Here’s just one of a number of examples from High Steaks (1962). High comedy erupts when Jerry traps Tom’s tail in a barbecue. It sounds like Tom’s saying “no, no, no” over and over again as he tries to extricate his tail but it’s hard to tell because his echoey voice is being drowned out by the muffled music (there’s a fair bit of vocal ambient noise in the cartoon).
Here come the coloured spikes. Deitch has these four on a cycle, while Tom moves around, all on ones.
Mismatched shots. These are consecutive frames.
This was the fourth of the 13 Tom and Jerrys that William Snyder produced for distribution by MGM. Deitch directed this one at his studio in Prague, although there’s also an “animation director” credit.
The first half of Deitch's output of T&J's is extremely painful in its use of painful gags on Tom, as if Dietch -- no fan of the Hanna-Barbera school of violent comedy -- was trying to punish the audiences for making them popular enough he was now having to do them on consignment from his producer, William Snyder. His final few cartoons are a little easier to take, once he got the anger of having to make them in the first place out of his system.
ReplyDeleteYou could really tell he hated doing these. Of course MGM eventually sacked whoever made the decision to outsource their cat & mouse anyway so that's the end of the story!
DeleteGene seemed to get a lot of his anger out doing "The Tom & Jerry Cartoon Kit", where Allen Swift put voice to what Deitch really thought of the series. The last few had gags that were still violent, but where the director and animators didn't stress the painful aftermath of the gag as much.
DeleteI replied and it must of got deleted or something but
DeleteI've had a very simniliar variant on your premise J.Lee, but it's as if Deitch thought that Tom and Jerry cartoons were abstract (even with much more graphic violence than some other series) in their violence and that it wasn't painful ENOUGH, thus what he did.
Herman and Katnip were real violent in a way I lie..regardless of the directors with the pain expressing voice of Katnip.
Favorite still being 1956's "Mouse-um",director by Seymour Kneitel, where Katnip (1)sees a trophy's eyeballs fall on the floor in a big game museum and put them on HIS eyes then (2) (Syd Raymond as) Katnip theen yells "I can' See, I can't See",running all over the entrace and out, and all THIS because he'd been shot over from another museum trophy by b Herman either (I can't remember) sticking Katnip's hunting rifle, deflecting it as if Herman was Popeye, into katnip's eyes, or by Herman the mouse sticking his fingers into Katnip's guns and thus logically causing a backfire, and all THIS because Katnip messed with HOIMAN in the FOIST place,LOL!
As for Tom and Jerry, it makes the Roadrunners seem much more abstract in their violence..
Then again Chuck Jones, who directed the original Roadrunners, wasn;t a fan of Hanna-Barbera school of violence as shown by his making the final batch in the 1960s of T&J cartoons where Jones took Deitch's OPPOSITE approach and just made them cute....after no, Deitch and HB both had violent things happen not to Jerry but to Tom.
Final note: Chuck always said he didn't care for the violence in those (despite his Three Bears shorts of 1944-1951 using them.)
SC
Being produced by animators who were unfamiliar with the Hollywood style of cartooning, it probably took them awhile to really understand what was funny and what looked painful.
ReplyDeleteEspecially if you saw what they were used to doing back home.
Deletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efEg6BCK0t0
(this was a classic I enjoyed as a 4 year old!)
This is kinda a compliment (especially compared to the next studio that got them, Chuck Jones's independent Sib Tower), but compared to these, in turn, some of Hanna and Barbera's canonical Tom and Jerry's look tame (but nothing comes close to any director's Herman and Katnip ;) )SC
ReplyDeleteFifty-plus years later, I can still recall how ugly and depressing these things were. Enough of this junk could cause headaches.
ReplyDeleteThe Gene Deitch's studio located in Prague (Czechoslovakia in the year in which this Tom & Jerry short was produced [1962], nowadays Czech Republic), is named Rembrandt Film.
ReplyDeleteTechnically, the actual studio name is "Bratři v triku" (Brothers in T-shirts). Rembrandt Films is/was the name of the NY Distributor and Producer of these outsourced productions.
DeleteGene and his wife got to talk about the studio in this Radio Prague report...
http://www.radio.cz/en/section/arts/studio-bratri-v-triku-the-cradle-of-czech-animation
William Snyder began Rembrandt Films as a distributor of foreign films for the independent American theaters known as "art houses."
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