But Where Are the Dinner Guests?

Tom is sleeping and minding his own business for the first 4½ minutes of The Little Orphan (1949 general release). Then, thanks to Jerry and Nibbles mooching a feast put out on a long table by the maid, an orange is swatted out of the baby mouse’s body and flies into Tom.



This brings on a very swift cat vs mice war. For about the next 2½ minutes, Tom is bashed in the face with a champagne cork, stabbed in the butt with a fork launched from a tempting dish of delicious Jell-O (note the dry-brush), smacked with a spoon, swallows a boomeranged decorative bulrush he set on fire and splooshed in the face with a crème pie (we will guess it is banana).




Nibbles then fires a candle which lands on the cat’s tail. The flames go up his body and turn him into a black kid, complete with curls on his head. Someone will have to explain why this is funny. I don’t get it. (At least Scott Bradley didn’t put “Old Black Joe” in the background soundtrack like he would have in a Tex Avery cartoon).



Finally, a champagne bottle is popped open. The force of the bubbles turns it into a rocket that bams into Tom’s head, sending him flying.



There’s a crash. It’s off-camera. We see Jerry and Nibbles reacting to what we can’t see, as the camera shakes. It’s just like in a Pixie and Dixie cartoon of a decade later.



Mr. Jinks, er, Tom, is no longer a stereotype as he waves a flag of surrender.



The final scene shows the three giving Grace like good little Christians.



Someone at MGM smelled Oscar-bait with this film. It was shoved into a theatre to make it eligible for an award for 1948. The Miami Herald reported on December 8th.

HOLLYWOOD, Cal.—Preview reaction to M-G-M’s Tom and Jerry cartoon, “The Little Orphan,” resulted in the birth of a new star—Nibbles, baby mouse with ravenous appetite. Result—Nibbles series with William Hanna and Joseph Barbera co-directing. Fred Quimby producing.

Indeed, the cartoon did win the Academy Award for Best Short Subject (Cartoon). (1948 was the year Warners released What Makes Daffy Duck?, Back Alley Oproar and Bugs Bunny Rides Again. Not one was nominated. Boo).

You can see Quimby accepting the award below. I like how they didn’t waste time at the Oscars back then with endless speeches. Besides, what would Quimby say? “I really had nothing to do with making this cartoon. I’m just a mid-level executive.”

Speedy Cat

It’s been said the increasing pace of the action in Tex Avery cartoons at MGM rubbed off on the studio’s Hanna-Barbera unit.

Here’s an example from Mouse Cleaning (1948).

Tom’s been told by the maid to keep the house clean. In one scene, he realises eggs are going to fall from the air and splatter on the floor. The first drawing is held for ten frames.



Then he realises what’s about to happen. He scrunches down, then the take (with alternating drawings).



Tom scoots out of the scene.



Here’s the speed of the action. These frames are back to back. The first has Tom leaving. He’s already back in the second frame.



The usual team of Irv Spence, Ken Muse, Ed Barge and Ray Patterson receive the animation credit on screen. No background or layout artist are credited, but we could be viewing the work of Bob Gentle and Dick Bickenbach (to be honest, I don’t know which MGM cartoons were laid out by Gene Hazelton).

Just a Quick Drink

There are scenes with very quick movement in The Mouse Comes to Dinner, released by MGM in May 1945.

In this one, Tom gulps down a glass of champagne. Director Bill Hanna times the drawings so the whole bit takes just over half a second (11 frames).

The second and third drawings are the same, but the camera (by Jack Stevens?) trucks in just slightly in the third frame.

Swinging the arm up takes up two frames, as does the next drawing. The remaining drawings take up only one frame apiece.



You’ll notice when Tom first raises the glass, there’s nothing in it. Nobody would catch that watching the cartoon and it saves some painting.

I suspect a few years earlier, Hanna would have had Tom daintily sip the champagne, with Tom in various poses like in a Rudy Ising cartoon. The quicker way is the funnier way.

Ray Patterson, Ken Muse, Irv Spence and Pete Burness are the credited animators. Harvey Eisenberg (uncredited) would have drawn the layouts.

Scary Jerry

The Lonesome Mouse (1943) is an unusual cartoon in some ways. In the early years of the series, Tom and Jerry battle each other, but when the maid comes into the room, she only yells at Tom, while Jerry hides somewhere. In The Lonesome Mouse, the housekeeper actually interacts with the mouse.

Jerry is supposed to be scaring her, but his expressions are more goofy than frightening.



Cut to the “pull up multiple skirt” gag. I don’t have these cartoons memorised so I can’t tell you which other cartoon re-used this. I’m pretty sure one of them did.



The other unusual thing in this short is there is dialogue between Tom and Jerry to drive the plot. It doesn’t seem right to have the characters talking. I thought Cal Howard was doing Tom’s dopey voice—it’s speculated he played the dog in the Screwy Squirrel cartoons and was writing for the Hanna-Barbera unit—but Keith Scott says it’s Harry Lang. Lillian Randolph is the maid, and even gets to sing a few bars of “How About You?”, written by Burton Lane and Vancouver-born Ralph Freed (his father owned a furniture shop) for the 1941 feature Babes on Broadway.

Avoiding the Boot

The greatness of the early Tom and Jerry cartoons relied on a number of things. One of them was the expressiveness of the characters. Audiences knew what they were thinking.

In this scene from Puss Gets the Boot, Tom is creeping away from the housekeeper, who has threatened him with eviction if he breaks anything else in the house. Almost instantly, he smacks into a table with a vase. The table wobbles. The expressions speak for themselves.



The last frame shows his annoyance when he hears Jerry behind him laughing at his plight.

Interestingly, when Tom is finally booted “o-u-w-t” of the house, it happens off-screen. That saves money-consuming animation. Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera did this time, and time, and time again in their TV cartoons (which, at least, involved a camera shake, which is more than what happens in this short).

Today marks the 85th anniversary of the cartoon’s official release date. You can read about the short in this transcription of the January-February 1940 edition of the MGM internal magazine “Short Story” in this post. The characters, according to Metro publicists, were named Jasper and Pee-Wee (with appearances by “the housekeeper,” who never had a name in the whole series).

Judging by the trades, the cartoon showed up somewhere in MGM’s release schedule between the start of October and the beginning of December 1939. The story remains to be found or told about how Hanna and Barbera managed to convince someone in power to let them join forces to direct a cartoon at what had been a studio full of internal politics since opening in 1937.

The Ol' Sucker Gag

In Pup on a Picnic (1953), Tom tries to distract Spike the bulldog with a wiener by pretending it’s a stick to be fetched.



The ruse works. Tom tosses it in a little pond. The pond turns out to be very shallow.



Seeing this, I thought “I wonder if Spike’s head is going to turn into a sucker, like in an Avery or Clampett cartoon.



Yes, I have watched too many cartoons.

Actually, Spike and Tyke are not on a picnic. They’re on a “pic-a-nic,” which is the way characters voiced by Daws Butler pronounce the word. Even if they’re not smarter than the average bear.