Tom and Jerry. Just, you know, not the ones you know: Van Beuren and Paul Terry.
We previously met Paul Terry, about whom it’s said his Terrytoons were poorly made, badly received and which are generally seen as being quite unsuccessful. Well Terry worked for Fable Pictures, renamed in 1928 as Van Beuren Pictures after its new owner, but left a year after the takeover to pursue his somewhat doomed own venture. In the meantime, Van Beuren Pictures released a series about two mismatched men who went under the names of, yes you guessed it, Tom and Jerry. This was, to be fair, over a decade before the world’s favourite cat and mouse team would appear on our screens, and while I won’t accuse MGM of robbing the name, what is certain is that if, even today, the names are mentioned it’s always the cat and mouse who come to mind.
Be that as it may, back in 1931 Van Beuren unleashed his Tom and Jerry on the world, and if they’re memorable for anything it’s for the talents of one Joseph Barbera who worked on the series, and who would later team up with William Hanna to create a legendary animation team which brought us, amongst others,
The Flintstones and
Top Cat. Reading further now (always a good idea before writing, something I never do) I see that the pair actually invented Tom and Jerry - the famous ones - when they moved to MGM in 1940. So the name is not coincidentally the same, it’s deliberate, and you’d wonder how they were able to copy it. Sure, the names are common enough, but in the same team of cartoon characters? Van Beuren must have been fuming.
Anyway, what were they like? Well according to Wiki they were of the old style (though in colour, presumably two-strip as our man Walt was holding on to three-strip like a man trying desperately to retain his grip on the winning lottery ticket) and utilised little speech, mostly conveying their intentions through the medium of music. Tom and Jerry (these ones) were a sort of tramp duo, perhaps something similar to Mutt and Jeff, and one was very tall while the other was very short. My intention is to check out, if I can, three of the movies, beginning with the first ever, 1931’s
Wot a Night (for you Americans, that’s a colloquial English way of saying what a night).
Oh. So not in colour then, at least not this first one. All right. Well in this one they appear to be taxi drivers, and the cab also has a face, sneezing in the driving rain, the wind so strong it literally uplifts everything including buildings, and makes it seem as if they’re going to blow away. They don’t, but the effect is good. The idea of cars and other objects having faces and making expressions, even speaking, once sound came properly to cartoons, would become another thing cartoons did, and we saw be used by George Moreno at the tail end of the 1940s, with his cartoon, also about a taxi, called
Bubble and Squeak.
There are some clever ideas here. Although the train follows the Disney standard of seeming to dance along the tracks, when the rail is flooded oars come out of the carriages, and when the passengers, having alighted from the train and been picked up by our heroes, end up going underwater again in the heavy rain, there’s a boat lowered from the cab to save them and bring them back on board. Realism pops its head in when the passengers then calmly leg it without paying their fare, and when Tom and Jerry pursue them towards a castle (rich bastards huh? And let’s be honest here: they’re made very much to look like Jews) a portcullis slams down and traps them in the courtyard. A stormcloud comes along and starts playing the battlements of the castle like the keys of a piano (again with the piano!) and our heroes have no choice but to venture inside the castle in search of their fare.
It seems to be some sort of ghost castle, as it’s people with some weird flying bird with bat wings, skeletons and, oh yeah, ghosts. Good usage of the screw principle, which is to say, one skeleton, when he sees Tom and Jerry, is so scared he screws himself right down into the plughole of the bath he’s been washing himself in, while another, creating a piano (yeah I know) by basically painting it screws himself down when the piano stool is too short. Oh, and there are black skeletons too. And then Tom and Jerry are turned into skeletons. Guess they never get their money then.
Meh, emphasis on the clever animation and the sounds, but you’d have to say nothing Disney and others had not done previously. Most importantly, to me, the story makes no sense. I know it’s a cartoon but still: who were the “Jews”? Why did they not pay, and why, in the name of sanity, did they turn Tom and Jerry into skeletons? Very weird, and really not very satisfying. Let’s see if they improved. That was 1931. How were they a year later?
We’re back with pianos, but then, what would you expect in a short entitled
The Piano Tooners? Note the pun on the word tuner/toon duh. Plenty of Mickey-like mice here, and I wonder who had the idea first of the ambulance coming for a fallen comrade, Van Beuren or Iwerks? Both cartoons came out in 1932, but whose was released first in the year? Looks like this was second, as it’s November before it’s out, so unless our man Ub released his Flip the Frog cartoon
The Milkman in December then he would have had the idea first. Were his shown in cinemas? It looks as if they were. But I wonder would there have been time, between the showing of
The Milkman and the release of
Piano Tooners to incorporate, i.e., steal the idea of the first-aid thing? Maybe it’s just a coincidence. In any case, they do it better here, with a small ambulance complete with siren coming to take away a stricken mouse.
And again we see a form of violence used - although cartoons, particularly
Looney Tunes, would become all but synonymous with violence, it’s still odd to see it in the staid and button-down world of 1930s America - when an errant note in the piano is caught, and, well, killed and flushed down the toilet. The fact that it’s made look so cute and innocent, for me, makes this even more disturbing. I know: I need to get out more. Or at all. There’s a seemingly unnecessary joke about a fat woman - a
very fat woman - coming in and displacing all the guests at a concert, then some more
risque stuff as we see the pianist get dressed and in rather revealing lingerie, caught on stage as the curtain raises prematurely, still trying to fasten her suspender belt (garter, to you). All a little chauvinistic, if not actually misogynist. Yeah, for a kid’s cartoon there’s a whole lot of leg and ample cleavage on show. Hmm.
Tom and Jerry only ran for three years, so their final adventure comes in summer 1933, and perhaps attempting to cash in on the science fiction serials such as
Flash Gordon and
Commander Cody which were popular around this time,
The Phantom Rocket features the pair being launched into space. Tying in too with growing practice of cartoons to tend towards mischief and mayhem, the rocket is hijacked by a desperado and, well, pretty much kills everyone, wrecking a ferris wheel, pulling up telephone lines and eventually diving underwater. This gives the animators plenty to do, with various fish and even mermaids coming out of a shipwreck in a state of undress, followed quickly by divers hastily putting their helmets back on, so again more sexual innuendo that the kids would of course not have got but the adults may have. It ends up crashing - into the local jail, where Tom and Jerry are rewarded, and so their final cartoon ends up making them rich, a good reason to stop getting into all sorts of scrapes and capers, and settle down somewhere.
With the exit of Tom and Jerry, Van Beuren went on to produce a series of animated shorts called
Rainbow Parade between 1934 and 1936. The first of these, Pastry Town Wedding, was in the drab old two-strip Technicolor (Disney’s hold on three-strip wouldn’t expire for another two years) but looks a lot better than the Tom and Jerry cartoons. Yes, those are in black-and-white, or at least the ones I can find are, but overall the animation here is better. Again it’s based on musical performance and like the final Tom and Jerry above, looks to have had this song written for it perhaps; it’s quite clever, almost giving me a sense of
The Nightmare Before Christmas in terms of the song. I must say, the head baker, who we see first, looks quite evil for some reason. Maybe it’s the curled moustache or the thick eyebrows. Sound/speech sync is not too bad. It’s clever, and the ideas are well thought-out, but you can see where it would have benefit from three-strip if only Walt hadn’t been such a greedy f
ucker.
The first of the
Rainbow Parade cartoons to use three-strip then was
Molly Moo-Cow and the Butterflies (1935), and immediately you can see the difference. The colours are brighter, deeper, more alive. And of course, there are more of them. I guess in such a circumstance, as they change over from two to three-strip Technicolor, butterflies was a good choice to display the expanded use of colour, and it works well. No speech in this one; they seem to be relying on showing off their new colours and do so through the medium of music and dance. I would point out that Molly Moo Cow bears more than a passing resemblance to Ub Iwerks’s Clara Cowbelle.
Oh I’m wrong: now there
is speech, as a butterfly collector enters the scene and captures all Molly’s friends, then for some reason begins singing about how he loves catching butterflies, as Molly tries to come up with a plan to release the insects and set them free. She eventually hits upon the idea of disguising herself as a butterfly and so… well, it’s a silly story but what the hell. Nobody ever said cartoons had to make sense, and to be honest, if there’s one thing I’ve learned writing and researching the history of animation it’s that it’s damned hard work. But if there’s another thing I’ve learned it’s that it is totally futile and a waste of energy to try to ascribe logic to cartoons. So the fact that a professional lepidopterist would easily - as would anyone else - see through such a disguise, or that his net is way too small to capture this huge “butterfly”, to say nothing of the fact that cows can’t fly, is all beside the point. It’s a cool and not terribly funny but clever cartoon. Let’s check out one more.
This is the first of several that featured my little pal Felix the Cat (Van Beuren must have had some deal going with to use him) and it’s interesting for several reasons. It’s the first time, I think, that I’ve come across a cartoon using someone else’s creation, not to mention that it’s the first time I’ve seen Felix in colour (though of course he remains black) and also heard him speak. In
Felix and the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg, they’re obviously plundering the tale of
Jack and the Beanstalk, bringing two well-loved characters, if you will, from folklore together, and though I’m not familiar with this series (
Rainbow Parade) or indeed Felix’s own adventures, this also seems to feature his arch enemy, Captain Kidd?
The idea is that Felix is using the Goose to give out aid to the needy from what is termed the “Relief Office”, but Captain Kidd wants the goose for himself of course. Felix recognises him, disguised as an old woman, and a chase ensues. Good to see that Felix retains his zany cartoon logic, turning himself into a cannonball and firing himself at the pirate ship when Kidd makes off with the goose and sails away. Interesting to hear Kidd say to Felix “Why you little..” sixty years before it would become one of Homer Simpson’s catchphrases. Felix of course saves the day and showers the town in gold fired from the ship’s cannon, thus completely screwing up the town’s economy, but that’s cartoons for ya!
Looks like
Rainbow Parade were Van Beuren’s last ventures in animation; RKO, their distributor for the series, went with Disney instead, and after 1936 they diversified into live-action and adverts, with founder Amadee J. Van Beuren actually dying two years later of a heart attack. I suppose, if you were very cruel and unfair, you could suggest that Disney literally killed his competition.