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What happened to Tom and Jerry?

Started by Virgo76, September 12, 2020, 08:41:30 PM

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Glebe

Wasn't there one where they joined forces to get rid of some new character and shook hands in the end?

New page "THOMAS!" twat.

Virgo76

I'm sure I saw one where Tom won at the end. He squashed Jerry into a photo album.
A few characters spoke didn't they? The woman. The bulldog. Spike? The annoying Tweety Pie type bird.
I remember Tom saying something like "don't you believe it" in a weird voice after an explosion once on one of them. Having them speak all the time was a crap idea though.
Generally, I enjoyed the cartoons. I have fond memories of them.
Did the animation change at some point? Think I liked them less after that.

SavageHedgehog

Quote from: Virgo76 on September 13, 2020, 03:45:28 PM
Did the animation change at some point? Think I liked them less after that.

I'm guessing you might mean the Chuck Jones cartoons from the 60s which looked like this


Although like most early-mid-20th Century cartoons the design and animation changed quite a bit over time and it took a while for what we now consider the standard look to appear. For example in the first cartoon they look like this


And by the end of the classic Hanna-Barbera cartoons they were using a much more stylised look


It's interesting to consider, for all their reliance on formula, how much less homogenous cartoons were in that era, insofar as characters could really change and develop in both look and personality. If you mention Mickey Mouse to someone, even now they may picture him with a chalk white face and button eyes, or with a pasty face and pupils. Daffy Duck evolved from an anarchic trickster who got the better of his enemies to a foil who ran afoul of his own arrogance and greed. This doesn't happen now unless a character is retired and then rebooted. Other than mild refinements to keep up with technology and The dreaded "Flanderisation" The Simpsons, the South Park kids and Spongebob all act and look pretty much the same as they did 20 years ago. I guess it speaks to an era where cataloguing of work wasn't readily available to the public, works were seen once and only again by dedicated effort or random happenstance, and consistency for corporate branding wasn't a top concern. Heck, with Warner Bros in the 50s you often had three fairly distinct versions of the same character coming from three different units releasing shorts concurrently (Bugs Bunny in particular).


TL, DR; yes, the animation did change.

thenoise

Quote from: SavageHedgehog on September 13, 2020, 11:17:22 AM
Whether or not redrawing her as a white woman, or dubbing over one of the few performances in Golden Age American Animation by an African American performer with a "more acceptable" voice holds up as a successful effort in making these cartoons less racist is debatable.

Lillian Randolph.

QuoteMGM, Hanna-Barbera and Randolph had been under fire from the NAACP, which called the role a stereotype. Activists had been complaining about the maid character since 1949. The character was written out entirely. Many of these had a white actress (June Foray) redubbing the character in American TV broadcasts and in the DVD collections.[38]

Lillian Randolph believed these roles were not harmful to the image or opportunities of African Americans. Her reasoning was that the roles themselves would not be discontinued, but the ethnicity of those in them would change.[39]
which is what happened - avoid any accusations of racial stereotypes by making sure everyone is white, just to be on the safe side.

There are a couple of blackface explosion gags here and there that the cartoons are better off without, but mammy two shoes is almost too odd to be offensive. When I was a child I thought she was some kind of bear, she seems to have great big spa-like hands for some reason. And I was expecting a reveal of her face one episode and she'd look like a teddy bear.
Certainly assumed she was the home owner or a housewife of some kind, certainly, she wasn't shy about trashing her furniture or worried about being chucked out. If there were implications of her being servant class (other than being black, and being called 'mammy') they were lost on me.

idunnosomename

The Zoot Cat is just fucking hilarious


Virgo76

Quote from: Glebe on September 13, 2020, 01:52:43 PM
Wasn't there one where they joined forces to get rid of some new character and shook hands in the end?

New page "THOMAS!" twat.

A bit like World War II...

Is that her official name? Mammy Two Shoes?


dissolute ocelot

Wikipedia is a wealth of cat/mouse information, including on the plausibility of the storylines. Mammy Two Shoes has her own Wikipedia page. Wikipedia also details every time the cat and mouse talk, which shows just how much of the show is a parody of things that have been entirely forgotten:
QuoteThe Lonesome Mouse where they speak several times briefly, primarily Jerry, to contrive to get Tom back into the house. Tom more often sings while wooing female cats; for example, Tom sings Louis Jordan's "Is You Is or Is You Ain't My Baby" in the 1946 short Solid Serenade. In that short and Zoot Cat, Tom woos female cats using a deep, heavily French-accented voice in imitation of then-popular leading man, actor Charles Boyer. At the end of The Million Dollar Cat, after beginning to antagonize Jerry he says, "Gee, I'm throwin' away a million dollars... BUT I'M HAPPY!" In Tom and Jerry: The Magic Ring, Jerry says, "No, no, no, no, no," when choosing the shop to remove his ring. In The Mouse Comes to Dinner, Tom speaks to his girlfriend Toots while inadvertently sitting on a stove: "Say, what's cookin'?", to which Toots replies "You are, stupid." Another instance of speech comes in Solid Serenade and The Framed Cat, where Tom directs Spike through a few dog tricks in a dog-trainer manner. ...
The only other reasonably common vocalization is made by Tom when some external reference claims a certain scenario or eventuality to be impossible, which inevitably, ironically happens to thwart Tom's plans – at which point, a bedraggled and battered Tom appears and says in a haunting, echoing voice "Don't you believe it!", a reference to the then-popular 1940s radio show Don't You Believe It!
I was actually looking up where the names Tom and Jerry come from; it seems to be 19th century British slang for juvenile delinquents, and after a change in British licencing laws in 1830, "Tom and Jerry Shop" was a name for a beer shop. In the US in the 19th century "Tom and Jerry" was a type of the popular Xmas drink egg nog, supposedly named after a Jerry Thomas, and possibly unconnected with the British usage.

JesusAndYourBush

Quote from: Virgo76 on September 14, 2020, 06:49:30 AM
Is that her official name? Mammy Two Shoes?

I've never heard the name used in the cartoons.  I don't know if it was made up years later to make it easier to talk about the character, or if perhaps the name was used in official documentation (scripts etc) at the time?  Anyone know?

idunnosomename

Quote from: JesusAndYourBush on September 14, 2020, 11:57:56 AM
I've never heard the name used in the cartoons.  I don't know if it was made up years later to make it easier to talk about the character, or if perhaps the name was used in official documentation (scripts etc) at the time?  Anyone know?
from what i can find the name was used on model sheets in HB but also for a very similar character in a Disney Silly Symphonies. I cannot find proof of this though (ie, a c.1940 model sheet image)

In scripts such as the Library of Congress archives she's just called "Maid"

Shit Good Nose

I've always known her as Mammy Two Shoes from as far back as I can remember, but I couldn't tell you where I picked that up from.

buzby

#41
Quote from: idunnosomename on September 14, 2020, 12:43:01 PM
from what i can find the name was used on model sheets in HB but also for a very similar character in a Disney Silly Symphonies. I cannot find proof of this though (ie, a c.1940 model sheet image)

In scripts such as the Library of Congress archives she's just called "Maid"
As you say, the 'Mammy Two Shoes' name wasn't used at MGM, she was just refered to as 'Maid' in the scripts. The name originated at Disney, where a similar character had been created with that name (also voiced by Lilian Randolph) for the Oscar-winning cartoon Three Orphan Kittens, and reappeared in the sequel More Kittens, a Pluto cartoon called Panty Pirate and finally in Figaro and Cleo, where she was renamed Aunt Delilah. (Three Orphan Kittens also featured this scene, which was excised when it was edited for TV syndication in the 1950s).

In the Tom & Jerry comic strips and storybooks that were published contemporary with the cartoons she featured in she was first called Dinah, and later Rose.


The Disney cartoons were also released as storybooks, whose popularity led the the name to come into common use. The first time the name was specifically used to refer to the T&J 'Maid' character was in a famous article on Tom & Jerry in the Jan/Feb 1975 issue of Film Comment magazine written by Mark Kausler (who later said he had used the name he knew from the Three Kittens storybook to refer to the character) and that name then stuck within animation fan circles.

For the record, as a kid I'd seen enough old films on the telly to know she was supposed to be the African-American housemaid stereotype.

Shit Good Nose

Quote from: buzby on September 14, 2020, 01:47:31 PM
The Disney cartoons were also released as storybooks, whose popularity led the the name to come into common use.

That MUST be where I got it from then - I remember having a lot of Disney storybooks and being read them at bedtime (28 I was, etc) and there must have been a few T&J ones in there.

idunnosomename

can't have a Tom and Jerry thread without an acknowledgement of how great Tom's absolute ROAR of pain is

and "YAHHH -hoo-hoo hoo" to a lesser extent

Brundle-Fly

Quote from: idunnosomename on September 14, 2020, 03:00:54 PM
can't have a Tom and Jerry thread without an acknowledgement of how great Tom's absolute ROAR of pain is

and "YAHHH -hoo-hoo hoo" to a lesser extent

Not forgetting the sound of marching ants.

Elderly Sumo Prophecy

Tom quit, Jerry got married
I should've known we'd never get far

notjosh

Has no-one mentioned that there's a Who Framed Roger Rabbit-style live-action movie coming out next year?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_and_Jerry_(2021_film)

Of course, this won't necessarily be terrible. Joe Dante's Looney Tunes: Back in Action was very nearly an example of how this kind of approach could be great, were it not pretty much ruined by the studio. The Louvre scene is still brilliant though.

This will almost definitely be terrible however.

Shit Good Nose

Quote from: notjosh on September 14, 2020, 04:37:01 PM
Has no-one mentioned that there's a Who Framed Roger Rabbit-style live-action movie coming out next year?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_and_Jerry_(2021_film)

Of course, this won't necessarily be terrible. Joe Dante's Looney Tunes: Back in Action was very nearly an example of how this kind of approach could be great, were it not pretty much ruined by the studio. The Louvre scene is still brilliant though.

This will almost definitely be terrible however.

Four writers doesn't inspire confidence.

SavageHedgehog

Also directed by Tim Story, best known for the Jessica Alba\Michael Chiklis etc Fantastic Four movies, which I don't think are thaaaaaaat bad and get a bit of a bum rap, but still those are his best movies and that's not particularly encouraging. But that they're apparently going for a traditional look rather than going the Scooby/Garfield etc. route does have me intrigued.

Donnas Cakes

Quote from: Shit Good Nose on September 12, 2020, 10:38:55 PM
Tom and Kenneth

Their relatiosnhip always reminded me of Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell - so I think you are on to something with this. Let's see Jerry's collages and dust-jacket defacements before passing judgement.