Friday 18 February 2022

There's Always Room For Jerry Jello

Mouse-flavoured Jello?

That’s evidently what we get in Calypso Cat, where Tom attacks Jerry with a mould of gelatin dessert.



No, Tom, don’t play with your food! It’s dangerous.



The weird off-modelness of this scene can mean only one thing—it was produced by Gene Deitch.

Steven Konichek’s music certainly doesn’t sound like anything you’d hear in a cartoon. Or anywhere else, really. He starts the scene with an echo-ey vibraphone which gets suddenly cut off and replaced with a solo piano and flute while Tom fingers the Jello, which is interrupted by a squeak toy noise and some other odd sound when Jerry bites Tom. It then jumps into a jazzy number with vibes, drum/cymbal and a horn (maybe a trombone) for a few seconds. Later, we get a violin accompanied by a ratchet. There are continual tempo changes. A melodic score it’s not. And the acoustics sound like something in a subway tunnel.

Freelancer Larz Bourne came up with a story reminiscent of the Hanna-Barbera unit shorts where Tom is pining over Toots and ignoring Jerry. At least Joe Barbera’s stories had likeable characters and some laughs. This has Tom turned into a vibrating turtle.

For Gene Deitch, this Tom isn’t terrific.

8 comments:

  1. Perhaps you'd prefer...Jello, with ALVIN in it!

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    Replies
    1. They should have had a spot where Clyde Crashcup invented Jell-O.

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  2. I was pretty tolerant of old theatrical cartoons when I was a kid. I'd even sit patiently through Happy Harmonies and mid-'30s Merrie Melodies, hoping for something better to come along afterward, but I couldn't stand those Dietch Tom and Jerry's. They were definite channel-changers.

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    1. Dicky Moe! Dicky Moe!

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    2. I like them. Mid-30s MMs are intolerable, personally.

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  3. Looks like Deitch's Czech animator (Vaclav Bedrich, perhaps?) was channeling Jim Tyer, poorly.
    Leonard Maltin wrote that the music for these cartoons "sounded like it was recorded in a lavatory," and I can only agree. The music scores were veering into a kind of Harry Partch vibe.

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  4. The Gene Dietch Tom and Jerrys were post-UPA Eastern European graphic style, which hasn't aged well. At least they, like the later Chuck Jones T&J's, avoid the impeccably rendered welts and bruises of the earlier cartoons (the ones that won Oscars). "Calypso Cat" is redeemed by its music track--also a product of its time.

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