Tom and Jerry at 80: how a psychotic cat and mouse drove Hollywood wild

At this stage, Hanna and Barbera had not fully fleshed out main protagonists. The initial idea was for “two equal characters who were always in conflict with each other – we originally thought of a fox and a dog, before deciding on the cat and the mouse,” Barbera told The Seattle Post in 1993. In Puss Gets the Boot, the main characters were not even called Tom and Jerry. The mouse was named Jinx (although this was not revealed) and the cat was called Jasper.

As production began on the second cartoon, The Midnight Snack, due to air in July 1941, MGM decided to hold a studio-wide competition to rename the characters, with the winner being picked out of hat. The contest was won by animator John Carr, who scooped $50 for coming up with the names Tom and Jerry. A squabbling pair called Tom and Jerry dates back to sportswriter Pierce Egan’s 1823 book Life in London, or Days and Nights of Jerry Hawthorne and his elegant friend Corinthian Tom, but Carr’s inspiration was more modern.

He was thinking of the popular Christmas cocktail Tom and Jerry, made with eggnog, brandy and rum, that had been popularised by President Warren Harding in the 1920s. According to Ted Sennett’s book The Art of Hanna-Barbera, the show’s creators were not overly happy to have their cat and mouse named after an alcoholic drink.

Puss Gets the Boot established the template of the mouse turning the tables on a bullying cat, although it’s the thrill of the chase that counts. The look of Tom the cat was quickly refined after the debut. In the 1940 debut, Jasper’s body is more kitten-like, with fluffier grey and white fur, larger feet and a rounder face.

After getting the green light to make more films, Hanna and Barbera assembled a team of nearly 100 animators, many working seven days a week in the early days. “Everyone was having a good time, everyone was making money,” said Barbera. He said that the typical budget in the 1940s was $50,000 for each Tom and Jerry cartoon – that’s equivalent to a staggering £700,000 per show in modern money. It is no wonder that Barbera said the funding allowed them “time to get it right”.

Between 1940 and 1957, Hanna and Barbera made 114 Tom and Jerry shorts, all around six to eight minutes long. They were not aimed at children – they were serious works of cinema art, meant to entertain adults waiting to watch the main movie of their choice. Cartoon aficionados rate the first decade of Tom and Jerry as the Hollywood cartoon at its best. Tom and Jerry films earned 13 times Oscar nominations, their seven wins coming for The Yankee Doodle Mouse (1943), Mouse Trouble (1944), Quiet, Please (1945), The Cat Concerto (1947), Mouse Cleaning (1948), Two Mouseketeers (1952), and Johann Mouse (1953).

Gus Arriola, who was part of the joke-writing team, said that Barbera “came up with about 75 per cent of the gags”. Barbera and Hanna would then act out the script, so the animators knew what was wanted. Although the rivalry between cat and mouse was intense, it was always meant to be controlled.

In his book Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons, film historian Leonard Maltin says: “Tom chasing Jerry is the ritual of the series. But somehow the audience realises that when all is said and done, the cat doesn’t want to eat the mouse. There is an underlying bond between Tom and Jerry that gives these cartoons tremendous strength and likeability.”

The violence was, well, cartoonish, keeping the censors onside, even though some sequences, such as in Fine Feathered Friend (1942), when Jerry twice nearly decapitates Tom with hedge clippers, pushed the boundaries. "Tom and Jerry were never going to kill each other, they were friends. Tom did it to Jerry and Jerry did it to Tom," said Barbera. The Itchy and Scratchy characters in The Simpsons are violent, bloody parodies of Tom and Jerry.

Tom and Jerry featured brilliant soundtracks, with musical director Scott Bradley creating complex scores that blended jazz, classical and popular music, along with songs from MGM films. In Solid Serenade, Tom even played double bass while singing Louis Jordan’s Is You Is, or Is You Ain’t My Baby? Bradley was a jazz fan and you can hear music from greats such as Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, Roy Eldridge and Dizzy Gillespie dotted about the films.

Bradley also put in his favourite classical composers, including Chopin and Bizet. The most dazzling use of music in all the Tom and Jerry films comes in the Oscar-winning The Cat Concerto. In this superlative short film, Tom is a big-headed concert pianist about to give a major concert. His performance of Franz Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No2 is sabotaged by Jerry, who had been dozing inside the piano. Their fierce battle is perfectly timed to the music, as they chase around the ivory keys.

Although, cat and mouse occasionally spoke – Tom would imitate the French accent of actor Charles Boyer when he was trying to woo female cats – in the main they were silent, except for the squeaks, gasps, sneezes and screams that Hanna provided. Music sometimes replaced voices, for example when a clarinet was used to portray the sound of Jerry laughing at his rival.

As they chased and fought, they often smashed the glass and crockery in the house, earning the displeasure of the maid. Viewers were only given glimpses of the legs and feet of Mammy Two-Shoes, a character brilliantly voiced by Lillian Randolph, the African-American actress who also portrayed Annie the maid in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. There is no doubt that Mammy Two-Shoes is a dated racial stereotype. Amazon have even carried warnings about “ethnic and racial prejudices” in these early cartoons.

Whoopi Goldberg says that although she believes the “unfair and hurtful” representation was wrong, she argued that these “timeless” cartoons should be shown in their original form. “Removing her would be the same as pretending she never existed… it accurately reflects a part of our history that should not be ignored.”

After the final Tom and Jerry Oscar win in 1953, MGM’s desire to commit a lavish budget to the series began to wane. Popular rival cartoons such as Mr Magoo were being made for a fraction of the cost. In 1957 things reached a head. “One day I got a call from the front office telling me to fire everyone. Just like that,” Barbera recalled. He and Hanna cashed in their MGM pensions so they could start their own company and make cartoons for television. Among the smash hits they went on to create in the 1960s were The Flintstones and Scooby-Doo.

Tom and Jerry were revived by MGM in 1960, when the studio commissioned director Gene Deitch to make 13 shorts. Former Warner Bros animator Chuck Jones made 34 more between 1963 and 1967. There were also later television spin-offs, including Hanna-Barbera’s The Tom and Jerry Show (1975), The Tom and Jerry Comedy Show (1980-82), Tom & Jerry Kids (1990-93), Tom and Jerry Tales (2006-2008) and the ongoing The Tom and Jerry Show, which started in 2014.

There was even a movie in 1992, with Tom voiced by Richard Kind and Jerry by Dana Hill. Barbera said he had been pitching the idea of a full-length film for the previous 30 years, “until I was blue in the face”, and gave his full approval to the feature-length version.

Hanna died in 2001 and Barbara in 2006, but their creations live on. A YouGov poll in 2015 revealed that they were the UK’s favourite cartoon for adults, knocking The Simpsons into second place.

There may even be a new swell of fans created later this year following the December release of a big budget live-action/animated Tom and Jerry movie from Warner Brothers. Hollywood has been down this road before, as it happens. In 1945, the MGM movie Anchors Aweigh, which starred Frank Sinatra, featured a live action sequence in which Gene Kelly danced with Tom and Jerry. The 2020 movie, which is directed by Tim Story, stars Chloë Grace Moretz, Michael Peña, Ken Jeong and Rob Delaney.

It always seemed to me that Hanna and Barbera favoured Jerry over Tom. There's a clue in an interview Hanna gave in 1961 to the British publication Picture Show Annual. He was asked about the real-life models for his famous cat and mouse. “On the MGM. backlot there was a whole colony of cats to keep down the population of rats,” explained Hanna. “Although the studio supplied them with food, water and even milk, those cats were vicious and like wild animals. Jerry, the mouse, was a little creature that turned up at our office from nowhere – I guess he was after scraps. We encouraged him to have the run of the office by putting titbits of cheese and other tasty morsels for him to nibble."

Tom and Jerry remain two of Hollywood’s most famous creations; a fox and a dog just wouldn't have been the same.