Tom & Jerry Tales Volume 6, completing the entire run of the Kids’ WB series, was released earlier this month. As with the earlier episodes, none of them turned out very good. Out of the batch here, noteworthy are: Kitty Cat Blues, haphazard attempt to follow up The Zoot Cat, featuring a rather long gag of Jerry tricking Tom into chasing a laser pointer (like a real cat) that comes out of nowhere; Kangadoofus, with Jerry posing a joey in Australia (and you thought Hippety Hopper had “artistic license”); Game of Mouse and Cat, which bizarrely uses the “Jasper” model of Tom (and he walks on all fours through the thing!); and (not joking) D.J. Jerry, with Tom owned by a joint smoking 
Jamaican music store owner, and Jerry running a pahty howse in the back (cameo by a street-talkin’ Tuffy: “Yo, Tom dawg, don’t be hatin’ on mah homies.”)
Story and characterization problems aside, the music in these things leaves no synthesizer effect unused. The classic T&Js tend to get whatever vitality they have from the soundtrack, and less so from Bill Hanna’s timing or Joe Barbera’s (expressive, but limited) rough sketches. A brassy musical score and destructive sound effects were more or less the foundation of those cartoons, and if you can’t at least get that, the shorts are going to flounder. (I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Scott Bradley really functioned as a third director on the T&J shorts of the 1940s and 1950s. Whether it was Mouse Trouble or Downhearted Duckling, the guy clearly wanted to hog the spotlight and tell the world that the film was his.)
If you just un-glossed whatever character layouts survived from overseas (Warren Leonheardt, who boarded on the episode Kitty Cat Blues, seen to the left, isn’t too convinced anything of his survived), you’d basically get what Hanna-Barbera would be doing with the characters if they were alive today: shallow, “modernized” reincarnations. And I honestly don’t think either of them would have a problem with that. It’s a shame that corporate agenda is the heart of these new cartoons, because the people working on the show really studied everything about the classic shorts (see the motion chart sketch below), and may have come up with a more reasonable facsimile in a better environment.
But all I can come up with after watching this DVD is “leave well enough alone.” I don’t want to see new Tom & Jerry cartoons anymore than I would want to see new Bugs Bunny or Popeye cartoons. They were films done in a different era, under different circumstances, and by people with a different world perspective than our own. But unfortunately, the standard thinking of the average joe in animation can’t fit that in his or her head: whatever worked once can and will work again. It’s why every cartoon on TV today looks like anime or Dexter’s Lab. A student I knew, who dropped out of the animation program at art school, summed it up bluntly: “Animation is too repetitive.”
Not that I’ve ever seen this series, but somehow, it doesn’t surprise me. You’ve probably seen the many spinoffs and reincarnations Hanna-Barbera has done of their previous shows (including Tom & Jerry twice before), so there’s no worries about anybody “ruining” their stuff, since they already did it themselves ages ago.
Can’t blame the one kid who quit animation. Even back in the Golden Years, there were instances where anything other than a fixed formula was discouraged.
Semaj actually brought up something I have been thinking about, would the golden age animators done much more justice in their later years ? Not just Hanna and Barbera but in general, nothing lasts forever, not even an artist’s talents. Chuck Jones took a noticable decline in the mid fifties onward and god know’s those Looney Tunes Specials he did was no where near the level of what he did between the early 40’s and mid 50’s. Also Bob Clampett’s Beany and Cecil was only about a third of the outstanding good quality of what he did during the tenure of his theatrical career. A great cartoon character is controlled by an assembly of great artists. Once they fall off the ball, retire, or die, said character just needs to never see any new material again. Studio’s need to just re-run and re-release the classics, which makes more money then any lame-ass revival or brand new 30 minute toy commerical they show.
The problem is there are no new characters. When Bill and Joe started their own studio they created dozens of new characters that kept the shorts tradition alive for a few more years. It’s a shame they had to be done on the cheap, but there was still something there, that indefinable “thing” that lifted these characters up from their 2-D confinement and made them just as memorable as Bugs or Woody or Popeye. Unfortunately, the studio really ran out of steam around 1967, when funny cartoons started being shoved aside in favor of Super Hero cartoons, this was followed by a series of cartoons that relied on comic book style art rather than the old traditional cartooning methods which to be honest, had been jetisoned already in favor of the simpler, flat” head and appendanges only” method of animation adopted for a more assembly line approach to animation. The first in a long series of nails in the animation coffin was driven home with the premeire of Scooby Doo. With the success of that program, the new die had been cast and TV animation went into a coma for the next twenty years.
The problem that exists today is that the market expects everything up front with very little risk, which is why the easiest way to get a show greenlit today is to copy another successful show or “revive” some classic property that might have some built in audience recognition that can be exploited through marketing. Even when new ideas come up, the assembly line process of television production is practically designed to elliminate any innovation (heck, once a show is designed, the artists are as good as obsolete)
(I realise the above paragraph has been beaten to death by many other artists using similar sentiments so I deleted the rest of my rant myself)
So, what’s the solution? We definitely need an infusion of new characters, but I think what’s most important if we want to improve the final look of today’s animation, I think we have to stop sending the work out to be butchered by foreign hands. There’s plenty of talent here in the U.S. eager to learn the actual craft (This is an AMERICAN art form folks) It breaks my heart whenever I see original layouts and character designs, full of life and promise, ground up and turned into hamburger by studios that either misinterpret or casually disregard the original directions. Make no mistake about this, if the artists from the” golden era” had their work reprocessed in this way, the results would have been just as abysmal.
Well nonsense like this isn’t ending any time soon, folks. Not if this upcoming live action/CGI Tom and Jerry movie has anything to say about it.
Although I disagree with the summation of Hanna and Barabera’s contribution to the Tom and Jerry’s, I completely agree with Thad’s final paragraph which is the way I’ve felt about revivals for ages. Even a live action tribute to the screwball comedies of the 40’s like “What’s Up Doc” seems fake despite all the frantic action.
“Leave well enough alone”. That’s the way I’ve always felt about the work of Don Rosa and all the other Carl Barks wannabe’s, but I realize I’m in a minority.
“That’s the way I’ve always felt about the work of Don Rosa”
That’s not fair. Don Rosa did great work though I think is biggest flaw is that he takes Uncle Scrooge a bit too seriously.
That picture of Tuffy BURNS!
“Leave well enough alone”. That’s the way I’ve always felt about the work of Don Rosa and all the other Carl Barks wannabe’s, but I realize I’m in a minority.”
How many other Carl Barks wannabe(e)’s are there? Also why would you even consider Rosa as a Barks wannabe(e)? Building upon someone’s body of work is not the same as a wannabe(e). If so, than Barks is nothing more than a Bob Karp wannabe(e).
I agree that Scott Bradley’s scores often feel equal to the Tom and Jerry cartoons in importance, but they’re so much fun to listen to that I never mind it. I think that this is simply a case of the composer working in conjuction with the animators doing a really great job, completing the entertainment value of the shorts.
Not too familiar with Bob Karp’s work. Of course I am familiar with Al Taliaferro, Floyd Gottfredson and others who worked with Donald before Barks (including, oh yeah, that Disney guy), but Barks was more than a Disney imitator. When he took over Donald he created a whole new world for the ducks, new characters, and even a town named Duckburg for them to live in. Once he hit his stride it was evident that the duck in “The Guilded Man” is a completely different character from that quacker who matched wits with Chip and Dale.
When I first saw the work of William Van Horne, it was amazing identical to Barks. Several other artists started doing duck stories and you can see them in new issues of “Donald Duck”, “Uncle Scrooge” and “Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories”. I can see that Don Rosa has talent, but he, like Van Horne, seems tied down by obeying all the rules that Barks set – same characters, same setting. He has even done follow-ups to Barks stories – including “Lost in the Andes” and “Back to the Klondike”. It would be interesting if Rosa, Van Horne, and the others completely dropped the ducks and created their own distinctive characters.
After a google search I found out that both Rosa and Van Horne indeed have created comics with their own characters, although I’ve never come across them in any of the comic shops in my area.
Forgive me for being so ignorant about this, but are TOM & JERRY comics still being published? I know that, back in the day, there were TOM & JERRY comic books and, while I didn’t like them because the characters talked, I was still glad that they were out there and I had always thought that these helped to keep the impressions of the cat and mouse out there. If TOM & JERRY comics no longer exist, perhaps someone should take the reigns and drive home the fact that the true “art” of the TOM & JERRY series was the violence that these two used to do to each other. Create a series of panels around the physical gags–and I know this can be done!! There have been occasional panels in the “golden age” of underground cartoons and, as I’ve stated before, even in the pages of NATIONAL LAMPOON magazine, that do a back-handed “salute” to classic theatrical cartoon violence; LAMPOON’s TOM & JERRY parody was especially perfect, even though I realize that one cannot even consider such graphic violence in a TOM & JERRY book. So why not bloodless violence? The artists on “THE SIMPSONS” were practically telling those still trying to revive and sweeten TOM & JERRY (with their ITCHY & SCRATCHY “cartoons within a cartoon”) just where the strengths of the series lie. Such suggestive nudging just didn’t work on the people responsible for “new” TOM & JERRY cartoons. Well, maybe someone pushing for new TOM & JERRY comic books might be able to gradually turn things back around. Hey, I agree that these were characters whose strengths lay in their classic shorts and we shouldn’t be tampering with this stuff anymore, but hey, marketers don’t see things that way. So, if they’re going to continue tampering, why not get someone out there who can really put into the faces of marketers just what was so great about the original cartoons like “KITTY FOILED”, “PLAY SAFE”, “PART-TIME PAL”, “MOUSE CLEANING”, “BABY PUSS” or “YANKEE DOODLE MOUSE”, truly painful violence run amuck!! It is sickening that marketers tend to forget just why animation is there and why older cartoons were so frenetic and funny to begin with!
Look how bad the DVD cover is. Jesus.
“I think we have to stop sending the work out to be butchered by foreign hands.”
As a foreign hand myself (I’m a Canadian), this statement is hilarious! Time & money and lack thereof is the sole cause of what you see, my friends. I can honestly say with a lot more of both the research & enthusiasm ‘behind the scenes’ would have been apparent onscreen. This kind of thing is like trying to do a T&J feature cartoon with the budget they had for Huckleberry Hound! A recipe for falling short, if you ask me.
As for the new proposed feature, I have no hand in that one but I wish them luck. They have their work cut out for them – because the money is there…