The 40s was a very meaningful decade for the history of animation industry. A lot of classic features were released during those years, such as Fantasia (1940) or Dumbo (1941) from Disney Studios, and the industry for feature long animations started to spread and flourish around the world with new productions coming out from various countries.
But going back to the animated short’s world, two iconic characters were born right at the beginning of the decade with the release of Puss Gets the Boot (1940), which introduced Tom and Jerry to the world, although with different names and slightly different designs for this specific short. The duo was created by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera at the MGM studios and was produced by Rudolf Ising, who actually received all the credits for the short at the time.
A cat named Jasper is seen making a little mouse’s life miserable — the mouse had not yet received a name at this point, but I’ll refer to him as Jerry for convenience. Jerry tries to escape but Jasper does not make it easy, following him around, grabbing him by the tail and deceiving the little mouse. But after Jerry finally strikes back and escapes, the cat starts to chase him angrily and accidentally breaks a vase. Mammy Two Shoes, Jasper’s owner, comes in furiously into the room and scolds him. Jerry then realizes how he now has the upper hand and takes advantage of that throughout the rest of the show, which I will spoil no longer.
The cat takes pleasure in tormenting the mouse, but never actually really tries to eat or kill it, which surprisingly fits the character’s perfectly as we will see that the purpose of the show is to highlight the relationship between the two as they play a game of chase, traps, deception and most of all mayhem, but never actually putting an end to their story.
Even though the characters in the short have different personalities than the Tom and Jerry we know from newer productions, the slapstick violence and chaos that these two usually create are there, indicating that Hanna and Barbera got their formula right at their first try. The following short did take a while to start being produced though, as the studio was initially not interested in keeping the project alive, but the public and critics were very interested in seeing more of the cat and the mouse and the film was even nominated for an academy award.
One particularly interesting fact about this short is that a newer version was released in the 90s. The animation footage stayed exactly the same, but the voice for Mammy Two Shoes was re-dubbed to sound less stereotypical and offensive.
The short is available to watch on the internet, although it has not passed into public domain yet, so I’ll not be posting links for it this time.
References:
Sampson, Henry T. (1998). That’s enough, folks: Black images in animated cartoons, 1900–1960
Sennett, Ted (1989). The art of Hanna-Barbera : fifty years of creativity
“Puss Gets the Boot”. IMDb.
