How did they do it?
How did Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera manage to take the barest of conceits—a cat and a mouse abusing each other—and spin it out for fifteen years, making dozens of brutally funny and beautiful shorts? After all, there isn’t often much to distinguish one Tom and Jerry cartoon from another. Oh, sometimes they’ll get a supporting character—Spike and/or his son; Mammy Two-Shoes; a duck or an elephant or that annoying little baby mouse in the big diaper—but it doesn’t usually make a big difference to the story or the gag structure. Even the little bits of character business—Tom’s grimaces and Jerry’s terrified gulps—tend to get repeated. But it doesn’t really matter. Though it’s sometimes very hard to tell one Tom and Jerry from another, it’s equally hard to stop watching them once you start, and just about impossible to keep from laughing or just grinning maniacally as they play.
For all their physical violence, then, there is something very ineffable about those shorts. So probably it’s no huge surprise that Tom and Jerry Tales, the Kids’ WB series that revives the franchise, manages to miss the magic.
That’s not to say the series is egregiously bad; certainly it’s better than the bastardized show the original creators themselves produced in the 1970s for network television, when they were forced to remove all traces of violence and even animation from the series. The shorts in Tom and Jerry Tales are also markedly handsomer and funnier than the Gene Deitch-directed cartoons that appeared in the 1960s, during the hiatus between Hanna and Barbera’s departure form MGM and Chuck Jones’s arrival. They don’t capture the full solidity or the supple rubberiness of the classic 1940s shorts—these days, who can?—but they are clearly inspired by the look of the classic cartoons. They aren’t as saturated with body-shattering violence as the originals, but there’s enough mayhem to keep them from looking embarrassingly pacific. The animation is fluid, and the animators and storyboard artists seem to know that a lot of the character comedy needs to be carried by facial and body expressions. The gags are also better timed and executed than the superficially similar physical gags in Tiny Toons and Animaniacs. (Simply as physical comedy, Tom and Jerry Tales a giant step up from the former.) The credits are replete with the names of genuine talents: Spike Brandt, Tony Cervone, and Tom Minton, to name just three who should be familiar to fans of contemporary animation.
So why does this show make my skin crawl?
I don’t know, though I can speculate that maybe it’s close enough to the original to fall into a variant of “the uncanny valley.” It feels less like a pretty good modern cartoon that captures elements of the original, and more like a “real” Tom and Jerry that has gone wrong in some horrible but undefined way.
If I had to pick out individual things that bugged me while watching the recently released fourth DVD volume, though, I guess I’d have to trace most of the problems to a sense that the show is somewhat overwritten. Hanna and Barbera put the characters in a variety of settings—in the old West, at a tennis game, on an ocean liner, in the Vienna of Johann Strauss—but they usually kept each story pretty simple. If the short opened with Tom using Jerry as a combination of caddy and tee in his golf game, it would stick to golf gags and explore every possible way of disassembling its characters with wedges, putters, and mashie-niblicks. A Tom and Jerry, more so even than a Roadrunner, feels impossible to script, for how could you descriptively write some of the indignities Tom suffers?
Now, I suspect that Tom and Jerry Tales also uses storyboards more often than scripts, but there is altogether too much time spent thinking up plot complications in these shorts. “Power Tom,” for instance, has to set up Tom’s dreams of being a super hero, and then set up a completely different story to actually put him into a super suit. The Oriental-themed “Zent Out of Shape” has Tom upset and distracted by Jerry’s musical performances—and then drags a Godzilla-like Spike out of the nearby ocean. The utterly incoherent “Which Witch” makes Tom into a witch’s mouse-chasing familiar, then has him dodging the witch’s own curses when he upsets her, introduces a second witch, turns Tom into a mouse a couple of times, introduces a feud between the two witches that the cat and mouse can get caught up in, and finally turns the witches into Spike clones. None of it is funny; mostly it feels like the work of a writer who kept changing the plot of his cartoon after discovering he didn’t have enough material to sustain any of his ideas, and kept changing the plot each time he came up short of inspiration. It’s a woeful toon to watch.
Contributing to the sense that there were too many word processors at work on the show are some ideas so bad they seem they could only come from a person who couldn’t draw. In “Jungle Love,” for instance, a python falls in love with Tom’s tail. Now, I suppose I can imagine a first-class animator, given time enough and the world, producing a sequence that showed an exceptionally stupid—and possibly intoxicated—snake by degrees becoming attracted to and hypnotized by the unconsciously seductive twitching of a cat’s tail. What is unbelievable is what this short gives us: a snake that looks at a short limb covered in grey fur and takes it to be a hot lady python. I’m about as likely to mistake a willow tree for a supermodel.
There are a handful of shorts that are funny in and of themselves. Most of these, like the “Cat Show Catastrophe,” come from the team of Brandt and Cervone, who combine writing and directing duties, so maybe it’s not a surprise that the physical gags in their shorts are melded more seamlessly with the story. It’s also to the show’s credit that the shorts are not overcrowded with dialogue. When characters do talk they don’t say much that is funny or interesting—though Ian James Corlett does provide a wonderfully dumb-looking bunny with a very funny Tom Bodett-like personality in “Don’t Bring Your Pet to School Day.” There’s no point in complaining about the musical score: recreating the zing, blast, and full-bodied blare Scott Bradley wrung from the great MGM orchestra is just not a possibility these days.
The real problem with this show is not that it traduces the original—it doesn’t. The real problem is that it diverts into a sterile enterprise money and talent that could be better spent elsewhere. No one, I’d aver, could recreate the original shorts on a TV budget; and because that would be the only excuse for making a new Tom and Jerry show, the money has been wasted. Worse is the misuse of talent: the people who made these shorts plainly have quite a lot of skill and imagination, not to mention guts. It would have been much better to set them to work on something new—something of their own and not just a recreation of a classic.
Tom and Jerry are imperishable. Would that Kids’ WB had just brought the originals back to broadcast television instead of trying to reanimate what wasn’t even dead.
