How To Slam a Newspaper By Jerry Mouse of Prague

No, this post won’t bash the Gene Deitch Tom and Jerry cartoons made in Czechoslovakia. They do have some redeeming factors. One is they never included an annoying duck that became Yakky Doodle. Another is they never featured a way-too-cute little French mouse.

Instead, we’ll simply post the frames from a scene in Mouse Into Space (released March 1962). Todd Dockstader’s story has Jerry reading a newspaper ad encouraging mice to enlist in the space programme, promising “There are no cats in outer space!” Here's an in-between as Jerry turns to look at Tom.



Fed up with Tom trying to kill him, first with a pistol, and then a bomb, Jerry has had enough, and storms off out of the scene after slamming down a newspaper. The action takes place pretty quickly, though it still seems a little jerky on screen. These are the drawings, one for each frame (exceptions noted below).



The drawing below is held for four frames.



The next two drawings are held for two frames.



33 frames in all, less than a second and a half. Lots of jagged impact animation, isn't there?

Vaclav Bedrich is given an "animation director" credit, though Deitch is credited as the director. Who did what is your guess. Gene isn't around any more to ask.

Got a Magnifying Glass?

One of the reasons Tom and Jerry won all those Oscars under Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera was because the characters were great actors. They were wonderfully expressive.

The Cat Concerto (released in 1947) is a fine example. Ken Muse turned out some fine footage of Tom as the high-brown pianist, with Irv Spence providing looney expressions when Jerry exacts revenge for having his nap inside the piano disturbed.

That brings us to Carmen Get It!.

In a way, comparing a cartoon made in the early ‘60s to one from the later ‘40s isn’t quite fair. At Warner Bros., what was being made in 1962 was pretty lacklustre compared to the cartoons from the period of Rabbit Hood or Back Alley Oproar. The later Tom and Jerrys produced by Hanna and Barbera weren’t as attractive as the ones made when they were winning Oscars (wide screens, flattened designs and a changeover of animators in the mid-‘50s didn’t help).

Still, cartoons should be entertaining. And I’m afraid the Tom and Jerrys under the eye of Gene Deitch were not.

One of a number of things that bothers me about them is what I mentioned off the top is the expressions. Deitch seems to have loved a number of things, and one of them was long shots. It’s smart to vary shots in a cartoon but the problem with Carmen Get It! and a number of other Deitch shorts is the characters spend too much time in wide shot, which eliminates any chance to give the characters expressions and let them act, as Hanna and Barbera used to do.

These are just some examples.



In the scene below, Jerry has a rose between his teeth. It’s a good idea, but Jerry is so tiny you can’t make out the rose. So what’s the point of it?



Okay, but the closer shots, you’re saying. The M-G-M animators—Ed Barge, Ray Patterson, Spence, Muse, Mike Lah—were able to make the characters act. You knew what they were thinking. What they were thinking motivated the next part of the story. Deitch’s animators simply went for goofy expressions.



And what about Tom below? I’m sorry, it’s a pretty wretched drawing. It’s more or less held for five frames. Could you picture Muse drawing something like this?



There are some good things going on with the story in this cartoon. The last scene was no surprise, but I like it anyway. But Tom and Jerry just didn’t mix well with Gene Deitch.

Deitch moved on to create a dozen cartoons starring Nudnik, a stylish little series. You won’t find long shots like those above. Nudnik’s actions and motivation are clear for the audience to see. Will Jones of the Minneapolis Star Tribune praised the Paramount-released cartoons in a column on Oct. 10, 1966, where he recommended arriving early or staying late to watch From Nudnik With Love at a local theatre. Among his “few nice words about the Nudnik cartoons,” Jones wrote:

Visually, the cartoonists who make the films indulge in the same sort of elaborate sadism that is a characteristic of the Roadrunner and the cat-chasing-mouse cartoons, but with a most important difference in point of view. It is not just one cartoon creature trying to do in another, or outwit another. It is Nudnik, simply trying to bring something pleasant into the world, who triggers the action. And it is the whole that is the sadist, rejecting Nudnik and anything he has to offer. . . .
A fellow named Gene Deitch gets credit as writer and director for the cartoons.

Deitch was praised for later films, winning the San Sebastian International Film Festival’s “Golden Seashell” in 1969 for Obri in the best short film category. (It was banned in Czechoslovakia, where it was made).

As for the aforementioned The Cat Concerto, we’ll have some words tomorrow.

It's Greek, All Right

The term “It’s Greek to me,” I gather, means “I can’t understand it.”

How appropriate it was that one of Gene Deitch’s Tom and Jerry cartoons was It’s Greek to Me-Ow. Does anyone understand what is going on in these Deitch cartoons?

In one scene, I was hoping for perspective animation like in the 1930s when a character goes running or flying “past the camera.” It starts out that way, but then Deitch cuts to a medium shot. And one that doesn’t even try to match the previous frame.



He just loves those jagged impact drawings (even the Hanna-Barbera Tom and Jerrys had them). They’re all over the place in this short.



Deitch also like doing what James-Call-Me-Shamus Culhane did better 15-plus years earlier for Walter Lantz. He has impact footage where there are camera shakes, and goes back and forth from frame-to-frame between extreme close-ups and a medium shot. Culhane’s versions seem funnier to me; I don’t know why; the timing's pretty much the same.



Fans of Tod Dockstader’s “boing” sound effect (which I first heard in the Deitch Popeyes as a kid) will enjoy this cartoon. I don’t know anyone else who would. Deitch had a good perspective on humour but I can’t picture him laughing at this. If you want to keep yourself amused with this cartoon, consider the words “It’s Greek to Me-Ow” fit the opening bars of Scott Bradley’s Tom and Jerry theme. Think up your own funny lyrics for the rest of it, instead of watching this cartoon.

Something I find amusing may have been unintentional, but I’d like to think it was deliberate. A theatre manager in San Francisco booked it with a Melina Mercouri movie. “Hey, we got this Greek chick in this movie about Greece. Let’s have a Greek cartoon, too.”

Buddies Thicker Than Water

When Gene Deitch was handed the task of creating new Tom and Jerry cartoons for MGM, he and his writers put the cat and mouse in different locales. For a time they were paired with a grumpy guy who reminded speculating cartoon fans of Clint Clobber from Deitch’s Terrytoons (he wasn’t Clobber, as Deitch had to inform them).

However, in Buddies Thicker Than Water (released in 1962), Tom’s owned by a young lady in an urban penthouse apartment.

Having come from UPA where design was practically everything, Deitch and his artists came up with exaggerations on ultra-current home interiors.



This is a lovely satire on 1962 home interiors. Who had a pole lamp like that? We did. Or that plant? We did. Or that clock or divider or plastic chair? We didn’t, but I knew people who did. (The chair was the same colour, too).



The uncredited background artist came up with a different background to use as a close-up. Actually, this is part of a long background that was panned left-to-right at one point in the cartoon.



A view from the other direction.



This kitchen is pretty basic and dull. But at least Deitch (or whomever handled this kind of thing) has it laid out at an angle.



Dig the modern art portrait of Tom.



More modern art. My guess is a blue filter was placed over the camera.



The cartoon starts with some exteriors; I presume the setting is supposed to be Manhattan. The snow is on a couple of cycles. The penthouse has a jazzy human statue next to the tree and a crazy TV antenna on top.

Animation? Soundtrack? Well, let’s forget those for now and say the backgrounds in this short may be the most attractive thing about it.