February 10, 1940: Puss Gets the Boot premieres. It is a cartoon written and directed by the team of William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, who would do much more over their careers. But this 9-minute Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer opus launched them, and the cartoon's stars: A cat named Tom, and a mouse named Jerry.
There's little about the cartoon to make it stand out from the many that would follow it, as it's typical slapstick, including the trope of Jerry drawing a hole on the wall near the floor, fooling Tom into thinking it's Jerry's mouse-hole, and he crashes into it, stunning him. (Something that Wile E. Coyote would later try on rocks to stop the Road Runner, only to see it backfire.)
Unfortunately for Tom -- or Jasper, as she names him -- the house's maid walks in on the mess that the two of them have made. Even more unfortunately, the maid is a caricature that was already offensive: A fat, middle-aged black woman. Her name is listed in the script, and makes it even worse: Mammy Two Shoes. (We never see her face, only her lower body and her "grandma arms," but, mostly, her shoes.) She warns "Jasper" that if he makes another mess, she'll throw him out of the house.
(This warning, and the fact that she has her own room in a 1951 cartoon, makes it suggest that she may actually be the homeowner, not the maid. The character was retired in 1952, when Lillian Randolph, the black actress who provided her voice, left to appear in the ill-fated TV version of Amos & Andy.)
Jerry (whose name is not mentioned, in either the title or the script) overhears this, and does what he can to sabotage Jasper. Finally, he succeeds, and Mammy chases Jasper out of the house. You may now be expecting a twist ending: That Jerry ends up missing Jasper, and somehow convinces Mammy to let Jasper back in. But, no: Hanna and Barbera, on this occasion, were not that clever. The cartoon ends with Jerry sticking his tongue out at Jasper, and hanging a "HOME SWEET HOME" sign in front of his hole.
The short was successful, earning a nomination for an Academy Award for Best Short Subject: Cartoons. Texas businesswoman Bessa Short sent a letter to MGM asking whether more cat and mouse shorts would be produced, which helped convince management to commission a series. A studio contest held to rename both characters was won by animator John Carr, who suggested Tom the cat and Jerry the mouse, after "Tom and Jerry," a cocktail that was then especially popular at Christmastime. It is a variant of eggnog with brandy and rum added, and served hot, usually in a mug or a bowl.
That cocktail's name is derived from the names of two characters in an 1821 stage play by William Moncrieff. This play also coined the phrase "the sweet science" to describe boxing. The play was an adaptation of Pierce Egan's book from the same year, titled Life In London, where the names originated. It was based on the careers of Egan and a pair of brothers who were illustrators. George and Isaac Cruikshank.
After MGM gave the green-light for Hanna and Barbera to continue, the studio entered production on The Midnight Snack, released on July 19, 1941, and giving the characters their familiar names. Hanna and Barbera produced 114 cartoons for MGM, 13 of which were nominated for an Academy Award for Best Short Subject, and 7 went on to win, breaking the winning streak held by Walt Disney's studio in the category. Tom and Jerry won more Academy Awards than any other character-based theatrical animated series.
Barbera estimated the typical budget of $50,000 for each Tom and Jerry cartoon, which made the duo take "time to get it right." A typical cartoon took around six weeks to make. Hanna and Barbara worked on Tom and Jerry cartoons for the next 15 years, before forming their own production company, and making cartoons for the TV networks.
In 1945, MGM made the war-themed musical Anchors Aweigh. They asked Disney himself to lend the character of Mickey Mouse to dance alongside Gene Kelly. Disney refused. So they asked Hanna and Barbara, and a full-sized Jerry, rather than a mouse-sized one, danced alongside Kelly, raising the character's profile tremendously.
In 1961, MGM revived the Tom and Jerry franchise with 13 shorts, directed by Gene Deitch, who also wrote most of them. At first, he wasn't a fan of the previous cartoons, calling them "needlessly violent." But, after working on them himself, he quickly realized that "nobody took it seriously." He even saw "biblical roots" in Tom and Jerry's conflict, similar to David and Goliath: "That's where we feel a connection to these cartoons: The little guy can win (or at least survive) to fight another day."
In 1965, the cartoons began to be put together in TV packages, although with other MGM cartoons of the era, including the father & son bulldogs Spike & Tyke (who had been introduced in Tom and Jerry cartoons), Barney Bear, and one-offs such as the brilliant 1951 Symphony in Slang.
This would be how I would be exposed to them: In the late 1970s, I would run home from school, usually not making it it time for the show to begin at 3:00, but, from whenever I did get home until 4:00, I would watch Tom and Jerry on New York's WPIX-Channel 11. My mother didn't want me to watch it: She hated violence of all kinds, including cartoon violence. Well, she needn't have worried: To this day, I have never purposely injured a cat, real or animated.
This version would sometimes include shorts from a CBS Saturday morning version that ran from 1975 to 1977, in which Tom and Jerry were... friends, who worked together on things. I was a little kid, but I was not a dumb kid: It never looked right to me.
There would be Tom and Jerry movies in 1993 and 2021, but neither did well at the box office. Maybe the characters are finally played out.
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February 10, 1940 was a Saturday. Baseball and football were out of season. The NBA hadn't been founded yet. English soccer's Football Association had suspended Football League play for the duration of World War II.
There was 1 score, in the NHL: The New York Rangers and the Toronto Maple Leafs played to a tie, 4-4 at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto.
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