Puss Gets the Boot (Tom and Jerry)

Puss Gets the Boot is an American 1940 cartoon and the first animated short of the Tom and Jerry theatrical shorts. It was released to Technicolor theaters by Metro-Goldwyn Mayer, and was nominated for an Academy Award.

Synopsis
When Jasper accidentally break the flower pot and is warned by his owner Mammy Two-Shoes that he'd be thrown out is he breaks one more thing, the mischievous little mouse, Jinx seeks revenge on the cat that chased and taunted him earlier by breaking all of the items in the house to make Jasper threatened to be thrown out for good.

Why It Doesn’t Get The Boot

 * 1) It starts the legacy of MGM animation, as the major improvement over the infamous Captain and the Kids series, as well as Bill Hanna's apology for it.
 * 2) The first Tom and Jerry cartoon to ever be produced and the first time Hanna and Barbera worked together, since Bill and Joe are very best friends.
 * 3) The first cartoon to be directed by Hanna and Barbera, despite being uncredited.
 * 4) * Rudolf Ising (who also directed this short) was the only one to get screen credit, despite not being involved in the film's production.
 * 5) The animation is great and fluid for its time, thanks to Bill Hanna's excellent timing.
 * 6) Most of the gags are clever and funny, albeit more on a Disney-esque level than the later shorts.
 * 7) It's a great beginning for the colossal cat and mouse duo. Their designs are more on par with the Disney style of feature films, which would later be stylized as slick and cartoonish, which it proudly fits for the very zany Warner Bros. style.
 * 8) Like Daffy Duck, mh:greatcharacters:Bugs Bunny, and Woody Woodpecker, Tom and Jerry was involved in putting an end to the cutesy animated cartoons of the mid-30s and kickstarting the zany comedy-style of the late-1930s and the 1940s.

Bad Qualities

 * 1) Despite being the first film, it's pretty disturbing to hear Tom scream or yell like a real cat in pain, a problem which is carried over in the earliest Tom and Jerry cartoons between 1940-1941. Thankfully, Tom's cat-like vocal effects are later phased out as the series progresses throughout the early-1940s.
 * 2) The gags and jokes can be slow-paced, on par with the Disney style of that period.
 * 3) Looking back on the short, it feels more like a Disney cartoon from the late 1930s than an actual Tom and Jerry cartoon.
 * 4) *Speaking of which, the designs for Tom and Jerry in this cartoon are a little rough and uncanny when compared to their later designs.
 * 5) When Mammy Two Shoes misspelled Out with "O-U-W-T" Ouwt which can be racist if as if she couldn't spell, but luckily in the redubbed version by Turner Entertainment, Mammy Two Shoes (whose voice was changed as it was too stereotypically African-American) correctly spells "Out" as "O-U-T".

Reception

 * It holds a rating of 7.8/10 on IMDB.
 * Motion Picture Exhibitor reviewed the short on March 6, 1940: "Puss teases the mouse but when the latter learns that breakage in the house will lead to Puss being thrown out, the fun begins. Windup has the crockery crashing, the mouse victorious, Puss getting the boot".

Trivia

 * The only screen credit on this film was a Rudolf Ising Production.
 * This is the first Tom and Jerry short to be nominated for an Academy Award.
 * Despite being released in theaters in 1940, it was the only Tom and Jerry short created in the 1930s, due to being produced in 1939.
 * This cartoon was billed as an MGM Cartoon.
 * The unrestored prints beforehand (including the mid-1990s Turner print) is the original theatrical version, however, the remastered version by Warner Bros. is a 1960's re-issue print with a recreated MGM Cartoon logo without the Technicolor reference which then jump-cuts to the rest of the original opening titles.
 * Though Rudolf Ising took sole credit for producing the cartoon, it was later discovered by co-producer Fred Quimby that Ising had little or nothing to do with the production, and that it was entirely done by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera.
 * At a little over nine minutes, this is the longest Tom and Jerry short released in the Golden Age era.
 * After the short, The cat was renamed Tom and the mouse was renamed Jerry at the suggestion of animator John Carr, following a studio contest when MGM green-lit the series.
 * Tom was originally named Jasper. While Jerry as unnamed, he was referred to himself as Jinx, around the MGM studio.
 * The first redubbed version of this cartoon by June Foray in the mid-1960s has Tom correctly referred to by his actual name "Thomas" instead of "Jasper".

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