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CAT AND MOUSE TALES:MGM's Tom and Jerry Cartoons1940-1958Toms, Jerrys, Cats and Mices |
MGM was not the
first studio
to launch a cartoon
series featuring a team named Tom and Jerry.
That honor
belongs to the Van Beuren Studio, which released about two
dozen
black and white animated shorts from 1931 to 1933 starring two guys,
one tall, one short, named Tom and Jerry. Later on,
when
these cartoons made it to television, the characters were renamed Dick
and Larry so as to avoid confusion with the more famous MGM cat and
mouse characters.
Abbott and Costello fans who have the DVD of the 1952 Colgate Comedy Christmas show know that there was also a human team named Tom and Jerry who were acrobats.
There was once a
musical team who called
themselves Tom and Jerry. In 1957, they had a minor hit
single
titled "Hey Schoolgirl". The recording career of Tom and
Jerry
was shortlived, ending in 1958. However, a few years later,
they
re-emerged in the folk scene and recorded an acoustic album
under
their real names: Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel. That album's
acoustic ditty "The Sounds of Silence" would be turned into a huge hit
with the addition of electric instruments, and Simon and
Garfunkel would go on to have many other hits including "I Am a Rock",
"Mrs. Robinson" and "Bridge Over Troubled Water".
Like
the cartoon Tom and Jerry, they fought a great deal, though they never
used axes or polo mallets. That we know of.
In 2004, as part of a German-American experiment to
accurately
map the Earth's magnetic field, two satellites were launched into
orbit. One satellite was named Tom, and you can guess the
other.
No reports that they are currently chasing each other through
outer space.
No doubt MGM's Tom and Jerry remain the most famous of all Tom and Jerry's, and are the best remembered cat and mouse team in history. In the 1940s, as Tom and Jerry became popular, Paramount's Famous Studios (formerly Fleischer) launched an obvious "copy-cat" series featuring Herman and Katnip. Herman was voiced by character actor Arnold Stang, while Sid Raymond voiced Katnip. Unfortunately, these cartoons are not easy to find today, and the one example I have seen was heavily edited for violence.
Then there's Itchy and Scratchy, Matt Groening's
long-running cat and mouse duo as seen on The Simpson's.
Itchy and Scratchy take the violence of Tom and Jerry and
multiply it by approximately a thousand, with Scratchy the cat being
bodily mutilated in scores of stomach-churning ways during the
show's history. Although most people assume Itchy and
Scratchy
are
based on Tom and Jerry, producer-director David Silverman has
said they are actually modeled after Herman and Katnip.
On The
Simpsons,
when Krusty the Clown loses the Itchy and Scratchy cartoons to a more
popular children's show, he opts to show a sample of yet another
animated cat and mouse, "Worker and Parasite" (from Eastern
Europe, Krusty informs us.) After an appropriately surreal,
existentialist
ten-second clip in which nothing happens in a variety of ways, Krusty's
sole comment is "What the HELL was that?".