And Henry Mancini, as legendary a composer as we're ever going to get, wrote Tom and Jerry: The Movie's score and original songs.
I was too young to recognize the great Richard Kind as Tom (but what a phenomenal toddler I would have been if I had) or Dana Hill, voice of Goof Troop's Max, as Jerry. Phil Roman, 1992)īefore revisiting the original Tom and Jerry feature-length film, I remembered two things: that I had rented it as a kid, only to get home and find a different tape in the clamshell case, and that the title characters talk and say they've always been able to. After three movies, I will either have found out what that is or be more lost than ever, mentally squished into a bowling pin and flattened by a pissy asshole bulldog of the soul.ġ. We aren't here because the Chinese market demanded it, so there has to be something else. My assumption going in had been that Tom and Jerry had the kind of mysterious foreign popularity Top Cat and Woody Woodpecker developed, but that doesn't seem to be the case. I honestly don't know why "cat chases mouse" is the premise multiple giant studios have decided to exploit.
With Tom and Jerry coming out, with my general interest in obscure and damned cartoons and with the suggestion of my editor, I'm going to look at three of the Tom and Jerry movies HBO Max would rather not talk about. Social Safeway would always have a kiosk with recent Steven Seagal movies, Happy Madison double packs and at least a couple Thomas and Jerome adventures. I became aware of these straight-to-DVD features after walking by stacks of them in grocery stores. Mergers and acquisitions shuffled Tom and Jerry from MGM to Turner, whose in-house and contracted animation divisions have put the characters into a dozen-plus scenarios, hoping something sticks. I need you to know there have already been 14 Tom and Jerry movies. The lack of a subtitle or number implies Tom & Jerry is the pair's first movie.
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This week, HBO Max releases Tom & Jerry, a live-action movie where famous-but-not-too-famous actors like Chloë Moretz, Michael Peña and sentient-mashed-potato-lump Colin Jost interact with the 3D-animated title characters in a fancy hotel.
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I used to write a column on Hanna-Barbera films, a mini-genre based on recycling story beats and jokes from already stridently unvarying TV shows, but those have nothing on MGM's bullshit. Everything's a trope when your creative process begins and ends at shuffling old storyboards. The basic Tom and Jerry tropes–Tom getting smashed into an accordion, Tom getting his face blown off by explosives–are so recognizable because they were brought back so often. They cranked those suckers out, running the same scenarios with the same two or three characters ad infinitum. When Hanna and Barbera quit MGM, realizing they could run their own sweatshop instead of working in Louis Mayer's, the company didn't have anything but Tom and Jerry to fall back on. They didn't even have a Terrytoon-sized well.
and the Road Runner to parody Tom and Jerry), Disney, and later Hanna-Barbera, MGM didn't have a deep character well. Coyote and the Road Runner, "only" got 49 shorts in that same time period. And we can say "all cartoons are repetitious," but Tom and Jerry's closest comparisons, Wile E. Sometimes there's a duck, sometimes a dog helps break Tom's bones, sometimes there's an ugly racial stereotype named Mammy Two Shoes, but it's always the same story. Tom is the cat and Jerry is the mouse and MGM produced 161 shorts where Tom chases Jerry and oh, wouldn't you know it, Jerry ruthlessly fucks Tom up in response. Hemingway boasted about his six words and then, in his lifetime, William Hanna and Joseph Barbera halved the record with a cartoon: "cat chases mouse."
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When Ernest Hemingway argued, perhaps apocryphally, that he could write a full story in six words, ultimately coming up with "For sale: baby shoes, never worn," he revealed himself to be a baby-brained pig-person.