All ABout Tom & Jerry Cartoon
Tom and Jerry is an American animated series of theatrical shorts, television shows and specials, feature film,
home films created by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer that centered on a never-ending
rivalry between a cat (Tom) and a mouse (Jerry) whose chases and battles often involved comic violence.
Hanna and Barbera ultimately wrote and directed one hundred and fourteen Tom and Jerry cartoons at the MGM cartoon studio in Hollywood,
California between 1940 and 1957, when the animation unit was closed. The original series is notable for having won the Academy Award for Animated Short Film seven times,
tying it with Walt Disney's Silly Symphonies as the theatrical animated series with the most Oscars.
Tom and Jerry has a worldwide audience that consists of children, teenagers and adults,
and has also been recognized as one of the most famous and longest-lived rivalries in American cinema.
In 2000, TIME named the series one of the greatest television shows of all time.
Beginning in 1960, in addition to the original 114 H-B cartoons, MGM had new shorts produced by Rembrandt Films, led by Gene Deitch in Eastern Europe.
Production of Tom and Jerry shorts returned to Hollywood under Chuck Jones's Sib-Tower 12 Productions in 1963; this series lasted until 1967, making it a total of 161 shorts.
The cat and mouse stars later resurfaced in television cartoons produced by Hanna-Barbera and Filmation Studios during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s; a feature film, Tom and Jerry:
The Movie, in 1992 (released domestically in 1993); and in 2000, their first made-for TV short, Tom and Jerry: The Mansion Cat for Cartoon Network.
The most recent Tom and Jerry theatrical short, The Karate Guard, was written and co-directed by Barbera and debuted in Los Angeles cinemas on September 27, 2005.
Today, Time Warner (via its Turner Entertainment division) owns the rights to Tom and Jerry (with Warner Bros. handling distribution).
Since the merger, Turner has produced the series, Tom and Jerry Tales for The CW's Saturday morning "The CW4Kids" lineup,
as well as the recent Tom and Jerry short, The Karate Guard, in 2005 and a string of Tom and Jerry direct-to-video films - all in collaboration with Warner Bros. Animation.
In February 2010, the cartoon celebrated its 70th anniversary and a DVD collection of 30 shorts, Tom and Jerry Deluxe Anniversary Collection,
was released in late June 2010 to celebrate the animated duo's seventh decade. It then had a rerun on Cartoon Network.
Tom and Jerry Outside the United States
When shown on terrestrial television in the United Kingdom (from 1967 to 2000, usually on the BBC) Tom and Jerry cartoons were not cut for violence and Mammy was retained.
As well as having regular slots (mainly after the evening BBC News with around 2 episodes shown every evening and occasionly shown on children's network CBBC in the morning), Tom and Jerry served the BBC in another way.
When faced with disruption to the schedules (such as those occurring when live broadcasts overrun), the BBC would invariably turn to Tom and Jerry to fill any gaps, confident that it would retain much of an audience that might otherwise channel hop.
This proved particularly helpful in 1993, when Noel's House Party had to be cancelled due to an IRA bomb scare at BBC Television Centre - Tom and Jerry was shown instead, bridging the gap until the next programme.
In 2010, a mother complained to OFCOM of the smoking scenes shown in the cartoons, since Tom often attempts to impress love interests with the habit, resulting in reports that the smoking scenes in Tom and Jerry films may be subject to censorship.
Due to its lack of dialogue, Tom and Jerry was easily translated into various foreign languages. Tom and Jerry began broadcast in Japan in 1964.
A 2005 nationwide survey taken in Japan by TV Asahi, sampling age groups from teenagers to adults in their sixties, ranked Tom and Jerry #85 in a list of the top 100 "anime" of all time;
while their web poll taken after the airing of the list ranked it at #58 - the only non-Japanese animation on the list, and beating anime classics like Tsubasa:
Reservoir Chronicle, A Little Princess Sara, and the ultra-classics Macross and Ghost in the Shell (it should be noted that in Japan, the word "anime" refers to all animation regardless of origin, not just Japanese animation).
Tom and Jerry have long been popular in Germany. However, the cartoons are overdubbed with rhyming German language verse that describes what is happening onscreen, sometimes adding or revising information.
The different episodes are usually embedded in the episode Jerry's Diary (1949), in which Tom reads about past adventures.
In India, South East Asia, the Middle East, Egypt, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Lebanon, Chile, Argentina, Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Venezuela, other Latin American countries, and in eastern European countries (such as Romania),
Cartoon Network still airs Tom and Jerry cartoons every day. In Russia, local channels also air the show in their daytime programming slot.
Tom and Jerry was one of the few cartoons of western origin broadcast in Czechoslovakia (1988) and Romania (until 1989) before the fall of Communism in 1989.