File this post under ‘isn’t the internet cool’, particularly wikipedia.
I watched a lot of cartoons growing up. The fact that after 20 years I can still remember scene by scene most Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck cartoons makes me wonder what effect these had in shaping my personality (many of these classic cartoons are posted on YouTube and other video sites). Watching some of these again for the first time in many years brought back many memories and prompted me to do a little research on the cartoons that I loved and still love (though for different reasons now, but that’s another post).
Something I learned very young was that there was a clear difference in style from cartoon to cartoon. I began to recognize that if the opening credits for a cartoon included names like Chuck Jones, Fritz Felang, or Tex Avery then the cartoon would be enjoyable. Within a few seconds I could decipher, based on color, music, font, print quality, and other cues whether a cartoon would be worth watching. I didn’t connect these differences to cartoons created over a span of several decades, by different artists, with different cultural influences. To me the how and why cartoons were created was a mystery, and I thought it strange that the cartoons didn’t always look the same.
One cartoon series where these differences in style is very apparent is the Tom and Jerry toons. The best cartoons were produced by, I believe, in the 40′s and/or 50′s by the Hanna Barberra team with Tex Avery thrown into the mix somewhere. These are drawn very similar to disney animation of the same era (in my opinion), but unlike disney are very violent in a cartoon funny way. The level of comic violence is truly amazing, but very very funny. The comic timing, music, and voices (primarily screams) are more funny to me now than they were as a kid. As an aside, I think it’s obvious that Tom and Jerry are the primary influences for the Itchy and Scratchy cartoons on the Simpsons.
But the Tom and Jerry characters had multiple incarnations over the years. There was an era produced by Chuck Jones, the guy responsible for many of the best Bugs Bunny cartoons. His T&J had a distinctive style that looked a lot more like Bugs Bunny than T&J. His mouse character also had these bushy eyebrows, and Tom looked at lot less mischevious. Overall the cartoons were less violent, and hence less funny.
In the 70′s there was a Tom and Jerry show that was awful. All the characters that were usually mortal enemies were suddenly friends going on adventures together. Jerry had this huge bow tie that looked like something the Don Knotts character on Three’s Company would wear. The annoying theme song from that show still pops into my head every now and then. Severely 70′s and severely unfunny.
If you watched these cartoons after school, like I often did, then usually the shows would be presented in half-hour blocks based around a set of popular characters, so usually something like the bugs bunny half hour, or woody woodpecker half hour, etc… Three cartoons would be shown in a half hour, interspersed with ads for cereal and toys. A half hour block of Tom and Jerry, for example, would show toons from all eras of the characters. If you were lucky they would show a few older T&J’s and then throw in a 70′s T&J at the end. My point is that if you watched long enough you would end up seeing many examples of the entire catalogue of Tom and Jerry.
Which brings me to the actual reason for writing this post…
There is one production era of Tom and Jerry that always stuck in my mind. They were rare to see, but were so distinctive that it is hard to forget them. The animation on these T&J’s was choppy and blurry, the music was spacey and reverbed, and the comic timing was totally off (compared to the early T&J’s). They were simply bizarre and almost creepy. They seemed totally foreign to any other T&J’s as well as any other cartoons I had ever seen. As a kid I felt like I was watching something truly alien, and they always left me feeling strange and perhaps a little upset. They were not awful though, not like the 70′s Tom and Jerry show, but they also were not funny. They were simply a spectacle because they didn’t make any sense.
It was the memory of these particular Tom and Jerry toons that prompted me to do a little research on the ‘ol internet. These days Wikipedia is the best resource for finding out info on trivial matters like this. I quickly found an entire, lengthy page devoted to T&J and also found the story behind these bizarre cartoons of my youth.
In a nutshell the story is that MGM hired an award winning american animator living in communist Prague to resurrect the Tom and Jerry characters who they had discontinued sometime previously. This animator, Gene Deitch, was given a shoestring budget to produce 12 cartoons in a year (6 a year being the norm), all while living in communist Prague and working with Czech animators. So when I said that I felt like I was watching something foreign or alien when viewing these particular toons, I wasn’t far off. How could one american train a team of communist eastern european animators to quickly understand the comic language of western USA?
A little more research and I found that Gene Deitch has a web site where he recounts the entire story behind the production of his 12 Czech produced Tom and Jerry toons. Among the more interesting details:
- He knew the project was more or less doomed from the beginning, but the job allowed him to stay in Prague long enough to be able to marry his Czech born wife
- Because the production took place in communist Prague, the production team was never credited because MGM wouldn’t want to put ‘Made in Communist Prague’ on the credites. All of the animators were given psuedonyms that didn’t sound eastern european
- Mr. Deitch gets some fan mail for his work, but also has received severe hate mail from some hardcore T&J fans!
Knowing the backstory on these toons gives me a greater appreciation of the toons themselves. They are no longer a mystery, rather I find them emphathetic to some degree knowing the great personal and cultural hurdles that existed in producing them. I think the real interest to me in this story is the realization and reminder that behind everything we consume, be it television, web sites, software, food, autos, toys, etc… there are real people wth real stories shaping and influencing how we receive that input into our lives. In some cases, such as knowing Gene Deitch’s story, knowing that story gives his work much more depth and ultimately makes it more enjoyable.
Which is not to say that his Tom and Jerry toons are funny, because they are not. But interesting to be sure.
As an addendum to this post I found this Popeye cartoon that Mr. Deitch did on YouTube. I couldn’t find any of his Tom and Jerry work, but this cartoon is in a very similar style to his Tom and Jerry toons:
Honey you are such a geek. I love you!!