Saturday, July 21, 2007

Saturday Morning Cartoons--Tom and Jerry in The Mouse Comes to Dinner

For today's Saturday Morning Cartoons, how about a little Tom and Jerry? This is the 1945 cartoon The Mouse Comes to Dinner. I love the Tom and Jerry cartoons just as much as I love the Warner Brothers cartoons. The interesting thing about Tom and Jerry is the absurd violence within the cartoons. According to the Wikipedia entry on Tom and Jerry:

The shorts are famous for some of the most violent gags ever devised in theatrical animation: Jerry slicing Tom in half, shutting his head in a window or a door, Tom using everything from axes, pistols, dynamite, clubs and poison to try to murder Jerry, Jerry stuffing Tom's tail in a waffle iron, kicking him into a refrigerator, plugging his tail into an electric socket, hitting him with a mace and so on. Despite all the violence, there is no blood or gore in any scenes. A recurring gag involves Tom hitting Jerry when he's preoccupied, with Jerry initially oblivious to the pain--and only feeling the effects moments later.

It is violence, but it is a violence at an absurd level where the characters do not feel any pain, nor is there any blood or gore shown. There is no realism within this type of violence. And while Tom and Jerry can be considered the most violent of the type of animation shorts that were produced between the 1930s to 1950s, this absurdity existed within the animated shorts of all the studios--including even Warner Brothers Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies.

So let's have some fun with Tom and Jerry in The Mouse Comes to Dinner. From YouTube:

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