by Alex Rudolph, Staff Writer

When Ernest Hemingway argued, perhaps apocryphally, that he could write a full story in six words, ultimately coming up with "For sale: baby shoes, never worn," he revealed himself to be a baby-brained pig-person. Hemingway boasted about his six words and then, in his lifetime, William Hanna and Joseph Barbera halved the record with a cartoon: "cat chases mouse."

Tom is the cat and Jerry is the mouse and MGM produced 161 shorts where Tom chases Jerry and oh, wouldn't you know it, Jerry ruthlessly fucks Tom up in response. Sometimes there's a duck, sometimes a dog helps break Tom's bones, sometimes there's an ugly racial stereotype named Mammy Two Shoes, but it's always the same story. And we can say "all cartoons are repetitious," but Tom and Jerry's closest comparisons, Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner, "only" got 49 shorts in that same time period. Unlike Warner Bros. (who had in part created Wile E. and the Road Runner to parody Tom and Jerry), Disney, and later Hanna-Barbera, MGM didn't have a deep character well. They didn't even have a Terrytoon-sized well.

When Hanna and Barbera quit MGM, realizing they could run their own sweatshop instead of working in Louis Mayer's, the company didn't have anything but Tom and Jerry to fall back on. They cranked those suckers out, running the same scenarios with the same two or three characters ad infinitum. The basic Tom and Jerry tropes–Tom getting smashed into an accordion, Tom getting his face blown off by explosives–are so recognizable because they were brought back so often. Everything's a trope when your creative process begins and ends at shuffling old storyboards. I used to write a column on Hanna-Barbera films, a mini-genre based on recycling story beats and jokes from already stridently unvarying TV shows, but those have nothing on MGM's bullshit.

This week, HBO Max releases Tom & Jerry, a live-action movie where famous-but-not-too-famous actors like Chloë Moretz, Michael Peña and sentient-mashed-potato-lump Colin Jost interact with the 3D-animated title characters in a fancy hotel. The lack of a subtitle or number implies Tom & Jerry is the pair's first movie. This is not the case.

I need you to know there have already been 14 Tom and Jerry movies.

Mergers and acquisitions shuffled Tom and Jerry from MGM to Turner, whose in-house and contracted animation divisions have put the characters into a dozen-plus scenarios, hoping something sticks. I became aware of these straight-to-DVD features after walking by stacks of them in grocery stores. The Washington, D.C. Social Safeway would always have a kiosk with recent Steven Seagal movies, Happy Madison double packs and at least a couple Thomas and Jerome adventures. Their existence confused me.

With Tom and Jerry coming out, with my general interest in obscure and damned cartoons and with the suggestion of my editor, I'm going to look at three of the Tom and Jerry movies HBO Max would rather not talk about. I honestly don't know why "cat chases mouse" is the premise multiple giant studios have decided to exploit. My assumption going in had been that Tom and Jerry had the kind of mysterious foreign popularity Top Cat and Woody Woodpecker developed, but that doesn't seem to be the case. We aren't here because the Chinese market demanded it, so there has to be something else. After three movies, I will either have found out what that is or be more lost than ever, mentally squished into a bowling pin and flattened by a pissy asshole bulldog of the soul.

1. Tom and Jerry: The Movie (dir. Phil Roman, 1992)
Before revisiting the original Tom and Jerry feature-length film, I remembered two things: that I had rented it as a kid, only to get home and find a different tape in the clamshell case, and that the title characters talk and say they've always been able to. I was too young to recognize the great Richard Kind as Tom (but what a phenomenal toddler I would have been if I had) or Dana Hill, voice of Goof Troop's Max, as Jerry. And Henry Mancini, as legendary a composer as we're ever going to get, wrote Tom and Jerry: The Movie's score and original songs. Mancini had been brought on well into production, when producers saw how hot Disney's renaissance musicals were and decided to shift gears and try to shove in a few singalongs. If you've done any reading about box office failures, you'll recognize this as the kind of decision a studio makes six months before releasing a bomb, a tactic roughly similar to "animate a sequence where the kangaroo raps and then put that in the trailers so kids think he spends the whole movie doing that."

Tom and Jerry gets around its source material's limitations by aping The Brave Little Toaster. Tom's family is packing up a moving van when he gets distracted by Jerry, his family leaves, and the title characters put aside their differences to track the van down and find Tom's owners. This is also, essentially, the plot of Toy Story, though many of the era's cartoons followed similar formulas–the dinosaurs from The Land Before Time had to band together to find a mythical safe haven, Fievel had to find his parents in New York.

Separating a hero from the people who love and protect them is an easy way to sell kids on a movie's stakes. Home Alone works for a slightly older audience who would treasure independence, but so many films for toddlers are about the dangers of that freedom. I don't think Tom and Jerry: The Movie read as horror to the infants of 1992, but it did provide a shortcut to minor panic. It also, more practically, leads to a road trip set-up, meaning you can string together a series of short-style vignettes instead of trying to put together a single 80-minute-long story.

The "enemies team up?!" idea was also popular in kids media, particularly cartoon specials. So many Nelvana and DIC heroes inevitably had to join forces with their villains for a little while, building up a newfound mutual respect before deciding to kill each other again, so that you could watch episodes of their shows in any random order. In this movie, Tom and Jerry even befriend a human orphan, like The Rescuers before them.

The movie has the normal TV-to-movies bump in animation quality–there's more shading and different camera angles–but the original Tom and Jerry theatrical shorts hadn't taken advantage of the limited animation techniques their subsequent TV incarnations would use. Tom and Jerry: The Movie looks better than everything the studio had made in the past four decades, but still looked a lot worse than they had originally.

I kind of love how lazy Tom and Jerry is. When they first talk, it turns out they'd never done it before because each one thought the other couldn't understand. Tom could always speak English, he just thought Jerry was the only animal who couldn't also do that. There's some samurai movie-style metaphor here about hating your enemy so much you dehumanize him, and thus limit yourself, but the artless plebes in charge of Tom and Jerry never explore it. The writers don't explore much about Tom and Jerry. Every character they introduce, from Robin the orphan to a French flea to the Rip Taylor-voiced owner of a pirate theme park, has dramatically more personality than they do. MGM's better cartoon mascot, Droopy, shows up for no other reason than to fill five minutes.

Tom and Jerry eventually move in with the orphan, who quickly usurps them as the hero of their movie. Tom never finds his family and doesn't seem especially bothered that they're gone. He's happy enough to settle down with Robin and her dad, who had been presumed dead in an avalanche. The film was written by Dennis Marks, who had also put time in on Tom and Jerry Kids, and that history is the sole indication the movie hadn't originally been based on a different property. Five minutes into Tom and Jerry: The Movie, you could be watching any cartoon. This ends up being a decent enough way to stretch the Tom and Jerry concept into a feature–you just have to throw out the Tom and Jerry concept. The marquee characters, the reason anybody's buying a ticket to see your movie in the first place, are purposefully upstaged by everything they cross paths with.

2. Tom and Jerry: The Magic Ring (dir. James Tim Walker, 2002)

Ten years after Tom and Jerry: The Movie, this was supposed to be the reboot that had kids demanding more. Turner had some success with straight-to-VHS/DVD Scooby-Doo films, and somebody decided it was once again time to thaw out Tom and Jerry.

Magic Ring is closer to the core formula than the 1992 movie had been–the main characters don't talk, Tom chases Jerry the whole time, most of the jokes see Tom get Takashi Miike-d into weird shapes. There's a sequence around the four-minute mark where Tom catches Jerry and Jerry starts laughing and continues for way too long, at which point Tom starts laughing in a voice that is unnervingly human. It's clearly the voice actor's real laugh, and something about hearing this otherwise silent cat "haw haw haw" like a grown man is upsetting. I have absolutely no allegiance to these characters and yet felt like the kid from Nathan For You's doggy heaven bit, crying "But he doesn't talk like that" in confusion. I should say that the screaming laugh may be native to the Hindi dub, which I first realized I was watching after ten minutes. From here, I rented Magic Ring in English and skipped ahead to where the people started talking. You could argue, for the sake of fairness, that I owe it to Magic Ring to re-watch the laughing scene in English, but I hope you'll also allow that if I was driving down a lonely road and passed a hitchhiking Ed Kemper, I wouldn't be expected to take a u-turn and make sure it was actually him. I would keep driving and be happy I had avoided being flayed and eaten.

After we make it through The Laughing, we meet Tom's owner, a wizard in need of one last ingredient that'll imbue a ring with power. Tom is tasked with guarding the ring, Jerry tries to take it. The setting, like Looney Tunes' Gossamer and mad scientist shorts before it, allows for a bunch of light twists on old tropes, i.e. Tom tries to hit Jerry with a broom, but it's a flying witch's broom and in evil wizard's castle, broom sweep you.

Magic Ring got enough of a marketing push that I remembered seeing it advertised on TV. It was the only one of the (to date) 12 straight-to-VHS/DVD Tom and Jerry movies to get a video game tie-in. There was some hope here. Somebody with power thought this would work. And Magic Ring cannot be considered a financial failure–11 sequels is a Troma-level mudslide of content that could only have been started if Warner Bros. liked the first film's returns. That lone video game is interesting, though. I infer from it, maybe incorrectly, that Magic Ring was supposed to start a new multimedia franchise out of an old property and instead led a bunch of new movies. It's possible Droopy's cameo here was intended to renew interest in that character and launch a spin-off (children wouldn't be in awe of another cute, depressed loser until Sanrio made Gudetama a decade-plus later).

Magic Ring gets credit for stretching "cat chases mouse" from four minutes to 60. Warner Bros. proved it could be done with a cartoon focused on two silent leads trying to mutilate each other. I'm sure this was especially impressive in the era of David Blaine TV specials about hanging upside down, totally motionless, silent and half-asleep, for a couple days. The length of time you spend watching nothing can sometimes make up for the fact that you're watching nothing.

3. Tom and Jerry and the Wizard of Oz (dir. Spike BrandtTony Cervone, 2011)

It's funny, looking at the trajectories of Tom and Jerry vs the Scooby-Doo! gang. Both series have so-basic-as-to-not-exist premises and were created before home media was anywhere near financially realistic for most consumers, and so they could sort of get away being the same thing every time around. I say "sort of" because kids aren't dumb. Even if you were only seeing three Tom and Jerry shorts in theaters every year, you knew five seconds into number two that the formula was familiar. Your 1940s education got you that far.

And at least when the Three Stooges put together their umpteenth take on Pygmalion, that premise was in a rotation and the next short was more likely to be about joining the army or fixing a bathtub than it was another version of "I can't believe it, I simply do not believe you can make gentlemen of these oafish brutes!" Tom and Jerry and Scooby-Doo! literally used the same old story with every new entry.

After Hanna-Barbera's collapse, Warner Bros. went in a few directions with the Scooby gang, ultimately creating the canon-heavy, reportedly very good self-reflexive cartoon Mystery Incorporated. Scooby-Doo's newer writers took decades of Groundhog Day story loops and tropes and found a way to bend those into something uniquely Scooby-Doo. Around the same time, Tom and Jerry's Warner Bros. caretakers decided to just put the characters into other stories, testing the waters with a riff on The Nutcracker in 2007 and fully diving in with this Wizard of Oz adaptation.

Putting cartoon characters into old stories doesn't sound new–every franchise will at one point have its characters act out A Christmas Carol, for example, either turning a mean boss side-character into Scrooge or deciding somebody like Fred Flintstone or George Jetson is going to stay the protagonist but become an old miser for the next 30 minutes. The twist here with Tom and Jerry is that there is no twist. Jerry doesn't stand in for Dorothy Gale and Tom isn't the Wicked Witch of the West because this is "and the Wizard of Oz," not "meet the Wizard of Oz." This is a straight cartoon version of The Wizard of Oz and Tom and Jerry run around doing bullshit in the background. Dorothy rarely acknowledges them. Picture watching The Bridge on the River Kwai but SpongeBob SquarePants is also stuck in the POW camp, and you have some idea what it's like to watch this movie.

Tom and Jerry work on the Gale family farm (Jerry is an accountant?) and are tasked with protecting Dorothy. Toto is still here, but he doesn't interact with the title characters and is clearly more beloved. The film's MO is established by the first musical number: Dorothy sings "Somewhere Over The Rainbow" while Jerry stops Tom from eating chicks by forcing him to eat some tools. The Wizard of Oz proceeds as expected, and then every once in a while Jerry will smash Tom with a mallet. The story highlights are mostly the same as they were in 1939, but now, for example, Jerry gives Dorothy the water that kills the Wicked Witch of the West. And Droopy, having been drafted into the Tom and Jerry universe in 1992, makes another cameo.

As a kid, my favorite parts of The Wizard of Oz were the supporting cast introductions. I loved meeting the Scarecrow, the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion, getting their songs and watching them befriend Dorothy. For whatever reason, those scenes are among the few from the 1939 movie that don't make it to Tom and Jerry and the Wizard of Oz. Tom and Jerry spend half an hour catching up to Dorothy and when they finally do, she's long since gathered her posse. When you have three great songs already written, why wouldn't you drop them into your movie? Why not pad the 57-minute runtime?

I'm sure some John Kricfalusi-type would vomit on me if I said this to them, but I liked the animation here. By the time I stopped watching cartoons as a child, they were largely animated in programs like Flash. Everything was too stiff, the character designs flat and ugly. I can't imagine T and J and the W of O had much of a budget, but it never looks cheap. Movement is limited, but the faces are emotive and the camera isn't just locked in that Peanuts/Garfield middle-ground.

Kids responded, apparently. The Tom and Jerry Braintrust made a direct sequel, Back to Oz, a few years later and then threw the characters into Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. You can watch them beg for attention, like a preschooler acting out, as the Oompa Loompas dance around.

I don't know who these movies are for. Watching them did not provide any insights. I don't know why a new Tom and Jerry movie is coming out this week. I don't know if the 14 movies Warner Bros. pumped out since 1992 have kept the property recognizable to kids. I don't know why now seemed like a good time to make the intended jump back from DVD to theaters. I don't know why I watched these movies. I am older and stupider than I was when I started this project and don't deserve to watch adult films anymore.

I'll be back with a review of the 2021's Tom and Jerry later this week.