Looney Toones vs Tom and Jerry

Dan's right though about the prolifery of LT making this not a good comparison. Looney Tunes have more than their share of towering masterpieces but then there's all the lackluster and forgotten rudimentary ones, (anybody remember 30's bosko or buddy?) and the level of crappiness they sunk to in the 60's Film Arts era that dilutes the good ones. Plus LT characters were handled by many directors, some great but some shitty which makes them inconsistent. But the classic Tom & Jerrys were directed and storyboarded by Hanna & Barbera from first to last (not counting the short lived 60's revival with Chuck Jones, and those couple of reeeally wierd ones made in Prague), and every one of those H & B cartoons is at least good.

T & J are my favorite of all cartoons for a few reasons- first is quality- MGM had higher production values than Warner, so some of the best T & J are at the level of the best Disney animation (like Mouse in Manhattan), but combined with the insane comic timing and graphic animation style derived from Tex Avery (and even improving on him) which made Disney look limp and stodgy. Of course they weren't experimental- they were very polished- Warner's strength was they worked around the constraints of low budgets with more distinctive graphic styles like Maurice Noble's backgrounds.

Next reason I like T & J so much is that they're so incredibly violent. (Joe Barbera did all of those screams himself, like when Tom gets his neck slammed in a window.) The pain gags were so wild it pushed them into surrealism territory- like Tom diving headfirst after Jerry, getting stuck inside a vase, which Jerry smashes, leaving Tom vase-shaped. That kind of cartoon violence has never been matched even in horror movies, I think. Only Roger Rabbit does it as good.

A lot of Looney Tunes were talky and way too literal- even Chuck Jones started sucking bad in the 50's that way. Tom & Jerry were the opposite, pure elemental visual stories. Chuck Jones' Roadrunner cartoons were pretty good though. But I thought they got repetitive and I don't think the supporting details of the environments added much to the stories like they did for T&J. The roadrunner universe was just some undefined neverending desert for chases to happen in, but T&J had a domestic setting with supporting characters to add personality and tension. (example- Tom is supposed to keep the house clean while Mammy Two-Shoes is away: Jerry now gets to ruin things and Tom is caught between trying to catch Jerry and trying to undo the damage before he gets in trouble.) I like T & J's relationship better too- they're enemies, but secretly, they're friends, so they team up sometimes when a 3rd character comes in, and they always make up if they go too far (like when Tom leaves Jerry in the snow and he turns into an icicle, and Tom has nightmares about dead Jerry and revives him).

Last reason they're better: Cat Concerto, with Tom playing the piano with Jerry inside it, got ripped off for the Bugs Bunny version with Bugs at the piano, but the Tom & Jerry one still won the oscar.

id much rather watch daffy duck lose his mind

Tthe engineers that designed this wireframe version of Daffy Duck must have had a very interesting sense of humor. We found it deeply embedded within the circuitry of a RISC microprocessor, about 1500 microns away from a similar-style rendition of Waldo. Daffy is about 50 microns in size, making it necessary to use a high-power (40X to 60X) microscope objective to photograph the wireframe character.

I want an independent cite.

And then there're the fucked-up ones with the nightmare music and the big oaf guy what seems to own Tom? They go on fishing trips and stuff? Either these or the Joneses definitely seem like the end of the line ... but I think I like them better than the bad Joneses at this point.

Roadrunner runs through painted-backdrop tunnel, Wile E. tries to follow, SMASH! = funny

but

Tom clobbers Jerry 4 times with poker, poker gets bent into 4 mouse silhouettes, Jerry somehow unharmed = not

And I'm not exactly sure why. But I think it has something to do with Wile E's ennoblement as a truly Kafkaesque hero (utter resignation joined to unkillable determination, every defeat a deadpan badge of honor). Tom is vivid amped-up surface fun, more a predatory Dick van Dyke or Chevy Chase, which just doesn't work as well in such a completely unfair scenario.

Yeah man those 60's T & J... Chuck Jones is reviled by most T & J fans for destroying the characters. I think he fell back to his 1940 beginnings where he was trying to copy Disney with the ultra cutesy Sniffles the mouse. He was past his prime, he got stuck up with his own success and started losing it in the late 50's. The only good thing about the Chuck Jones T & J were the great Maurice Noble backgrounds.

Then those really fucked up ones with nightmare music- those were made by Gene Deitch in Prague- he was a good artist, director from UPA studio (Gerald McBoingBoing) but he was the lone American on that production which was kind of a disaster. The foreign animators only had a couple of original T&J cartoons to study which were the only ones they had ever seen, so they had no clue what they were doing. You can tell which ones they studied too, because they reuse bits of acting from them. Isn't the sound horrible on that stuff? It's all tinny and every time there's a physical gag it sounds like a bunch of pots and pans crashing.

Iron curtain Prague made some amazing animation. I have a cartoon called "Przgody Krecika" (the little mole) which was kind of like the iron curtain Mickey Mouse. It's also a pure visual, no-talk cartoon, and it's got a very cool graphic style- the backgrounds have an almost frottage-like texture, and the animation is very iconic- like the old mickey mouse as opposed to the realistic later disney. The one I have shows this mole character living in a forest, when all of a sudden a bunch of machines clear-cut it and basically airdrop a city on top of him. So he's homeless and he has to appeal to the beaurocracy for a place to live, and they give him a rubber zoo, but he accidentally deflates it. So he decides to get rid of the city, and he goes to a truck with a giant spindle of sausages on the back, unrolls them all and sticks them up the tailpipes of every car in the city, and does a lot of other inventive, hilarious sabotage. In the end he can't do it so he hitches a ride in the beak of a pelican and leaves. There's a lot of hidden comments about socialism in it- it's very cool and very different from commercial american cartoons.

The ones I like the least have sort of ugly drawings, and dumb plots like Tom & Jerry in space, sending out robot cats and mice to gather and hunt.
The piano concerto is absolutely brilliant; some other favorites includes when Jerry has to take care of a duck, when Jerry has to take care of the hungry mouse-baby (uh-oh, pattern)

The music on all these episodes is amazing too. I had no idea Barbera did Tom's screams. That's impressive!
I think it just might make up for Scooby Doo!

http://www.tomandjerryonline.com/synopsis.cfm

Yay "Worker and Parasite"!

Bingo. Chuck Jones. I forgot to mention what a subhuman he made Tom also, esp. w/the 'ugly drawing.' Mistake.

The ones I like the least have sort of ugly drawings, and dumb plots like Tom & Jerry in space, sending out robot cats and mice to gather and hunt.

And this might be my favorite period. I like the ones with Spike a lot too (I think this is the same period or damn close anyway, but I'm gonna go check out the site now).

You can still download 121 Tom and Jerry episodes for free from the CIA 2017 release of Osama Bin Laden's hard drive. I understand that people don't have a lot of money for entertainment in these tough times.

— Ghostface Kafka (36 Chambers) (@TheKafkaDude) August 12, 2020

The recent live action Tom and Jerry movie with chloe grace Morris is so bad

Haven't heard the greatest hype about the recent Looney Tunes movie either!