Tom and Jerry

By Reggie's Take on March 3, 2013

William Hanna and Joseph Barbera were paired in the late 1930s. Their first discussion for a cartoon was a Cat-and-Mouse cartoon entitled Puss Gets the Boot that centers on Jasper, a gray tabby cat trying to catch a mouse named Jinx.

Puss Gets the Boot was released to theaters on February 10, 1940. Many at MGM at the time weren’t really impressed with it. That changed when the film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Short Subject: Cartoons of 1941. It did not win.

Fred Quimby, who ran the MGM animation studio commissioned a series featuring the cat and mouse. Tom and Jerry series went into production with The Midnight Snack in 1941.

Even though the theme of each short is virtually the same it quickly became MGM’s most popular and successful cartoon series. Thirteen cartoons of Tom and Jerry went on to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Short Subject: Cartoons; seven of them went on to win a Academy Award. Tom and Jerry would go on to win more Academy Awards than any other character-based theatrical animated series.

In 1957 MGM studio executives decided to close the animation studio. The final Hanna-Barbera Tom and Jerry short, Tot Watchers, was released on August 1, 1958. Hanna-Barbera made a total of 114 Tom and Jerry shorts.

By 1960 MGM decided to bring Tom and Jerry back to life. Thirteen shorts were released during 1961-1962 and were directed by Prague-based animator Gene Deitch and produced by a Czechoslovakia company.

From 1963 to 1967 Chuck Jones of Looney Tunes fame was brought in to produce 34 more Tom and Jerry shorts. Jones was able to recapture some of the fun and magic from the Hanna-Barbera era, but in 1967 MGM ended production on Tom and Jerry.

_______________________________________________________________________________