A cartoon cat, sick of
the annoying mouse living in his home, devises a plot to take him out with a
trap loaded with cheese. The mouse, wise to his plan, safely removes the snack
and saunters away with a full belly.
The plot may be
familiar, but the story behind it may not be. From Academy Award wins to secret
production behind the Cold War’s Iron Curtain – this is how Tom and Jerry, who
turn 80 this week, became one of the world’s best known double-acts.
The duo was dreamt up
from a place of desperation. MGM’s animation department, where creators Bill
Hanna and Joe Barbera worked, had struggled to emulate the success of other
studios who had hit characters like Porky Pig and Mickey Mouse.
Out of boredom, the
animators, both aged under 30, began thinking up their own ideas. Barbera said
he loved the simple concept of a cat and mouse cartoon, with conflict and
chase, even though it had been done countless times before.
Puss gets the Boot was
the first they released, in 1940. The debut was a hit and won the studio an
Oscar nomination for best animated short. Despite their work, the animators
were not credited.
Managers initially
told them not to put all their eggs in one basket. A change of heart came only
when a letter arrived from an influential industry figure in Texas asking when
she would see another one of those “wonderful cat and mouse cartoons”.
Jasper and Jinx, as
they were first known, became Tom and Jerry.
According to Barbera
there was no real discussion about the characters not speaking, but having
grown up with silent films starring Charlie Chaplin, the creators knew they
could be funny without dialogue. Music composed by Scott Bradley underscored
the action and Tom’s trademark human-like scream was voiced by Hanna himself
For the best part of
the next two decades, Hanna and Barbera oversaw the production of more than 100
of these shorts. Each took weeks to make and cost up to $50,000 to produce, so
only a handful could be made every year.
These Tom and Jerrys
are almost universally considered the best, with rich hand-drawn animation and
detailed backdrops helping win them seven Academy Awards and cameos in
Hollywood feature films.
When producer Fred
Quimby retired in the mid-1950s, Hanna and Barbera took over MGM’s cartoon
department just as budget cuts closed in. Studio bosses, threatened by the
growing popularity of television, realised they could make almost as much money
by re-issuing the old shorts as they could by making new ones.
When their department
was closed down in 1957, Hanna and Barbera set up their own production company.
But only a few years
later, MGM decided to revive Tom and Jerry without its original creators. In
1961 they outsourced to a studio in Prague to save on costs. Chicago-born
animator Gene Deitch was tasked with heading the remake, but struggled with a
tight budget and staff with no knowledge of the original.
After him the task
fell to Chuck Jones, best known for his work on Looney Tunes at Warner Brothers.
Under him, Tom’s eyebrows grew thicker and his face more twisted, and was more
like the Dr Seuss character the Grinch that Jones also animated.
Chuck Jones was behind
34 shorts made in Hollywood from 1963 to 1967
Mark Kausler, 72, is
one of many people who have warm memories of Tom and Jerry growing up. He
dragged his father to see reels of the shorts, over and over, at his local
cinema in St Louis. He began making his own cartoons, partly inspired by the
characters, and went onto an extensive animation career of his own.
Kausler worked on
dozens of productions, including Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Felix the Cat
At MGM, television had
been seen as a “bad word”, but after going it alone Hanna and Barbera
pivoted into the platform. With longer episodes and smaller budgets, they
adapted their animation style and used tricks to save time and money.
Their cartoons
dominated children’s television for decades. They first found success in the
early 1960s with characters like Huckleberry Hound and Yogi Bear and soon, more
hits like The Flintstones, Top Cat and Scooby Doo followed.
In the 1970s the pair
returned to Tom and Jerry. By then, many of the early episodes were considered
“too violent” under fresh guidelines issued to networks. New
episodes, with the duo as friends, never lived up to the success of the
originals.
The Jetsons
were among a string of television hits created by their pair in the 1960s
Like other cartoons of
the time, the show’s legacy has also been complicated by long-standing
criticism of its depictions of race. In particular, the character of
“Mammy Two Shoes” – a black housemaid with an exaggerated southern
accent usually seen from the waist down – has been labelled an offensive racial
caricature. Parts of the series also contain jokes using blackface and
derogatory depictions of Asians and native Americans.
When the originals
were broadcast on US television in the 1960s, some scenes were edited out with
“Mammy” replaced with new characters added by Jones’s team. Today the
worst-offending episodes are usually cut from re-release collections and
streaming platforms. Attention was drawn to this in 2014 when Amazon Prime
Instant Video added a “racial prejudice” warning to the series.
Tom and Jerry, with
its slapstick violence and dark comedy, remains extremely popular around the
world today. It can be found on children’s television everywhere from Japan to
Pakistan and a new mobile phone game has more than 100m users in China.
The show has also,
surprisingly, found itself in news headlines. In 2016, a top Egyptian official
tried to blame the cartoon for rising violence in the Middle East and Iran’s
Supreme Leader has compared their US relations to Tom and Jerry at least twice.
It became particularly
well liked in the UK and a 2015 poll named Tom and Jerry as the most popular
cartoon in Britain among adults.
In the 80 years since
their creation, the cat and mouse have appeared in everything from a
“kids” version to a 1992 musical movie where they sang and spoke.
Bill Hanna died in
2001 and Joe Barbera passed away in 2006. A year before his death, Barbera was
credited for the last time on a Tom and Jerry short – which was also his first
without his former partner.