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| A rare original Tom & Jerry title card from 1942's Fraidy Cat. The films shown by the BBC mostly had replacement titles dating from later reissues. |
An appreciation of Tom & Jerry, Part Two...
By
the mid 1970s, Tom and Jerry had become a fixture in the BBC1
listings, with the cartoon shorts employed by the corporation as a
kind of ‘scheduler’s glue’ between unrelated items of
programming; quite often Nationwide and whatever quiz, soap
opera or comedy came next in the evening’s line-up. Tom and Jerry
were, at first, only one in a series of cartoon shorts shown in
isolation on BBC1, filling such odd five or ten-minute gaps in the
schedule. Others seen frequently in the ’60s and ’70s included
Barney Bear, Foghorn Leghorn and Droopy, whilst the characters from
the Warner Brothers stable were generally to be found over on ITV.
BBC, of course, also brought us the Pink Panther (debuting September
1970), although the ‘fink’ was presented in his own 20-miniute
package ‘show’ rather than being shown in isolation.
I’ve
often suspected that those five or ten minute cartoons were used
tactically to keep the BBC’s schedule slightly out of synch with
ITV’s. Over on the commercial channel, programmes tended to begin
on the hour or the half hour, whereas BBC were much more likely to
begin a programme at ten past the hour (their ‘hour long’ series
tending to run for 48-50 minutes). This meant that there would often
be an overlap between a half-hour BBC series scheduled at 7.40pm, and
the start of an ITV drama at 8pm. You could watch one or the other,
but not both. Short items like Tom and Jerry helped maintain this
‘imbalance’ between the stations. But that’s only a theory...
Certain
Tom and Jerry cartoons tended to get shown by the BBC more frequently
than others, although with 114 titles at their disposal, the
Corporation had no reason to repeat them too often. Even so, it was
classics like Dog Trouble (1942), Cue Ball Cat (1950), The
Midnight Snack (1941) and The Dog House (1952) that proved
most popular, with their winning formula of conflict and wanton
destruction. One or two silently dropped off the schedules as the BBC
became more aware of their uncomfortable content. His Mouse Friday
(1951) was one of the most problematic, with its theme of native
islanders who turn out to be cannibals. Other titles just seemed to
languish on the shelves for no discernible reason.
The
first mention of Tom and Jerry in my diary comes on New Year’s
Day, 1972, although I had been watching the cartoons for many years
prior to that date. The Radio Times
billing lists that day’s cartoon as Jerry Jerry, Quite
Contrary, a Chuck Jones-directed
short from 1966. Jones had come to the series in 1964 following some
frankly awful efforts from Gene Deitch, produced in Czechosolvakia
between 1961 and 1962. To aficionados of T&J, the Deitch cartoons
quickly became well-known for their catastrophic mismanagement of the
characters and format, and anyone in the know soon came to recognise
that the hallmark of quality on any Tom and Jerry cartoon was the
production signature of Fred Quimby, appended to the opening title
sequence. For me, even the widescreen title card came to serve as a
warning sign, as the later Cinemascope efforts from the Hanna Barbera
era saw a significant step down in quality from the earlier classics.
My
diaries through the ’70s continued to note occasional viewings of
T&J, but the cartoons were so ubiquitous as to render such
comment almost superfluous. I certainly saw many more than I kept a
note of, and by 1980 I had begun using them to fill up the inevitable
spare five minutes at the end of E-180 VHS tapes. In so doing, I
inadvertantly preserved unedited broadcasts of titles that would
later be edited to remove content perceived as racist (eg 1948’s
The Truce Hurts).
One
notable broadcast that did merit a diary entry occurred on Tuesday
16th
February 1982, which, as far as I can determine, marked the
first-ever BBC broadcast of the prototype T&J cartoon, Puss
Gets the Boot. Even the Radio
Times acknowledged the historic
significance in its listing for the day. Puss Gets the Boot
presents an immediately recognisable Tom and Jerry under the guise of
Jasper and Jinx, their original and thankfully discarded identities.
Tom (Jasper) is at his fluffiest and most cat-like, features he would
gradually lose as the series evolved, although Jerry (Jinx) arrives
pretty much fully-formed. No good idea goes unused forever, and the
Jinx name would eventually resurface – appended this time to a cat
– in Hanna Barbera’s later Pixie and Dixie series. One element
most definitely present in Puss... was Tom’s nemesis, the
housekeeper, generally known as ‘Mammy Two-Shoes’ (although she
is never named in any of the cartoons).
In later years,
‘Mammy’ would prove to be something of a problem, with her deep
south accent and servant status in the T&J household being
perceived as racial stereotypes. The fact of her being, effectively,
an authority figure with the power to eject Tom from his comfortable
surroundings was largely overlooked in the rush to condemn. In the
USA, certain cartoons were withheld from broadcast, whilst others
were subtly modified to alter or remove ‘Mammy’, sometimes
revoicing her with a rich Irish brogue. The BBC showed no such
fastidiousness and screened the ‘Mammy’ cartoons for years
without comment or editorial elisions. Instead, it was an instance of
perceived ‘advertising’ that got the Corporation’s knickers in
a twist.
Push-Button
Kitty – a tale that saw Tom ousted from his job as rodent
catcher by a robotic feline – had been screened on numerous
occasions before some BBC bright spark observed that the name of the
mechanical cat was ‘Mechano’. Which sounds just like a certain
construction toy. You could even imagine ‘Mechano’ to have been
built from said commercial product, with his primitive nuts-and-bolts
appearance. For this reason and no other, Push-Button Kitty
was quietly dropped from the BBC’s line-up of regularly-repeated
T&Js. I know this, as I searched the listings for it in vain
during the 1980s. Its last scheduled broadcast was on 10th
November 1978, a fact confirmed by my diary entry of the same date.
(Push-Button Kitty is nothing less than the Tom and Jerry
equivalent of The Terminator... the robotic cat gradually
smashes itself to pieces in its insane drive to rid the house of
dozens of clockwork mice unleashed by Jerry, but even with its head
and body gone, the internal workings carry on unhindered, eventually
ending up inside Tom and turning him into a kind of cat-cyborg...)
Before I took to
recording Tom and Jerry cartoons on VHS, and indeed, before the
format was even available, I’d owned a couple as 8mm home movies.
The generally dialogue-free cartoons were an ideal choice for the
format, since the silent editions made perfect sense without the need
for inter-titles (although the Walton company who produced them also
offered editions with magnetic soundtracks). A complete Tom and Jerry
would have fit comfortably into the one-reel 8mm format, but Walton’s
deal with MGM obligated them to release the cartoons in slightly
edited form, and thus the TV broadcasts always provided the best
possible editions. Or at least most of the time. Somewhere, on a VHS
tape, I still have a heavily-edited version of The Yankee Doodle
Mouse (1943), from which
the BBC removed several firework-based gags, fearful of encouraging
imitation in young viewers.
Tom and Jerry
remained a staple of BBC1’s early-evening programming throughout
the 1970s and 80s, sometimes running as one-shots, latterly as
double, sometimes even triple bills. There seemed to be an unwritten
rule book governing the cat and mouse’s appearance on television.
Any time up to around 7.30pm seemed to be acceptable, but they were
rarely if ever seen any later than that. Aside from a brief period in
1968 during which the cartoons appeared during the pre-news
children’s programme schedule, the duo’s adventures were
generally aimed at a family audience, and shown at times when both
adults and children would be watching. T&J's last appearance on
BBC1 in their original form came on Sunday 4th February
2001, in a ten-minute slot at 1pm between the current affairs
programme On the Record and the Eastenders omnibus. The
programme schedules were becoming less reliant on odd five or
ten-minute items, although it may simply have been the case that the
Corporation’s rights in the original cartoons had finally expired,
perhaps being taken up by one of the many satellite networks that had
arisen during the 1990s. Whatever the reason, the cat-and-mouse
antics that had been so familiar a part of the BBC1 schedule would
never again be seen on the channel, or indeed, on any other BBC
outlet.
By this time,
another iteration of the series was airing as part of CBBC: Tom
and Jerry Kids refashioned the characters from the classic
cartoons as their younger selves, but this new version seemed to be
aimed squarely at children and to this day I have never seen an
example. Why bother, when there are 144 classic editions (mostly)
available to view – dozens of them readily accessible in HD via the
usual internet sites.
Although the duo
are long gone from BBC1, it’s interesting to reflect on their
enduring popularity. Produced in colour, the cartoons haven’t
dated, and only a very few examples show their age by the inclusion
of popular musical or cultural items from the era in which they were
produced – Tom’s rendition of Louis Jordan’s Is You Is Or Is
You Ain’t My Baby in Solid Serenade (1946) serves as a
reminder of the cartoon’s mid-40s origins: likewise, 1944’s The
Zoot Cat, wherein Tom literally becomes a ‘hep cat’ in a
parody of the fashions and slang of the jive era. Setting aside the
occasional examples of mild racism, the cartoons remain essentially
timeless, their appeal universal.
Personally, I always
preferred them to the safer fare on offer from Walt Disney. Disney’s
characters seemed too clean-cut, unthreatening, all-American, whereas
Tom and Jerry kicked ass... literally, on dozens of occasions. They may have been
violent, and cruel, but they were – and still are –
laugh-out-loud funny. Perhaps you need a certain sense of humour to
appreciate them. After all, where else could you see a puppy being
tarred, feathered, and turned into a chicken?*
* Slicked-up Pup
(1951)
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