Interestingly, a contest was run to give the characters their monikers. It was in the follow-up toon, The Midnight Snack (1941), that "Tom and Jerry" were officially dubbed as such. The public loved Puss Gets the Boot, too.īut the clincher was a letter from a leading Texas distributor asking, "When are we going to see more of those adorable cat and mouse cartoons?" This distributor was too important to ignore, so Hanna and Barbera were told to develop the series. Jinx was the nemesis of two mice named Pixie and Dixie.Īfter the release of Puss Gets the Boot, the execs at MGM were still grumbling about the whole "cat and mouse" shtick ("Haven't we had enough cat and mouse cartoons already?") But to everyone's astonishment, Puss Gets the Boot garnered an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Animated Short.
#Tom and jerry episodes when spoke series
Ironically, a much later Hanna-Barbera toon television series would feature a character named "Jinx," who was a cat. In this toon, Tom is called "Jasper" and Jerry goes unnamed (although in the writer's notes, he is referred to as "Jinx"). The fact is, the suits at MGM had already screened it for themselves and were unimpressed, but since they had nothing else in the works, they decided to release it.Īlthough the general concept of the series (cat menacing and chasing mouse, with mouse turning the tables and coming out the victor by toon's end) was already set, the two main characters had not yet been given their iconic names. The toon was released without any fanfare, completely unceremoniously.
Puss Gets the Boot premiered on February 10, 1940. (As a side note, a "Tom and Jerry" was also the name of a popular Christmastime drink.) Although this would almost fit a fairly apt capsule description of the soon-to-be world famous toon pair, the usage of the two names was merely a coincidence. The term "Tom and Jerry" dated back to 19th-century England, and referred to children behaving mischievously. The new cartoon was called Puss Gets the Boot. We thought we needed conflict and chase and action, and a cat and mouse seemed like a great, basic thought." Barbera added that with a cat and mouse "Half the story was written before you even put pencil to paper." Hanna recalled: "We knew we needed two new characters. It was Hanna who had the (hardly original) idea of combining a cat and a mouse in a cartoon.
He decided to combine the talents of Wiliam Hanna, a director, and Joseph Barbera, a story man and character designer. Ising, on an inspiration, decided to team up two members of his unit and try to strike gold with a new animated series idea. Their last animated series, Captain and the Kids, had been a huge flop, in both financial and popular terms. In 1939, producer Rudolf Ising and his MGM animation unit were in trouble. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook. Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen.
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