Tom & Jerry is eternal; once you start watching this – usually as a kid – it seeps into your blood and your DNA. I don’t care how old I get but I will always enjoy watching Tom & Jerry. I am 46 now and I enjoy those cartoons. Heck my dad is 83, mom is 73 and my sister is 52 and they all enjoy it.
And to think this started in 1940 as series of comedy short films created by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera. Best known for its 161 theatrical short films by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. In its original run, Hanna and Barbera produced 114 Tom and Jerry shorts for MGM from 1940 to 1958. During this time, they won seven Academy Awards for Best Animated Short Film, tying for first place with Walt Disney’s Silly Symphonies with the most awards in the category. After the MGM cartoon studio closed in 1957, MGM revived the series with Gene Deitch directing an additional 13 Tom and Jerry shorts for Rembrandt Films from 1961 to 1962. Tom and Jerry then became the highest-grossing animated short film series of that time, overtaking Looney Tunes. Chuck Jones then produced another 34 shorts with Sib Tower 12 Productions between 1963 and 1967. Three more shorts were produced, The Mansion Cat in 2001, The Karate Guard in 2005, and A Fundraising Adventure in 2014, making a total of 164 shorts.
A number of spin-offs have been made, including the tv series The Tom and Jerry Show (1975), The Tom and Jerry Comedy Show (1980–1982), Tom & Jerry Kids (1990–1993), Tom and Jerry Tales (2006–2008), and The Tom and Jerry Show (2014–2021). The first feature-length film based on the series, Tom and Jerry: The Movie, was released in 1992, and 13 direct-to-video films have been produced since 2002, with a live-action/animated hybrid film released in 2021 just titled Tom & Jerry. A musical adaptation of the series, titled Tom and Jerry: Purr-Chance to Dream, debuted in Japan in 2019 in advance of Tom and Jerry‘s 80th anniversary.
I love all of the characters. At one time, I think this was during the early 2000s (I think so) I even had a dream that was like a movie of mixed live action & animation I was going to rescue my on again, off again girlfriend (I forget who the lead female was but she looked like a young Christina Aguilera) from the clutches of an evil alien syndicate and since I didn’t have any proof I had to get a spaceship on my own and my pets were my only crew – Tom & Jerry and the other characters were my pets! That included Nibbles and the Yellow birdie, the female cat, Spike & Tyke, Droopy, his wife & baby! The whole gang! Weird. And we went to the alien planet and she had already escaped so we picked her up and now had to escape the chasing aliens.