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Transcription
00:00Hello, I'm cartoon buff Michael Mallory. I'm going to be talking a little bit about Yankee
00:08Doodle Mouse, which, as you can see at the bottom of the screen, was the Academy Award
00:13winner. The reason they were able to advertise that on the cartoon itself is because they
00:17frequently re-released the cartoons with these special title cards. Occasionally, they would
00:22pre-release the cartoon for consideration and then release it with the title card if
00:26it won. This is probably the fastest and most gag-filled Tom and Jerry cartoon ever.
00:36If not the, it's certainly in the top three or four. Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, who
00:44made this, of course, hen grenades. How could you not love hen grenades? Anyway, Bill and
00:49Joe went on to win seven Academy Awards, of which this was the first, but they never actually
00:55received the Oscars themselves, because the Oscars were picked up by the producer of
00:59the shorts, which was Fred Quimby, who was a corporate guy overseeing the cartoon unit,
01:06and Quimby kept the Oscars for himself. What would happen was, after a while, after they
01:11had won all seven of the Oscars by the late 50s, Bill and Joe and their animation unit
01:18would wait until Fred C., as he was known, Fred C. Quimby, was at lunch, and then they
01:23would sneak into his office and they would take the Oscars down and they would pose
01:28for photos with them. So it looked like they had all of the Oscars with them, but they
01:33would have to replace them and then sneak back into their own offices and probably
01:37wipe them down for prints as well. And that was the only way they saw their Oscars. The
01:42disposition of those seven Oscars is still kind of up in the air, probably with the Quimby
01:47family, nobody knows, but Joe Barbera, to the end of his life, wished he had those
01:54seven Oscars in his office with all his other awards. Here, of course, as you saw earlier,
02:00we have Lieutenant Jerry Mouse fighting Tom with whatever he can, a grater, an ironing
02:10board. One of the most interesting things about this cartoon is that, unlike almost
02:18every other wartime cartoon, no matter what the studio was, you don't see the characters
02:25cast as the adversaries during World War II, meaning you don't see Tom dressed like Hitler,
02:34you don't see him in a Nazi uniform. He's not part of the Axis, he's simply a cat.
02:41A great Bill Hanna scream. And by keeping them simply an allegorical World War, a mouse
02:52fighting a cat rather than Jerry in American military uniform fighting Tom in a black
02:59shirt or a Nazi uniform, you get the universality of the characters. Even though it's set during
03:06wartime and there's wartime gags, it still plays today because you don't have that dated
03:11quality of seeing them as somebody in 1943. That is a lot of the appeal of Tom and Jerry,
03:19is that universality. They translate to any time, any country really, because they don't
03:24speak, so they don't have to be dubbed into languages. And it gives them that timeless
03:30quality that we love about them.
03:37Tom always forgets there's a spout in a teapot. Oh, here we have a very timely gag, of course.
03:42These sorts of racial gags popped up in the cartoons of the time. There's not much we
03:46can do about it, folks. But I wanted to point out that teapot, where you saw the top of
03:50the teapot a different shade and different look than the bottom of the teapot, that's
03:56because the bottom of the teapot would have been part of the background, painted with
03:59a different style of paint, while the top of the teapot was painted on an animation
04:04cell because it had to move. That style of cartooning, which was pretty common, anything
04:11that didn't have to move was in the background, was what allowed Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera
04:16to do the planned animation when they went into television, where so much of it was
04:20stationary and only what had to move, moved.
04:31Here we have the Russian dolls firecrackers. Russia, of course, being our ally at the time
04:39this was made. And what do you get from the littlest firecracker?
04:43The biggest bang.
04:53Jerry is now flying an egg crate, of course. Obviously, he's in the Army Air Corps.
05:01And you're getting kind of a doodlebug effect. Doodlebugs were these bombs that had very distinctive
05:08sounds as they dropped. That's the one element that kind of dates it to this era.
05:22Again, there's no actual weapons here, but you can see that there's a lot of
05:28no actual weapons here. We're dealing with firecrackers and brassiere parachutes
05:35and egg cartons. It's just homemade weapons because what we have here is a metaphoric world war.
05:46This is a recurring gag in a lot of Tom and Jerry cartoons.
05:49Jerry being chased by a series of objects. In this case, they're little explosive charges.
05:56In other cartoons, they are pool balls on a pool table. And it's the same gag with the balls
06:03chasing them around and lining up and reacting in a kind of an anthropomorphic style and responding
06:09to commands, of course. These were obviously meant to be patriotic cartoons. And that's what I find
06:18so interesting about this particular one is that it is on that level of metaphor.
06:24They're not hitting you over the head with it the way cartoons occasionally did in this era
06:29where you would have the extreme Japanese stereotype, for instance, or the Hitler caricature
06:35and you would have the leading cartoon character clubbing Hitler over the head with a hammer or a
06:40mallet to the cheers of everybody in the audience. In this one, really, it's the David and Goliath
06:47story. It's the plucky little guy fighting the bigger enemy. And so the cartoons would try to
06:53boost things and they would show the soldiers, the sailors, the marines, the air corpsmen as the
07:01winners, obviously, in this instance, Jerry representing them and Tom representing the
07:07bad guys, the evil side, but doing it slightly subtly. And I think just as effectively by not
07:16hitting you over the head with overt propaganda, because this is more or less a standard Tom and
07:22Jerry cartoon, really. This is the end. Thanks so much.