The Tom and Jerry Cartoon Kit

The Tom and Jerry's Cartoon Kit is a Tom and Jerry animated short film, released on August 10, 1962. It was the ninth cartoon in a series of thirteen to be directed by Gene Deitch and produced by William L. Snyder in Czechoslovakia.^[2] It is one of the special episodes indirectly satirizes the violence of the original Hanna-Barbera shorts.

Plot

The cartoon begins with a demonstration for the Tom and Jerry Cartoon Kit, with which "anyone can now enter the lucrative field of animated cartoons." The items in the kit include the following:

• Tom (or "one mean, stupid cat")
• Jerry (or "one sweet, lovable mouse")
• A hammer, knife, and stick of dynamite (or "assorted deadly weapons")
• Coffee and cigarettes (removed from kit and described as being "for the cartoonists")
• A slice of watermelon

The narrator says, "First, put the "sweet, lovable mouse" into a simple situation expressing a natural human being, such as eating the slice of watermelon contained in our kit. The result may not make sense, but it will last long enough for you to be comfortably seated before the feature begins." This statement refers to the original theatrical exhibition of the cartoon, in which it ran ahead of a feature film.

At first, Jerry eats the watermelon and spits the seeds out, hitting and waking Tom, who initially grabs the hammer to hit Jerry but instead flicks him in the back of the head. Jerry swallows the seeds by accident, causing him to turn green for a moment and then make sounds like a maraca when he moves, and goes into a lively dance until Tom traps him in a metal can. Tom uses Jerry as a maraca for his own dance; when the effect suddenly stops, Tom peeks inside only to get a mouthful of seeds spat into his face. He devours the rest of the watermelon and turns his head into a cannon to fire blasts of seeds at Jerry, who takes cover in the kit box just before Tom hits it, destroying the stick of dynamite and damaging the box.

Jerry winds up lying beneath a book named Judo for Mice, studies it, and emerges with enough fighting skill to easily overpower Tom. Even a stint of training at a boxing gym and use of the knife do not give Tom any advantage against Jerry. Finally Tom goes to a judo school in order to face him again. The two have a breaking contest, in which each tries to outdo the other: Jerry with a wooden board, Tom with a brick, then Jerry again with a cement block. The contest ends abruptly when Tom tries to break a huge block of marble, which crashes through the floor and takes him with it.

An unconscious Tom ends up in the battered box. Jerry replaces the lid in the word's "The End an MGM cartoon" and the narrator said, "Our next film will be for the kiddies, and will demonstrate a new poison gas. Thank you and good night." The music winds to stop as if it was being played on a slowing phonograph record and Jerry bows to the audience in typical Japanese fashion.

Reception

While the Deitch shorts were generally negatively-received by Tom and Jerry fans,^[3] this particular short is often considered one of the best of the thirteen cartoons, due to its inventive plotline and satirical nature.

References

External links

• The Tom and Jerry Cartoon Kit at The Big Cartoon DataBase
• The Tom and Jerry Cartoon Kit at the Internet Movie Database