Epic Win: Tom and Jerry
Submitted by Gloria
Tom and Jerry has a fascinating lineage. The first cat-and-mouse duo would be introduced to theaters by Hanna-Barbera in 1940. It would eventually turn into Tom and Jerry, produced by MGM Studios until 1958 and winning seven Academy Awards. Gene Deitch took over from ‘60-62, and the show was animated in Czechoslovakia. It wouldn’t be good again until Chuck Jones of Looney Tunes fame took the reigns again in 1963.
Debate of the day: Tom and Jerry > Sylvester and Tweety?
I always hated Tom & Jerry. Can’t stand it to this day. Don’t know exactly why :/
Your face looks messed up
I agree. I felt it was just too much unstructured fighting.
Agreed.
Especially the episodes Jones animated. The man had a brilliant sense of comedic timing, but eventually Tom started looking a lot like the Grinch, so not only did I hate the premise of the show, but it totally creeped me out.
For REAL chase comedy, it will always and forever be Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner.
wow man, Coyote and Road runner had some fine gags, but if you look at them, they have like standard 50 gags, they just shuffle them around and use different ones from the same pool in each episode, not 1 single episode is 60 % original.
I loved Tom & Jerry as a kid. After school would watch Tom & Jerry, Woody Woodpecker and Mighty Mouse. However watching it again now, the humor is a little darker than I remember.
In reflection Tom and Jerry was darker than I remember as well. Tom and Jerry, like some cartoons from that era, have been edited for content that is considered in poor taste now due to changes in the times. Jokes that sterotype other races and some characters have been removed or edited out.
You mean the black maid?
Yes. See my other comment about voice substitutions.
I know why I hated Tom & Jerry. The mouse was so impertienent and poor Tom never caught him. I had no pity for the mouse because Jerry was a rodent. I mean, that’s why we had cats…to catch and eat mice. Jerry was just too snarky.
My fiancee always hoped there was a lost episode where Tom finally caught the little bastard and ate him. I mean that mouse was usually the instigator teasing the cat.
“You mean was there ever an episode where Tom catches, murders, and consumes his co-star in front of everyone? No. No there was never an episode where Tom murders and eats Jerry.”
I loved this show! I watched it all the time and could probably tell you the plot of every episode ever made! I always felt sorry for rodents… They were too cute to die. Now, of course, I don’t care, but I still root for Jerry!
Gotta love Tom and Jerry (at least the H-B versions), especially the episodes with Mammy Two-Shoes in it!
Hell yeah! She was my favorite character!
coolest character ever
I have the theme stuck in my head now.
Tom and Jerry were definatly better than Sylvester and Tweety. They were funnier. S&T were just kinda I dunno… I always prefered Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner to both of them though…
I concur. Road Runner cartoons are by far my favorite.
How can you think Road Runner cartoons are far better than Tom and Jerry? Tom & Jerry cartoons are better in pretty much every way possible. They’re funnier & cuter & have better music. Besides they’re not as predictable & they’re more adventuresome & more original. I can’t think of any reason to prefer Road Runner cartoons.
Sylvester & Tweety < Tom & Jerry < Coyote & Roadrunner < Itchy & Scratchy
I can’t express in word how much I hate this show. Just highly annoying.
/agree with chipmunk
I always felt bad for Tom though.
cant make great shows like this anymore as they are “too violent”
Pssht. “Too violent” my eye! It’s not like I could lay out hundreds of mousetraps between me and my family, or hit them with irons, or, oh wait. I can. Muahaha!
idk, i like the od 1s but now..they killed it =\
“…took the reigns again in 1963.”
Reins. That is all.
I LOVE this show~the little girl I nanny loves it too, and she’s too young to understand the little things~like Mammy, and the fact that Tom gets RAGINGLY drunk twice in one episode and attacks her~she kicks his furry ass though!
Blast from the ass
Have to admit i hate this cartoon. The cat’s doing his job after all, and he’s getting his butt kicked all over…
It it just me or is jerry a jerk in most episodes, I mean many of the episodes are about tom guarding something and yet Jerry puts on this act that he’s the victim when he’s trying to steal something.
Agreed. Jerry was a complete jerk.
That’s the reason I didn’t really like Tom and Jerry. Jerry is always trying to break into somewhere or steal something and Tom is trying to stop him, but Jerry /always/ outsmarts Tom and gets away with it, usually making Tom look like the bad guy in the process.
“It wouldn’t be good again until Chuck Jones of Looney Tunes fame took the reigns [sic] again in 1963.”
I beg to differ. The Hanna-Barbera/Fred Quimby shorts are the best, hands down. When Chuck Jones took over, he turned them into a pale imitation of the old Warner Bros. rival teams of Sylvester/Tweety and Wile E. Coyote/The Roadrunner, even going so far as to change the way they were drawn to make them look more like WB created characters. Even as a child watching the shorts on TV after school, I always knew that when the characters looked rounded and soft that the show wasn’t going to be a good one; I just didn’t know why, then.
I never cared for Tom and Jerry, but I grew up on a farm where we had only a couple of television stations, so my television viewing was limited to what the local stations had, and I never saw Tom and Jerry until I was in my late teens and moved away to the city to go to school.
That said, I like neither Tom nor Jerry, nor do I care for Tweety; I liked Sylvester, because I had a black-and-white when I was a wee girl and he always reminded me of her. Red nose, spitting all the time…
My favourite childhood cartoons are, as has been mentioned before, the Roadrunner cartoons with Wile E. Coyote. What’s more iconic than receiving a big box with “ACME” written on the side? You know it’s going to be rocket-powered, whatever it is.
Obviously someone spent too much time in front of cartoons. “Reigns”. Did Tom and Jerry have a kingdom somewhere Im unaware of?
Tom & Jerry is epic fail in my book. Boring cartoon, plus that mouse is/was a total jerk.
I hate all shows that hurt cats.
Wow, it’s so surprising to see all TEH HAET this show is getting here… everyone I know loved T&J. The Hanna-Barbera ones, at least. The Gene Deitch and Chuck Jones episodes were just too different, plus the CJ ones often used recycled animation.
What really bothers me today though, is how Concerned Parents are castrating this show step by step. First they edited out the blackface shots, now the shots where a character smokes… I mean, Christ. I grew up on this show and guess what: I’m not racist and I have never smoked, ever. I guess my parents just did a better job.
I quite agree. I grew up on these too, but my parents took time to teach me right from wrong. Plus the old cartoons were a hell of a lot funnier than the crap that passes for cartoons these days. Between the incessant toilet humor (A poop joke every here and there is ok but the show shouldn’t be 70% potty jokes) and the piss poor animation I plan to just not have cable when I have a kid. I don’t watch TV anyway so why would I need it? When I have a kid I plan to hunt down all the old classics(unedited if possible) for my kid to watch. And the old pre Elmo Sesame Street too!
Hear hear! T&J has to be my favorite cartoon series from my youth. Sure, I also thoroughly enjoyed the Disney shorts and all the Looney Tunes stuff, but there was definitely something special about Tom & Jerry.
I’ll also echo your sentiment–the Hanna-Barbera/Rudolf Ising era was the best era. When Gene Deitch and Chuck Jones came in, the series lost all of its original pep. Deitch’s cartoons were way too strange, and Jones’s tried way too much to be like a Looney Tunes cartoon.
Yeah, in retrospect, Jerry was a big cartoon douchebag, but that’s what made the show hilarious. Poor Tom would always go out of his way to try to catch him (or even in the episodes where he wasn’t going for him), and Jerry just easily thwarted him every time.
I will also stand in defense for the original Mammy Two-Shoes. A racist stereotype though she may have been, I loved her nonetheless. If it wasn’t Jerry, it would be her acting as a foil for the hapless Tom.
I will also say that despite the humor & other non-PC themes, I grew up to be incredibly well-adjusted and crusading for equal rights. I agree, Archie; I guess our parents did a lot better job than those who crusaded against the cartoon.
Get the DVD sets. I have all three sets of the H-B ones plus the one Chuck Jones set. That’s all that have been released.
Unfortunately, a FAIL has to go to them for “Saturday Evening Puss” on the second DVD set whose soundtrack was lost with Lillian Randolph’s voice providing Mammy Two-Shoes. Whoopi Goldberg did her best to dub the lines in.
Another answer print out there had June Foray dubbing the voice, and another one I remember from the early ’80s on a video set has Lillian Randolph’s voice but completely different animation.
Again, Tom & Jerry and anything touched by Chuck Jones are pale, lifeless impressions of the real pursuit ‘toons created by Tex Avery or even a few from Friz Freleng. “Frenetic” redefined. Absolutely maniacal and jaw-droppingly funny.
Love and hate depending entirely on the episode.
Some episodes start off with Jerry trying to do something innocent – maybe running around with a piece of cheese. Tom catches him and messes with him – maybe shoves him in a champagne bottle, shakes it up, and launches him through the window, then laughs. These episodes set Tom up to be the jerk, and Jerry is justified in triumphing.
Some episodes start off with Tom trying to do something innocent – like get some sleep, or keep the house quiet – and Jerry, for no apparent reason, sets out to get Tom kicked out in the cold. If it has the first type’s setup then it’s clever, if it lacks that “Tom’s a giant jerk” scene then Jerry’s being a giant jerk.
Sometimes there’s a Higher Authority invoked – not so much religious, but an owner, or a bulldog, someone Jerry can run to…a good moral, and it puts a new spin on things as Jerry seeks to escape to Authority and Tom seeks to stop him from ringing the bell, etc. – but again, it comes down to whether or not we saw that Tom had it coming.
And then there are the white mice episodes – where Tom thinks Jerry’s the escaped white lab mouse, and highly explosive, and Tom has to stop Jerry from blowing himself up – and again, it comes down to whether or not Tom has the constant heart-attack coming, or whether we cheer when the white paint starts to wash off and Tom gives him the what-for. (or when the radio issues a retraction and Tom hits the Real white mouse with a hammer…very Dr. Strangelove for a cartoon)
Way I see it, both of them hated each other so they would always be jerks to each other but they were relatively good people (except when Tom was trying to eat some inocent animal).
It’s just a shame that this sort of dark humour can’t be shown these days as patheticly incompetent parents spend there time censoring the cartoons rather than explaining why you do and don’t do these things to their kid. It’s frustrating.
Anyone remember the ones where they worked together? There was the classic “Baby gets loose” episode, for instance. Ah…good times.
There are 2 episodes where a baby gets loose. One is Busy Buddies & the other Tot Watchers. I like these episodes a lot because they’re similar to the episodes of my favorite version of T&J; the one where they’re friends. That especially goes for Busy Buddies because in that one they’re friends for the whole cartoon, while in Tot Watchers they start out as enemies but then become friends.
tom and jerry, the riviting tale of a determined mouse trained in a secret bunker and designed to infiltrate the body of a large housecat for anti-communist propaganda directives from the US Central Intelligence Agency. controlling it as though it were a marionette. “Once the skull was hollowed out, my favorite part was wandering this brainless 4 legged meowing corpse in and out of bathrooms and expensive stores” jerry reported, “i cant get over how crazy i could make the meows, at one point going so far as to command a meow from the cats ass, and dictate the will of god from the cats mouth.” After the assassination of Mammy, the communist manner overlord residing at jerrys location, he recounted, “i was proud to have accomplished a grand mission for my country at a time of war. I piloted my FJI115-2 [zombified housecat] into the yard and trumpeted the national anthem from its mouth, as i raised the flag of the United States.” god bless america indeed, fighting jerry.
EPIC FAIL this show sucks. WTF is jerry doing stealing and hurting a cute kitteh. If I was on the show he would be full of 7.62 RPK rounds.
I love this show, it’s the last good show on Cartoon network.
I don’t know why people who complain about Tom losing like Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner better. Believe it or not, though Jerry is never eaten, there ARE episodes where Tom comes out on top, and those are usually the ones where Jerry starts the fight. And Wile E. Coyote never comes out on top. Ever. I hate those cartoons, every episode is the same thing, at least Tom and Jerry was different from episode to episode.
I agree w/ you 100%!
The best T&J episodes were the blueprint ones. For some reason being sucked up by fountain pen cracks me up
I don’t agree that Chuck Jones T&J’s are too much like Road Runner. He made them very different from R.R., pretty much the same ways the original is different. For one thing Jerry doesn’t always triumph over Tom in his version. For another Tom isn’t always trying to get Jerry & another is that he does other things to Jerry besides trying to eat him. Chuck Jones’ T&J’s would be too much like R.R. or Tweety and Sylvester if in every episode Tom tried to get Jerry so he could put him in his mouth & eat him.