Stuff I Like: Tom and Jerry
Like most of my generation I spent a large portion of my childhood watching cartoons. In an age before Playstation and Xbox (who am I kidding? This was before the Atari 2600), one sure-fire way of keeping sugared-up kids quite for a few blessed minutes was to park them in front of a cartoon, preferably several cartoons. The 2D creations of Tex Avery, Chuck Jones, Disney and Hanna Barberra were a kind of third parent, a story-telling parent of endless voices, bright colours and (most importantly) consequence free violence. And by far my favourite surrogate parents were a mischievous mouse called Jerry and his uptight feline would-be nemesis Tom.
One of the underrated aspects of childhood is its facility for uncritical enjoyment. As a child I couldn’t have cared less for the underlying socio-economic and racial injustices prevalent in the America of the 1930s and 40s, later so glaringly obvious to jaded adult eyes. I didn’t pause to question the fact that the only human authority figure to intrude upon the endless war betwixt mouse and cat always seemed to be solely occupied by household chores in a strangely luxurious house, nor ponder why she sounded so much like the maid (i.e. slave) who pandered to Scarlett O’Hara’s every whim in Gone With the Wind (my mother made me sit through it, OK?). It was a mouse and a cat inflicting an often insane level of violence upon one another in a never-ending battle of wills. What’s not to love?
Sound is an important element to the success of Tom and Jerry, from the klaxon scream provoked by a thumb in a mouse-trap to the multi-layered full orchestra score. However, the cat and the mouse are, with a view exceptions, essentially silent comedians, descendents of Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd, but capable of much greater excess. Shorn of real-world constraints, animation is a medium which allows full reign to physical comedy and pays great dividends when married to sublime characterisation.
Tom and Jerry featured the painstaking hand-drawn animation and exquisite background paintings typical of the cinema distributed cartoons of the 1940s. Sadly these were only financially viable in a post-depression economy and the story of mass-market animation would be one of ever diminishing visual quality marked by an over-reliance on loops and unimaginative characterisation, only really redressed with the introduction of digital techniques in the 1990s.
The sheer anarchic extremity of Tom and Jerry is perhaps the most salient reason for its failure to be successfully reinvented for a modern audience. Reboots and movies have come an gone over the years, all of them failing to recapture the magic of the original; the magic of excess. In an age when TV companies face mountains of complaints when a news reader inadvertently drops the F-bomb or Janet Jackson shows a nipple, the temporary dismemberment, mallet swallowing and disregard for basic firearms safety evident in Tom and Jerry, can have no place – as famously lampooned in the Simpsons episode where Marge launches a campaign to ban Itchy and Scratchy.
On those rare occasions when I catch a glimpse of children’s television these days I see a lot to admire (Horrible Histories for example – if your kids aren’t watching that they should be and you’re a bad parent), but the overall impression of the animated content is one of message laden, toy-selling mediocrity. There’s little in the way of real fun to it, and certainly no anarchy. Which I think is a shame, after all, a little mallet swallowing never did me any harm.
