REVIEW: Tom and Jerry: The Golden Era Anthology

When I started writing for the Tom and Jerry syndicated newspaper strip in 1990, I was given three rules:

1. Tom could chase Jerry but not catch him.

2. No violence! Not none, not never!

3. No puns.

The first two rules contravened fifty years of animated history, spanning more than 160 anvil-dropping, tail-chopping, dynamite-explosive shorts from MGM, Gene Deitch, and Chuck Jones. The third always sort of applied to the cartoons anyway, since they were largely pantomime and didn’t rely on dialogue or wordplay, but Tom and Jerry both spoke in the syndicated strip. The reason puns weren’t allowed wasn’t that anyone thought there was anything wrong with them per se, but because the majority of newspapers that carried Tom and Jerry were located outside the United States and published in languages other than English—it was very popular in Middle Eastern countries if I’m remembering correctly—and puns, of course, don’t translate.

The irony is that the original Tom and Jerry cartoons were violent. Very violent. Animated shorts from the major movie studios of the 1930s and 1940s weren’t produced for children. They were part of the larger entertainment package moviegoers of the era were offered along with their double features, so for the price of admission, they also got short features, two-reel comedies, newsreels, coming attractions, and cartoons. That’s not to say kids didn’t enjoy Bugs Bunny for the frenetic action and slapstick, but their parents, who paid for those tickets, were laughing at the double entendres and satiric social commentary.

It was only with the coming of television and the relegation of animated shorts to the cartoon ghetto of children’s after-school and Saturday-morning time slots that anyone began to worry about the content. The repurposed theatrical shorts featuring Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Roadrunner, Woody Woodpecker, Tom & Jerry, Popeye, Mighty Mouse, and others that made it to TV were trimmed of perceived child-unfriendly bits.

Tom and Jerry wasn’t very high up on the list of must-see cartoons. At the top was Bugs and just about any of the anarchic Warner Bros. Looney Tunes and Merry Melodies shorts, and at the bottom was Mickey Mouse and just about any Disney cartoon, which I always felt were trying to teach me a lesson. And somewhere in between were the cat and the mouse.

I didn’t give cartoons much thought or watch many of them after college in the mid-1970s. Even when I started writing the Tom and Jerry newspaper strip in 1990, I didn’t really need a refresher course on the characters. The dynamic was simple enough: cat chases mouse, cat catches mouse, cat gets his ass kicked. But the strip had a different dynamic: no asses got kicked, and they spoke.

Then, in 2009, I was asked to review Tom and Jerry: The Chuck Jones Collection, the 34 shorts made between 1963 and 1967 by Jones’ Sib Tower 12 Productions for MGM. And Tom and Jerry, at least in the cartoons by Chuck Jones—the genius behind my favorite vintage Warner Bros. cartoons and The Grinch Who Stole Christmas—suddenly shot up my list.

Now, I get to go back to where this 86-year long feline vs rodent rivalry began with the Tom And Jerry: The Golden Era Anthology 1940–1958 DVD collection—which, I might add, is labeled as “intended for the Adult Collector and May Not Be Suitable for Children”—an 817 minute, or close to 14 hour collection of all 114 MGM cartoon shorts.

It could also have been called “Tom and Jerry: The William Hanna & Joseph Barbera Golden Age Era Anthology,” for one of Hollywood animation’s most productive partnerships during the period when short-form animation was a central component of the moviegoing experience. Hanna had trained as an engineer and worked his way into animation through the technical and story departments at MGM, developing a reputation for timing, structure, and efficient production. Barbera came from a more conventional artistic path, having studied art and working as a gag writer and layout artist. In the late 1930s, the large MGM animation unit was overseen by producer Fred Quimby, and its directors, writers, and animators were routinely paired and reassigned.

Their partnership began with one such routine pairing, the result of which was “Puss Gets the Boot” (1940), the prototype for all future Tom and Jerry shorts, starring a cat called “Jasper”and a nameless mouse. The short was a fine balance between Hanna’s emphasis on pacing and Barbera’s focus on visual storytelling. The story was simple: after breaking a vase while chasing the mouse, Jasper is under the threat of banishment if he does any more damage. The mouse turns the tables on his tormenter, and Jasper spends a large chunk of the cartoon’s eight and one-half minutes trying to save every dish and glass in the house from being smashed by the gleeful mouse.

That first Hanna-Barbera collaboration introduced a cat-and-mouse dynamic that proved endlessly adaptable, economical, and, most importantly, popular with audiences. MGM soon committed the team to a continuing series, all of which are included in the five-disc DVD anthology (the Blu-ray collection includes a sixth disc with featurettes and documentaries). It was during those years that Hanna and Barbera refined their production model, balancing high animation standards with tight schedules and budgets. Working with a stable group of animators, background artists, and composers—most notably Scott Bradley—the duo produced an average of six shorts a year, films designed for widescreen theatrical exhibition, with detailed backgrounds, expressive character animation, and carefully timed musical scores that carried much of the storytelling. The shorts were nominated for 13 Academy Awards for Best Short Subject: Cartoons and won seven, making them one of the most honored series in their field.

Tom And Jerry: The Golden Era Anthology gives lie to the often assumed repetitive formula nature of these cartoons. It’s true the central conflict rarely changed, but the shorts experimented with setting, period parody, and tone, moving from domestic slapstick to fairy tales, historical pastiches, and contemporary satire. The absence of dialogue emphasized the story’s pacing and rhythm, which, like the great silent comedies, proved animation’s ability to communicate across language barriers.

Academy Award-winning “The Yankee Doodle Mouse” (1943), produced during World War II, is a prime example of the adaptability of Tom and Jerry’s “formula.” Set in a basement transformed into a miniature battlefield, Tom and Jerry are opposing military forces, complete with improvised weapons and patriotic music, their violence escalating into outright demolition. Jerry rigs Tom with improvised explosives, detonating him multiple times with firecrackers and makeshift bombs. Tom is blown apart, blackened, and reduced to scattered parts before reassembling himself for the next assault, mirroring horrific battlefield imagery that would have been familiar to contemporary audiences.

In “Safety Second” (1950), the mayhem moves to a skyscraper construction site, where Jerry engineers a series of situations leading to Tom being sawed, smashed by girders, dropped from heights, and nearly chopped apart by industrial machinery. The violence is sustained and severe, using modern urban hazards as tools of dismemberment.

Even the introduction of culture couldn’t save Tom from extreme abuse. Academy Award winner “The Cat Concerto” (1947), perhaps one of the most famous of the series, places Tom at a concert piano performing Liszt while Jerry interferes from inside the instrument. While remembered for its musical sophistication, the physical comedy isn’t any less severe. Fingers are slammed, tails are crushed, and the piano itself becomes a blunt instrument. Time was no barrier to mayhem either, as in “The Two Mouseketeers” (1952), a period parody of Dumas, with Jerry and his cousin Nibbles (aka Tuffy) attack Tom with swords, cannon fire, and heavy weaponry, repeatedly stabbing, blasting, and reducing him to smoking remains, only to have him reappear for the next assault.

On the other hand, “Quiet Please!” (1945) flips the formula on its head. Built around Tom’s desperate attempt to avoid waking a sleeping bulldog, it plays with sustained tension rather than constant and frenetic motion for laughs, the humor coming from restraint, anticipation, and carefully timed bursts of violence when things inevitably go wrong.

I don’t know if Hanna and Barbera knew that “Tot Watchers” (1958) would be their final Tom and Jerry short, but it featured a rare truce between cat and mouse when they’re forced to work together, as they’d done only seven or eight times before in past shorts, to protect a wandering infant from danger while the babysitter is preoccupied on the telephone. Tom still takes a beating, but not at the hands of his usual opponent.

Tom and Jerry: The Golden Era Anthology restores these cartoons to their original context as theatrical shorts designed for adults. If the violence was excessive, at least it proved that there were an infinite number of ways a simple chase could be restructured through setting, music, pacing, and escalation. And from a contemporary vantage point shaped by Adult Swim, Rick and Morty, BoJack Horseman, and other explicitly adult animated fare, the hand-wringing that once accompanied the broadcast of unedited Tom and Jerry cartoons seems silly. Modern animation is a no-holds-barred exercise in graphic violence, nihilism, and verbal cruelty, marketed without apology to grown-up audiences. But it’s a matter of context: Hanna and Barbera’s cartoons weren’t intended as children’s programming until television repurposed them as such. But seen alongside today’s “anything goes” animation, the MGM Tom and Jerry shorts don’t seem so much transgressive as quaint.