Tom and Jerry
Tom and Jerry is an American animated media franchise and series of comedy short films created in 1940 by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera. Best known for its 161 theatrical short films produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the series centers on the rivalry between a cat named Tom and a mouse named Jerry. Many shorts also feature several recurring characters.
Created in 1940 as the MGM cartoon studio struggled to compete with Walt Disney Productions and Leon Schlesinger Productions, Tom and Jerrys initial short-film titled Puss Gets the Boot proved successful in theaters and garnered an Academy Award nomination for Best Short Subject. Hanna and Barbera later directed a total of 114 Tom and Jerry shorts for its initial MGM run 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 thirteen Tom and Jerry shorts for Rembrandt Films in Czechoslovakia, from 1961 to 1962. Tom and Jerry became the highest-grossing animated short-film series of that time, overtaking Looney Tunes. Chuck Jones produced another 34 shorts with Sib Tower 12 Productions between 1963 and 1967. Five more shorts have been produced since 2001, making a total of 166 shorts.
A number of spin-offs have been made, including the television series The Tom and Jerry Show, The Tom and Jerry Comedy Show, Tom & Jerry Kids, Tom and Jerry Tales, and The Tom and Jerry Show. In 1992, the first feature-length film based on the series, Tom and Jerry: The Movie, was released. Thirteen [|direct-to-video films] have been produced since 2002. In 2019, a musical adaptation of the series, titled Tom and Jerry: Purr-Chance to Dream, debuted in Japan, in advance of Tom and Jerrys 80th anniversary. In 2021, the live-action/animated hybrid film Tom and Jerry was released, while a Chinese-American computer-animated film, Tom and Jerry: Forbidden Compass, premiered in June 2025.
Plot
The series features comic fights between an iconic set of adversaries, a house cat and a house mouse. The plots of many shorts are often set in the backdrop of a house, centering on Tom trying to capture Jerry, and the mayhem and destruction that follows. Tom rarely succeeds in catching Jerry, mainly because of Jerry's cleverness, cunning abilities, and luck. However, on several occasions, they have displayed genuine friendship and concern for each other's well-being. At other times, the pair set aside their rivalry in order to pursue a common goal, such as when a baby escapes the watch of a negligent babysitter, causing Tom and Jerry to pursue the baby and keep it away from danger, in the shorts Busy Buddies and Tot Watchers respectively. Despite their endless attacks on one another, they have saved each other's lives every time they were truly in danger, with the exception of The Two Mouseketeers and Blue Cat Blues.The cartoons are known for their violent gags. While Tom and Jerry has often been criticized as excessively violent, there is no blood or gore in any scene. Tom uses axes, hammers, firearms, firecrackers, explosives, traps and poison to kill Jerry, and Jerry's methods of retaliation are far more violent, with frequent success, including slicing Tom in half, decapitating him, shutting his head or fingers in a window or a door, stuffing Tom's tail in a waffle iron or a mangle, kicking him into a refrigerator, getting him electrocuted, pounding him with a mace, club or mallet, letting a tree or electric pole drive him into the ground, sticking matches into his feet and lighting them, etc.
Music plays a very important part in the shorts, emphasizing the action, bringing in humor, filling in for traditional sound effects, and lending emotion to the scenes. Musical director Scott Bradley created complex scores that combined elements of jazz, classical, and pop music. Bradley often used contemporary pop songs and songs from other films, including MGM films like The Wizard of Oz and Meet Me in St. Louis.
The two lead characters speak English on rare occasions. Most of the vocal effects used for Tom and Jerry are their high-pitched laughs and gasping screams. Even though Tom and Jerry almost never speak, the shorts often show other characters speaking. For example, the character Mammy Two Shoes has lines in nearly every cartoon in which she appears.
Characters
Tom and Jerry
, named "Jasper" in his debut appearance, is a gray and white domestic shorthair cat. "Tom" is a generic name for a male cat. He is usually but not always, portrayed as living a comfortable, or even pampered life, while Jerry, whose name is not explicitly mentioned in his debut appearance, is a small, brown house mouse who always lives in close proximity to Tom. Despite being very energetic, determined and much larger, Tom is no match for Jerry's wits. Jerry possesses surprising strength for his size, approximately the equivalent of Tom's, lifting items such as anvils with relative ease and withstanding considerable impacts.Although cats typically chase mice to eat them, it is quite rare for Tom to actually try to eat Jerry. He tries to hurt or compete with him just to taunt Jerry, even as revenge, or to obtain a reward from a human, including his owner/master, for catching Jerry, or for generally doing his job well as a house cat. By the final "fade-out" of each cartoon, Jerry usually gets the best of Tom.
Other results may be reached. On rare occasions, Tom triumphs, usually when Jerry becomes the aggressor or he pushes Tom a little too far. In The Million Dollar Cat, Jerry learns that Tom will lose his newly acquired wealth if he harms any animal, especially mice. He then torments Tom a little too much until he retaliates. In Timid Tabby, Tom's look-alike cousin pushes Jerry over the edge. Occasionally and usually ironically, they both lose, usually because Jerry's last trap or attack on Tom backfires on him or he overlooks something. In Chuck Jones' Filet Meow, Jerry orders a shark from the pet store to scare Tom away from eating a goldfish. Afterward, the shark scares Jerry away as well. They occasionally end up being friends, although there is often a last-minute event that ruins the truce. One cartoon that has a friendly ending is Snowbody Loves Me.
Both characters display sadistic tendencies, in that they are equally likely to take pleasure in tormenting each other, although it is often in response to a triggering event. However, when one character appears to truly be in mortal danger from an unplanned situation or due to actions by a third party, the other will develop a conscience and save him. Occasionally, they bond over a mutual sentiment towards an unpleasant experience and their attacking each other is more play than serious attacks. Multiple shorts show the two getting along with minimal difficulty, and they are more than capable of working together when the situation calls for it, usually against a third party who manages to torture and humiliate them both.
Sometimes this partnership is forgotten quickly when an unexpected event happens, or when one character feels that the other is no longer necessary. This is the case in Posse Cat, when they agree that Jerry will allow himself to be caught if Tom agrees to share his reward dinner, but Tom then reneges. Other times, Tom keeps his promise to Jerry and the partnerships are not quickly dissolved after the problem is solved.
Tom changes his love interest many times. The first love interest is Toots who appears in Puss n' Toots, and calls him "Tommy" in The Mouse Comes to Dinner. He is interested in a cat called Toots in The Zoot Cat although she has a different appearance to the original Toots. The most frequent love interest of Tom's is Toodles Galore, who never has any dialogue in the cartoons.
Despite five shorts ending with a depiction of Tom's apparent death, his demise is never permanent. He even reads about his own death in a flashback in Jerry's Diary. He appears to die in explosions in Mouse Trouble, after which he is seen in heaven, Yankee Doodle Mouse and in Safety Second, while in The Two Mouseketeers he is guillotined offscreen. The short Blue Cat Blues ends with both Tom and Jerry sitting on the railroad tracks with the intent of suicide while the whistle of an oncoming train is heard foreshadowing their imminent death.
''Tom and Jerry'' speaking
Although many supporting and minor characters speak, Tom and Jerry rarely do so themselves. One exception is The Lonesome Mouse where they speak several times briefly, primarily Jerry, to contrive to get Tom back into the house. Tom more often sings while wooing female cats. For example, Tom sings Louis Jordan's "Is You Is or Is You Ain't My Baby" in the 1946 short Solid Serenade. In that short and Zoot Cat, Tom woos female cats using a deep, heavily French-accented voice in imitation of then-popular leading man, actor Charles Boyer.At the end of The Million Dollar Cat, after beginning to antagonize Jerry he says, "Gee, I'm throwin' away a million dollars... BUT I'M HAPPY!". In Tom and Jerry: The Magic Ring, Jerry says, "No, no, no, no, no." when choosing the shop to remove his ring. In The Mouse Comes to Dinner, Tom speaks to his girlfriend Toots while inadvertently sitting on a stove: "Say, what's cookin'?", to which Toots replies "You are, stupid."
Another instance of speech comes in Solid Serenade and The Framed Cat, where Tom directs Spike through a few dog tricks in a dog-trainer manner. In Puss Gets the Boot, Jerry begs and prays for his life when Tom catches him by the tail. Jerry has whispered in Tom's ear on several occasions. In Love Me, Love My Mouse, Jerry calls Toots "Mama".
Co-director William Hanna provided most of the vocal effects for the pair, including Tom's leather-lunged scream, created by recording Hanna's scream and eliminating the beginning and ending of the recording, leaving only the strongest part of the scream on the soundtrack, and Jerry's nervous gulp.
The only other reasonably common vocalization is made by Tom when some external reference claims a certain scenario or eventuality to be impossible, which inevitably thwarts Tom's plans – at which point, a bedraggled and battered Tom appears and says in a haunting, echoing voice "Don't you believe it!", a reference to the then-popular 1940s radio show Don't You Believe It!. In Mouse Trouble, Tom says "Don't you believe it!" after being beaten up by Jerry, which also happens in The Missing Mouse. In the 1946 short Trap Happy, Tom hires a cat disguised as a mouse exterminator who, after several failed attempts to dispatch Jerry and suffering a lot of accidents in the process, changes profession to Cat exterminator by crossing out the "Mouse" on his title and writing "CAT", resulting in Tom spelling out the word out loud before reluctantly pointing at himself.
One short, 1956's Blue Cat Blues, is narrated by Jerry in voiceover, voiced by Paul Frees, as they try to win back their ladyfriends. Jerry was voiced by Sara Berner during his appearance in the 1945 MGM musical Anchors Aweigh. Tom and Jerry: The Movie is the first, and so far only installment of the series where the famous cat-and-mouse duo regularly speaks or is able to be understood by humans. In that film, Tom was voiced by Richard Kind, and Jerry was voiced by Dana Hill.