'Listen, Pussycat...'

an appreciation of Tom and Jerry… part one

Tom and Jerry… one of the classic title cards from the late 1940s

I don’t know when I first became aware of Tom and Jerry. Growing up, it seemed as though the characters had simply always been around. There was no sense of their being brand new, or even of encountering them for the first time. I might well have seen them in the cinema; this is quite likely, in fact, as original Tom and Jerry cartoons were still being shown as supporting shorts as late as the 1980s. It may even have been via the medium of 8mm home movies, although it seems that their appearance on this format came slightly later than their debut on British television. Whatever the truth, it’s certain that if I hadn’t encountered them before, then my introduction to the eternally warring cat and mouse duo came via the medium of television, some time in 1967.

It was in April of that year that the cartoons debuted on BBC1. I can find no record of their having been broadcast prior to this, and it looks likely that the BBC did their deal with MGM in the advent of the final theatrical releases, which appeared between January and September of 1967. From the outset, the BBC seems to have had access to virtually the entire MGM archive, which had been running successfully in cinemas since 1940, although it was the cartoons from the classic era (circa 1945-1955) that dominated the schedules, certainly in these early years. First off the block, on Tuesday 4^th April was the undisputed classic Dog Trouble, which aired at the unorthodox time of 18.17, between the regional news magazine programme and the immensely popular Dee Time.

Although many viewers would have been familiar with Tom and Jerry from encounters at the cinema, Dog Trouble was a good choice to introduce the series on television, as it established the power relationships between the warring axis of Tom, Jerry and the bulldog (unnamed here but later known as either Butch or Spike). With a release date of April 18^th, 1942, Dog Trouble was the fifth in the Hanna Barbera series that would extend to 114 titles by the time production ended in 1958. Typical of these early examples, the characters are truer to their animal origins than they would later become, with only Jerry favouring bipedal posture, and no one uttering a word aside from Jerry’s barely-audible whispering in Tom’s ear as the protagonists unite in their conflict against the angry bulldog. It’s violent, extremely destructive, and all in all, classic Tom and Jerry. The formula had already been established with 1940’s pilot film, Puss Gets the Boot, intended as a one-shot until MGM persuaded creators Hanna and Barbera to launch the protagonists (suitably renamed) in a series of their own. It was fast, violent action all the way, with the characters shaking off endless assaults on their physical form as the narrative, such as it was, lurched from one ingeniously destructive set-up to another. By the end of Dog Trouble, the house in which our heroes reside has been comprehensively trashed, and not for the last time.

You don’t mess with a successful formula, and there would be relatively little tinkering with Tom and Jerry during the golden era, which we can date from roughly the mid 1940s to the mid ’50s. The only noticeable changes during that time came in the appearance of the characters, and as the series progressed, it would be Tom who was subject to the most radical reimagining. Both he and Spike/Butch quickly evolved from being animals with human characteristics into, effectively, humans in the shape of animals. The early Tom is still very much a ‘pussycat’, with his twitching whiskers, bristling fur, and a tendency to prance around on all fours. When he howls, it is usually in a typical feline fashion, a far cry from the soon-to-be famous yell, provided distinctively by co-creator William Hanna. Butch/Spike is equally very much the average dog in these early cartoons, snarling and snapping at Tom’s heels. His benign paternal side would come later, with the addition of a puppy (variously known as Chip and Tyke) placing him in the role of father figure/protector, in which capacity he was afforded plenty of opportunities to come to blows with Tom.

Watching the series as they aired over the years (always on BBC1) I became aware of these subtle differences in the characters; and whilst the original dates were generally too small to discern on a television screen, it nevertheless became fairly easy to date a particular cartoon according to Tom’s physical form. The earliest titles, I categorised as being ‘Fluffy Toms’, owing to his rounder-faced and notably more furry appearance. It’s almost impossible to say exactly when the ‘newer’ Tom acquired his definitive style, but as an approximate rule of thumb, the ‘classic’ Tom seems to have been in place by the time of 1949’s Love That Pup. He would be subject to only minimal modifications during the remainder of the ’50s, the most obvious being a change in colour from grey to blue.

I also recognised the superior quality of the animation in the pre-1950s cartoons, especially the backgrounds, (many of them exquisitely redered in watercolour and airbrush), although the post-1950 titles still include many of the greatest examples in the series, which generally maintained its high level of quality until around the middle of the decade.

By 1950, the series had reached its half century, having won four Academy Awards, alongside a handful of nominations. The classic conflicts continued, although concerns about violence seem to have been responsible for steering the series towards softer, more whimsical storylines, often notable by the appearance of Jerry’s nephew, Nibbles/ Tuffy. The animation, of course, remained nothing short of superb; but for the T&J connoisseur, a ‘highbrow’ entry such as Johann Mouse (1954) simply couldn’t hold a candle to the no-holds-barred punchups of the mid to late ’40s. The wartime T&Js were, on the whole, more violent than their peacetime counterparts, a fact later acknowledged by series producer Fred Quimby.

Good old fashioned violence continued to be popular in later titles like Muscle Beach Tom and Barbecue Brawl (both 1956), but there was no disguising the fact that the series had peaked. The Flying Sorceress (1956), rarely if ever screened by the BBC, was an aberration that strayed too far from the classic format, while Blue Cat Blues of the same year struck a decidedly downbeat note, with its out-of-character narration and final scene of our heroes sitting on the railway tracks contemplating suicide. The series, now entirely in Cinemascope, juddered to a standstill with the safe, domestic fare of Tot Watchers (1958) by which time MGM’s executives had got wise to the fact that they could earn as much from re-runs as they could from expensive new productions. Tom and Jerry would return, but without their creators William Hanna and Joseph Barbera.