Tom and Jerry Bonus Cat and Mouse The Tale of Tom and Jerry 2
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00:00 popular. Everything Bill and Joe ever did had heart. They were incapable of doing
00:04 something that didn't have heart. And so the heart came from them, filtered
00:09 through their staffs and their teams and their animators and ended up on the
00:11 screen. That's what the Academy saw when they were voting for these cartoons.
00:18 Tom and Jerry's were some of the first ones to really sort of break through and
00:21 started to rack up, you know, one Oscar after another.
00:24 They are the most Oscar directors in Hollywood history. Even if you cut it in
00:28 the middle and go three and a half each, that's more than Hitchcock ever
00:32 won, certainly. It's more than John Huston, Howard Hawks. And they never got to go up
00:37 and give an acceptance speech. They didn't get the award. Fred Quimby was the
00:41 one who went up and got the Oscar each time. Because it's always the producer
00:45 is the one who goes up to get the Oscar. There is a series of photos of the Tom
00:49 and Jerry unit posing with these seven Oscars. They got those photos by waiting
00:54 until Quimby went to lunch and then sneaking into his office with a camera.
01:01 That's as close as they ever got.
01:05 The years immediately following World War II were the most prosperous years
01:20 the movie industry had ever had. More people were going out to the movies than
01:23 ever before. And then came television. By the early 50s TV was really, really had
01:28 caught on and people weren't going to the movies in the same way. MGM's answer
01:33 to the threat of television was widescreen. And that that goes for live
01:40 action as well as animation. But cartoons were still an accepted and expected part
01:47 of the movie going program back in the 1950s. So MGM had had asked the studio to
01:53 make the cartoons from this point on in CinemaScope. Now when you've spent your
01:57 whole career working in a frame like this, suddenly having to work in a frame
02:03 like this must be an enormous challenge. The difficulty in animating something in
02:11 CinemaScope is that you've got a whole almost another frames worth of space
02:17 across the way to deal with. It's harder to time a gag when you have that much
02:22 space. You're staging for this rectangle and you really have to kind of think of
02:26 the screen so broken into thirds. You know where you could have in your
02:31 standard 3 by 4 ratio Tom going from here to here you know in a take, boing. In a
02:37 CinemaScope screen does he do this all the way across? That's really very
02:43 difficult to conceive. The most successful CinemaScope Tom and Jerry
02:47 cartoon I think is called The Flying Sorceress and it also contains a classic
02:52 example of Hannah's timing acumen. The first time Tom climbs on the broom and
02:59 they just hold the pose and hold it and hold it and hold it until the very last
03:04 minute because you can imagine what's going through this cat's head.
03:08 [Cat noises]
03:12 [Music]
03:23 Lots of people know nowadays what it's like to be downsized. Bill and Joe had
03:28 been at MGM something like 20 years. All those Oscars to show for it and and then
03:34 one day was all gone. Out of the blue sitting on top of the world we get a
03:39 stupid phone call that closed the studio. I mean this is your reward after working
03:43 for 20 straight years and that's how they closed the studio. No emotion, no
03:47 nothing. Just closed. Lay off everybody and we had a couple of things to finish
03:51 up and we did and then we're sitting there saying what do we do next. Bill
03:54 and Joe were let go for a variety of reasons. What really drove the final
03:58 nail through the coffin was when somebody realized look at all these
04:02 cartoons we have already here why don't we just release them.
04:06 [Music]
04:16 What they forgot was that theaters wanted new contemporary cartoons. They knew when a
04:21 cartoon was old and audiences felt cheated. So after two or three years of
04:26 reissues in the late 50s MGM hired Gene Deitch to produce some low-budget new
04:34 theatrical cartoons. He did them down in Prague and they look like foreign
04:40 cartoons. They're actually good in their own strange way but instead of being
04:46 made in Central Europe it's more like they were made on Central Neptune. Gene
04:51 told me like he got I think they got three Tom and Jerry's to look at. They
04:55 sent them three prints I don't know which ones they were but that's what the
04:58 animators had to study to learn to draw the characters. They didn't get any model
05:02 sheets no old drawings nothing just send them three prints of old Tom and Jerry's.
05:06 Okay this is enough for you. Gene Deitch is a brilliant cartoonist but they
05:11 certainly aren't the best example of his ability.
05:15 So that series was let go and they then went to Chuck Jones who was recently
05:20 let go from from Warner Brothers and they and had him start making Tom and
05:24 Jerry cartoons. Chuck's were strange because he didn't
05:30 really like the Hanna-Barbera pictures he thought he didn't like that kind of
05:34 comedy. Even Chuck himself said this this was not a good idea really because his
05:39 humor isn't Bill and Joe's humor. As brilliant as Chuck was it just wasn't a
05:44 fit a perfect fit. I think if he could have given Tom and Jerry voices he
05:49 would have done it because Chuck really favored Mel Blanc. He favored verbal
05:53 comedy like Bugs and Daffy and Porky used to do and he probably wanted to do
05:57 that with Tom and Jerry but he couldn't because of the tradition of Panama that
06:00 they had in the series up to that point.
06:04 Tom and Jerry without Hanna-Barbera were never quite the same.
06:07 Those Joe Barbera stories that Bill Hanna timing, Scott Bradley's music, those great
06:16 sound effects. That's what made Tom and Jerry.
06:21 [music]
06:46 [music]
06:53 There's all sorts of elements that are in these cartoons that are no longer
06:59 something that we would make in a cartoon aimed at children.
07:04 Cartoons of the the 30s and 40s reflect the stereotypes and the attitudes of
07:10 that era. Now stereotype humor was a staple of vaudeville and was carried
07:17 over by Hollywood from the silent era right into the talkies.
07:22 Hold on there you no good cat. Just look what you've done to my clean boat.
07:28 Man in Two Shoes is a caricature of the kind of black maids you saw in live-action films.
07:34 Lillian Randolph who created a character named Birdie on the old Greg
07:38 Gildersleeve radio show did Mammy's Voice and that voice was very familiar
07:43 to audiences of the 40s because the Greg Gildersleeve was a big hit.
07:47 After a certain point these stereotypes began to be regarded as distasteful or
07:51 recognized as distasteful.
07:53 Hey, have you seen a no good cat around here?
07:57 Back in the 60s when the civil rights movement was gaining momentum a lot of
08:01 studios took cartoons that featured black stereotypes off television. MGM
08:06 went even further than that they actually had Chuck Jones's unit redo
08:11 these scenes with with the maid character and so they painted her legs
08:16 white. They actually dubbed Mammy Two Shoes several different ways like in the Chuck
08:22 Jones era in the early 60s they hired somebody that spoke I get that was
08:25 Jennifer A. She spoke in an Irish brogue. Then later on they had a second version
08:30 of Mammy a black voice but more sophisticated. Well gentlemen I'm glad to
08:37 see you're enjoying your little siesta. You are comfortable aren't you? I don't
08:45 know if that's any better or any worse. It's important to remember that these
08:48 cartoons were not made for kids. It's not to say that those stereotypes are a
08:53 healthy thing but it's wrong I think to sweep them under the carpet or pretend
08:58 they didn't exist in that form. When we were doing Tom and Jerry we were doing
09:04 them for screening in theaters along with a feature and we weren't aiming the
09:09 children. The American short cartoon evolved out of the baggy pants comics of
09:17 the silent era. I never thought of giving them dialogue it was all pantomime and
09:22 action which is what Chaplin was. Tom and Jerry got kind of a bad rap many times
09:31 for being too violent. I think it's really slapstick comedy. Modern
09:39 political sensibilities political correctness cringes at you know all the
09:42 characters hitting each other with hammers and flamethrowers and you know
09:45 all kinds of bizarre things happening but I think everybody understood the
09:50 plasticity of the medium. Everybody knew these were cartoon characters you know
09:53 nobody got a hammer and went and actually like hit their friend on the
09:56 head with it you know or gave your friend is that you know stick of
09:59 dynamite lit.
10:02 The actual market was drying up and television had a big appetite for
10:19 cartoons but its appetite was so enormous it had to be fed in a way that
10:25 they didn't at first know how to do. Even then we thought maybe we could make
10:30 stuff for television but there was no real thinking of that at all until they
10:35 closed the studio and then we started thinking TV right away. Bill and Joe who
10:40 had presided over the most brilliant wonderful series of animated cartoons
10:45 had to kind of deconstruct their own work and pare it down to its barest
10:51 essentials. Limited animation a lot of people don't understand what that means
10:56 and they think it's not great animation but if you don't have the money you have
11:01 to think of some other way to do it. The essence of planned animation is putting
11:04 different parts of a figure on different cells and that is really the breakthrough.
11:10 They came up with the idea of if the body doesn't have to move say it's Yogi
11:14 Bear if he's standing and talking to somebody all he's got to do is move his
11:18 head. Really all that has to happen is the lips are moving so the lips are
11:23 moving on one cell the head is on another cell which moves only every so
11:28 often the body is on a third cell and it's not moving at all for a good long
11:32 chunk of dialogue. If you know how to play a symphony you know also how to
11:39 play very simply but if all you can do is play simply you you don't have the
11:44 chops to expand. People who had the broad experience of working at animations
11:49 peak of artistry and productivity were the exact guys who knew how to do it
11:57 simpler and they were particularly happy when they could get any veterans of that
12:01 golden age to come and work for them because they knew those guys knew what
12:05 they were doing. It was a gradual change but it didn't take very long to know
12:10 that you were not going to make any more cartoons for the theater and the
12:14 television was here to stay.
12:19 These shouldn't be considered old kids show fodder they're not. They're as
12:29 classic as any MGM musical. Well I think a lot of people remember Bill and Joe
12:36 for their of course for their television work and it did done some legendary
12:40 television. The Tom and Jerry cartoons stand out as some of the finest animated
12:45 cartoons in certainly in American animation if not world animation. I think
12:50 of Bill and Joe as heroes of animation. They were great artists. These guys were
12:57 animators and they had it down they had it down solid. There's a heart and a
13:01 appeal to the stuff that you can't really quantify but but it's either
13:05 there or it isn't. Everybody loves you and one of the reasons they love you
13:10 they say I was raised on your cartoon. I'm gonna enjoy them all over again with
13:14 my children which means that you left something that's being appreciated by
13:18 more and more generation. You just mentioned Tom and Jerry you just look at
13:25 great reaction that I don't have to want to be remembered that way it's just
13:28 gonna happen. Those cartoons are not going to go away.
13:44 you
13:46 you
13:48 you
13:50 you
13:52 you
13:54 [BLANK_AUDIO]