What's your favorite era of the tom & jerry cartoons?

examples:
Fred Quimby ('40-58 )
Gene Deitch ('60-62 )
Chuck Jones ('63-67 )
Hanna-Barbera ('75-77 )
Filmation (1980 )
Tom & Jerry Kids ('90-94 )
Tom & Jerry Tales (2006-2008 )

Van Beauren ('20s~30s )


I for one loved the filmation ones. The H/B ones from the 70s were definitely not the best, but they were fun.
The gene deitch ones were those decidedly bizarre old ones (watch the clip to see what I mean).
I omitted the feature length ones because they're a very seperate entity.

Definitely Fred Quimby.
I always hated the Chuck Jones ones. They were basically Roadrunner cartoons with different characters...maybe he just wanted to add something new but I never felt those concepts belonged with T&J.
I don't think I ever saw any of the later stuff before. All I'll say is HB looks crap. Like CJ, just taking T&J to make the same stuff they always make.

Did you also get fooled by the Van Buren stuff? I was so excited the first time I found those, ha.

I first found the van beuren stuff on a DVD from the dollar tree. I saw "tom & jerry" listed as one of the cartoons, but suspected it was misleading advertising. Still, those DVDs usually have entertaining stuff on, so I got it anyway. I thought the T&J they listed might be one of those old banned/racist type cartoons or something. As such, I was somewhat surprised by what it really was, but not entirely so.

When I was a kid, I used to watch the hanna barbera T&J before school, and the filmation one (sometimes swapped out with the classic MGM shorts) after school. I got to watch the first 2/3 of H/B and the last 2/3 of filmation. It seemed as if T&J had either aired all day long, or paused itself till I got home. At the time, I never really noticed that it was 2 very different shows (3 if you count when they would replace filmation with MGM).

Easily the Quimby 40s & 50s era with Hanna and Barbera directing the shorts. These were by far the best Tom & Jerry cartoons ever made and none afterwards were able to equal them.

I think the reason those old ones don't rate higher on my list is because they are so overplayed. Those classic T&J shorts have been on TV almost incessantly since the dawn of time. The H/B ones from the 70s don't get replayed much, and the filmation ones pretty much never get replayed. On top of that, I like filmation stuff in general (even though most people hate it). Thus the H/B and filmation series rate higher on my list due to sheer freshness factor, with filmation edging out due to my love of filmation in general.

While kids & tales are newer & have been re-aired less, I hated the whole kids/babies/little/etc fad. Muppet babies manged to pull it off effectively, but every copycat series sucked.
Tales on the other hand is decent, but just lacks a certain charm.

That's right, I forgot they did that...what happened to them? Why did they start making such garbage later?
Heck yeah, I just got one the other day. It has the Betty Boop Cinderella, a really old Felix the Cat, a couple Popeyes, and some other ones.

Some of them were on the public domain cartoons VHS box set my dad mail ordered ordered when I was a little kid. There was ten tapes with 4 cartoons each. I bet it cost at least $50 then. On Sunday I got a DVD of 12 cartoons for $1. And half of them are probably on archive.org for free download.

The reason the 70s T&J was so different from the classics was due to the restrictions on children's TV at the time.


What cracks me up about those cheapo DVDs is that if you get one with popeye in the title it'll have 1 popeye toon & 15 old superman ones. ....Yet if you buy one with superman in the title it'll have 1 superman toon & 15 popeye ones.

Ha, yeah. That's a little annoying.

I like the cover art though. Something about a rule against using copyrighted characters, but likenesses are OK, so they use really bad drawings.

Quimby, but not the politically corrected redubs you see on TV now-a-days.

When MGM shut down their cartoon studio in 1957, they left and started their own studio. I also don't understand why they were never able to replicate the shorts they directed in MGM, some people believe its because Avery influenced them back then, but later in the 70s they didn't have the influence. Who knows?

Dude... see my previous post. It was due to restrictions on violence in children's TV.

Keep in mind that the classic T&J shorts were made for movie theaters, but the 70s ones & later were made for saturday morning television. THAT is the key difference. In addition to legal/political restrictions, being made for TV also imposed significant time & budget restrictions. When the classic shorts were made for the theaters, they had months to make each 6~7 minute short, and months to get their investment back (thus allowing for bigger budgets). In the TV era though, they had to come up with about 25 minutes of cartoon EVERY WEEK. On top of the labor aspect of that, they got significantly less finacial return for that 25mins than they did from each 7min short. Less return means smaller budget. Smaller budget + more content + less time = significant drop in quality.

The time/budget restraints were also why jerry got a bowtie. Having a nice clean line under his head allowed for easier use of "limited animation", where they would just animate the head/arm/whatever for a new frame instead of the whole character like they did in the classic shorts. (Ever notice on yogi bear cartoons how his moving arm will often be a slightly different shade of brown than the rest of his body? Having something like a collar to seperate the parts makes such minor inconsistancies much less noticable. This is why nearly every character in all the old hanna barbera shorts (ie, yogi, huckleberry hound, mr jinx, etc, etc) have some kind of collar. Since the head moves almost all the time but the body only moves a fraction of the time, this allows them to easily just animate the heads in each frame & not worry about precisely matching the color of the body.)

The loss of quality was due to budgets. With MGM they had a $35,000 budget per 7 min short. That translated into 26,000 cels per short. Most of H-B's work was on tv and tv producers allowed no more than about $3,000 per short, which is about 1,200 cels per short. Big loss in quality.

Hands-Down the 1940-1958 Years. 2nd would be 1963-1967, 3rd would be the 1975 version (though the theme nearly has that "Billy Don't be a Hero" vibe), 4th would be the Tales, 5th would be the 1980 Comedy Show, 6th would be the Kids version (It's like they combined the 1975 and 1980 shows and made Tom and Jerry younger), and the Gene Dietch version just sucks ass...it was too canned!

The Fred Quimby were the best. The Chuck Jones and Filmations ones gave me bad vibes.

Super interesting stuff and detail, thanks :D

I'm confused. 7 minutes * 60 seconds * 24 fps = 10,080. How do you figure the 26,000?

cells != frames

A single frame in a cartoon will usually have several cells. Each character in a scene is usually on it's own cell, likewise background type items that move or that the characters interact with, and foreground items that the characters move behind.
illustration: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Animation_cells.png

Ever notice how in the classic shorts the characters pass behind many more objects, interact with many more objects, etc, while in the later/TV ones the scenes are usually very sparse, with nearly all the detail existing purely in the background? ...Or the fact that each scene in the TV ones rarely has more than 2 or 3 characters in it at the most, while the classic shorts may have had a slew of characters in each scene? That's the difference between having 26K cels in a 7 minute short vs 1k cels in a 7 minute short.

Oh yeah, I forgot to reply back to this thread. The comp died on me when I tried this before. My fav era is definitely Fred Quimby era. I know they were made for theaters, but they still seemed better to me (and I'm not talking about the art). Seems the storylines for those shorts were more enjoyable for me as well as seeing how Jerry was going to outsmart/outdo Tom.

Fred Quimby all the way. The Dietch ones from the early 60s were awful.

I saw a bit some modern Tom & Jerry cartoon the other day and they were TALKING! I wanted to pull my hair when I saw that...

I think that was one of the many direct-to-video T&J movies. I know T&J themselves never talked in any of the series prior to the warner bros one (with a few rare exceptions in the old classic ones), and I never saw them talk in the warner bros one. The various movies though are just plain weird at best, so it wouldn't surprise me if they talked in them.


edit: I was right, they talked in their first movie: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sa_X4gs0T98

I'll be honest with you I'm not a real fan of T&J. but gimmie Chuck Jones anytime!