Jess is back with Fox Kids Club! This time, she’s diving into Tom and Jerry Kids, the early ‘90s attempt to bring the classic cat-and-mouse duo to a new generation. With a “theatrical-type” budget, backing from Ted Turner, and the legendary Hanna-Barbera at the helm, this show had everything going for it… or did it?

Join Jess as she explores how Tom and Jerry Kids became one of Fox Kids’ early anchors, its surprising ties to Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Cartoon Network, and whether it holds up today. Plus, a deep dive into Tom and Jerry’s history—from their Oscar-winning shorts to their many reinventions. A full transcript follows the video.

Tom and Jerry Kids, A New Spin on Classic Cartoon Chaos

Few cartoon pairings have been as iconic or longer lasting than Tom and Jerry.  Conceived in 1940, the series put MGM’s struggling cartoon department on the map, earning seven Academy Awards and setting new standards for cartoon violence in the process.  However, while the characters continued to appear in new cartoons after the original studio was shut down in the 1950s and its creators went on to pioneer television animation, nothing seemed to really stick.  The two 1960s revivals didn’t really garner more than mild acclaim at best, and the less said about the two revivals for television after that, the better.

But times had changed.  The characters had passed in ownership from MGM to Ted Turner, and the public was more accepting of the cartoons’ violent content in the wake of Roger Rabbit.  So why not team up with the original creators and do new Tom and Jerry cartoons with a twist?

Well, here’s the result: Tom and Jerry, in pint sized form.  This is Tom and Jerry Kids.

PART ONE: WHAT IS IT?

Tom and Jerry, the very first creation by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, is the story of a cat and a mouse who… I guess “frenemies” is probably the best word to describe what they are?  Most cartoons are some variation of Tom, a cat, chasing Jerry, a mouse.  I say “most cartoons” because there are some exceptions, like ones where Tom and Jerry are working against a common foe, or at least the direct conflict isn’t explicitly between the cat and mouse. (Sometimes they’re battling depression!)

One notable aspect of the series is that the lead characters almost never vocalize outside of yelps, screams, and the occasional “DONNNNN’T YOU BELIEVE IT”.  This has made the series a favorite internationally.

A Familiar Formula with a 1990s Twist

Each half hour of Tom and Jerry Kids consists of three shorts:

Every episode save for two features at least one short with Little Tom and Little Jerry.  These are reasonably close to the original shorts, where Tom and Jerry are almost always antagonists.  The only major difference is that the characters have been de-aged.  Well, okay, Tom has been de-aged, redesigned to be a kitten wearing a baseball cap.  It’s honestly hard to tell if Jerry is even supposed to be younger in this version – while Tom is clearly a kitten there’s no changes to Jerry’s character model.

The eternal chase happens, well, wherever the plot dictates it happen.  Sometimes it’ll take place around the house, sometimes they’ll hit the beach, occasionally we’ll get Tom and Jerry Kids IN SPACE! There’s also some concessions to “modern” culture – Jerry will join a rock band, or get help from Bat-Mouse.  Stuff that would be familiar to a kid in 1990.

Most episodes also have one short featuring Droopy and his son Dripple.  Like Tom and Jerry, Droopy also hailed from the MGM studio, but unlike Tom and Jerry he was created by not Hanna and Barbera, but Tex Avery, for my money the greatest animation director of all time.  Droopy was introduced in the 1943 film “Dumb-hounded,” as a sluggish, mild mannered bloodhound who nevertheless is there to catch an escaped convict wolf at every opportunity. 

This comedic device actually surfaced in earlier Avery works, most notably his second cartoon with Bugs Bunny, Tortoise Beats Hare.  Dripple is actually not entirely a creation made for this show – he appeared in an earlier Tex Avery cartoon, though this series gave the character his name.

Droopy and Dripple are usually placed in conflict with that loud, obnoxious wolf..  Here he’s named, uh, “McWolf,” and he is foiled less by our heroes and more by himself.  Droopy, Dripple, and… McWolf are often joined by the lovely nightclub dancer from Avery’s Red Hot Riding Hood, here named… Miss… Vavoom.  …who came up with the names for this segment?!

After that, the third most common recurring segment is with Spike and Tyke, the father and son bulldog pair that appeared in a number of classic Tom and Jerry cartoons directed by Hanna and Barbera at MGM.  Spike was a frequent foil for Tom and Jerry in some of the duo’s more memorable entries like “Quiet Please” and “The Truce Hurts.”  His son Tyke was introduced in the 1949 short “Love that Pup,” and two shorts featuring just Spike and Tyke were made before the MGM studio closed down in 1957 and Hanna and Barbera started producing cartoons for television.

But while Hanna-Barbera couldn’t make Spike and Tyke cartoons anymore, they clearly liked the concept enough to basically make their own Spike and Tyke.  Hence, Augie Doggie and Doggie Daddy, a more domesticated version of the two characters that premiered on the Quick Draw McGraw show.  Unlike Tyke, Augie Doggie has a precocious voice (provided by the great Daws Butler) while Doggie Daddy bears the Jimmy Durante type voice Spike had in later shorts.   Augie Doggie and Doggie Daddy would become part of the H-B posse in later years, showing up as part of the ensemble cast in shows like Yogi’s Gang and Laff-a-Lympics.

What’s funny is that the Spike and Tyke shorts here take clear inspiration from Augie Doggie.  Like, they give Tyke a voice here and he sounds basically exactly like Augie Doggie.  So basically – Hanna-Barbera create Spike and Tyke at MGM.  They then make their own Spike and Tyke at their own studio.  And then they do Spike and Tyke cartoons way later, but those cartoons are basically copies of the copy… I have a headache and need to lay down now.

There are other characters in the cast, mostly in the Tom and Jerry Kids shorts.  This is not unlike the original shorts, which would often throw in other characters in an attempt to liven things up.  The original series featured characters like the rival cat Butch, Tom’s prospective love interest Toodles, and Jerry’s French speaking and cold blooded nephew Nibbles.  (Tom gets beheaded in one short and Nibbles callously shrugs it off!)

What separates Tom and Jerry Kids from the original shorts is that there is far more reliance on these side characters, many of whom have extensive dialogue.

Perhaps the most notable character introduced in this cartoon is Calaboose Cal, a fast talking huckster cat voiced by the late, great Phil Hartman.  You can tell they liked this character, and it’s hard not to like Hartman doing a riff on LA used car salesman Cal Worthington.  Calaboose Cal was just one part of a busy season for Phil Hartman, who was still on Saturday Night Live at that time.  1990-91 was the season he began voicing two of the greatest creations in the history of The Simpsons: Troy McClure and Lionel Hutz.

The show was produced by Don Jurwich, a longtime veteran of the animation scene in the 60s, 70s, and 80s.  Jurwich got his start on Rocky and Bullwinkle and Tennesee Tuxedo before jumping to Hanna-Barbera at the end of the decade where he worked on shows like Wacky Races and Scooby-Doo. He then worked at Marvel Productions for a few years in the mid-80s, most notably serving as supervising director on GI Joe before returning to H-B later in the decade, where he stayed until the mid-90s.

One of the Tom and Kerry Kids supervising directors was Ray Patterson, who is actually a really notable name.  He actually worked on many of the classic Tom and Jerry shorts of the 1940s and 50s, so it’s really cool that he worked on this show.  He’s also notable for being the “Ray” in Grantray Lawrence Animation – the producers of the first season of the highly beloved 1960s Spider-Man cartoon.  When Grantray Lawrence went under, he essentially became a Hanna-Barbera lifer, working at the company right up through The New Adventures of Captain Planet in 1993.

Towards the end of production, a few notable names began to trickle in in layout and character design roles: Lance Falk, Butch Hartman, David Feiss, and Jim Stenstrum.  This was the beginnings of the youth movement at Hanna-Barbera, a movement that would fully take root starting with 1993’s SWAT Kats and Two Stupid Dogs. These people would go on to contribute to some of the most beloved cartoons of the 90s and 2000s.

So that’s Tom and Jerry Kids in a nutshell – a pretty typical cartoon for the early 90s.  But the franchise it belongs to is anything but typical – it belongs to one of the most beloved classic cartoon franchises ever made.  So let’s take a look at how we got here.  How Tom and Jerry ended up at Tom and Jerry Kids.

PART TWO: A BRIEF HISTORY OF CAT AND MOUSE

In 1940, the MGM cartoon studio was struggling.  A recruitment drive brought them some of the top animators in Hollywood, but those animators were saddled with a Captain and the Kids adaptation that was completely dead on arrival.  

In this environment, Joseph Barbera, a fresh transplant from the Terrytoons studio in New Rochelle, New York, teamed up with a fellow animator, Bill Hanna, who got his start at the Harman-Ising animation studio where he worked on the first Looney Tunes.  Looking for a cartoon idea that was actually good, the duo decided to make a cat and mouse cartoon.

They planned their cartoon with an unorthodox method.

We wanted to present something more than a storyboard, but less, of course, than a finished cartoon.  So we invented what we came to call “limited animation” in order to produce a demonstration film of the cartoon.  I laid the cartoon out as I wrote it, and Bill shot my full-size layouts directly.  The technique used far fewer drawings than a fully finished cartoon – fewer than 1,800 – but these were shot to length so that the film produced by means of limited animation would run as long as the final product […{

We used various shortcuts to get as much movement out of the technique as possible.  For example, instead of using a lot of drawings to animate walking legs, I would take two drawings and alternately reverse the legs to give the impression of movement.  We’d use zooms and pans to suggest other kinds of movement, and if we needed to indicate the effect of a head-on collision, Bill would just whack the side of the camera.

Joseph Barbera, My Life In Toons

The resulting effort, which did not credit either of the two directors nor any of their animators, was Puss Gets The Boot, in which a cat named Jasper chased an unnamed mouse.  After the short’s release in February 1940, Hanna and Barbera were given a strong recommendation from the studio: no more cat and mouse cartoons. 

Yea, the studio hated the cartoon! But favorable audience reaction, including a letter from a major exhibitor asking for more cat and mouse cartoons, quickly led the studio to change course.  After an internal studio poll, the characters got their names – “Tom and Jerry,” coincidentally reviving a name used on an unrelated series at the earlier Van Beuren studio (that Joe Barbera actually worked on, funnily enough)

The Oscar nominated “Puss Gets The Boot” was one of the highlights of what proved to be a very strong year for animation.  Walt Disney released his masterpiece that year, “Fantasia”.  Woody Woodpecker made his debut for Walter Lantz.  And most notably, Bugs Bunny made his first “real” appearance for the Leon Schlesinger studio.

So Hanna and Barbera got to work making more cat and mouse cartoons – and ONLY cat and mouse cartoons.  For the next 17 years, the duo directed dozens of Tom and Jerry shorts.  While popular right away, it took time for the shorts to find their trademark pacing and violence.

Part of this was that the studio was shaking off the kinks.  Studio executive Fred Quimby brought in Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising to supervise the MGM cartoons after their studio shut down.  Harman and Ising were two ex-Disney animators who at times were obsessed with beating Disney at their own game.  Harman and Ising’s MGM work was typically lavishly animated, beautifully detailed – and painfully slow.  Speaking personally, a Harman-Ising cartoon typically elicited a groan from me because they were so long and boring.

Shortly after Puss Gets The Boot hit it big, Harman and Ising left MGM – and into their void stepped maverick director Tex Avery.  Tex, who was about as much of an anti-Disney as you can get, was the man who made the Looney Tunes actually Looney, establishing the style that every other director at Termite Terrace would end up following.  However, he’d leave the studio after a conflict with his boss, Leon Schlesinger, and end up at MGM, blessed with an even larger budget than he had at Termite Terrace.

Tex never worked on the Tom and Jerry cartoons, but by the mid-1940s, his influence was undeniable.  The Tom and Jerry cartoons got faster, more stylized, more violent, less interested in being realistic and more interested in being funny.  The upshot is that the cartoons ended up being considered some of the most violent of the Golden Age of Animation, and that would cause problems when the shorts were released to television years later..

Also causing problems: the racist content sometimes present in the shorts.  MGM, unfortunately, relied on Blackface jokes and stereotypical Black characters long after other animation studios largely retired those gags.  These gags unfortunately mar what is otherwise Tex Avery’s finest short, Magical Maestro.  There are more blackface gags in Tom and Jerry than you’d think. 

Nineteen cartoons feature a character popularly known as  Mammy Two Shoes, a stereotypical uneducated Black maid who is Tom’s owner and is only seen from the waist down. (The character was actually named Dinah, but an erroneous claim by an animation historian ended up sticking.)  These cartoons aren’t just controversial today, they were controversial at the time.  In fact, pressure from the NAACP caused MGM to finally retire the character  in 1953.

Despite featuring a basic premise of a cat chasing a mouse, Tom and Jerry shorts were often brilliantly inventive.  You could put these characters anywhere – cleverly done war references, getting into mischief at a bowling alley, antagonizing each other while Tom is trying to do a piano concerto.  Sometimes the shorts would even break format: Jerry exploring New York in the wonderful “Mouse in Manhattan,” or Tom trying to avoid eternal damnation in “Heavenly Puss.”  Remember, all of these premises take place with minimal (if any) dialogue.

The 114 shorts directed by Hanna and Barbera are considered to be the series’ peak.  It was enormously popular commercially and critically, with the series getting 13 Oscar nominations and winning seven times.  Compare that to Bugs Bunny, who was nominated only three times and won just once – and that film, Knighty Knight Bugs, is generally seen as one of the wabbit’s weaker entries.

But the good times were never going to last.  As the 40s and 50s progressed, two things managed to eventually spell the end of the theatrical animated short.  The first was the Paramount Decree, which prohibited the major studios from owning their own movie theater chains.  MGM was owned by the Loews theater chain, which ultimately spun off the studio by the 1960s, beginning years of tortured mismanagement.

But the Paramount Decree also prohibited something else – a practice called block booking.  To simplify everything, block booking forced independent theatre owners to take everything a studio produced.  A theatre might just want the A picture with Bogart and Bacall, but the studio would force it to take unwanted or unproven B pictures alongside that.  And yes, block booking included all of the shorts and cartoons a studio was producing.  So the decree made that practice illegal, and easier for theatre owners to opt out of receiving shorts.

The second – the emergence of television.  The explosive growth of the new medium in the 1950s had a massive effect on moviegoing.  Why go out when you could just watch I Love Lucy ?  Studios began introducing new innovations just to compete – 3D, Cinerama, and CinemaScope.  In fact, MGM produced a number of widescreen Cinemascope cartoons in the mid-1950s.

All of these disruptions led MGM to initially cut costs dramatically – cartoons from the 50s still look pretty good but nowhere near as lush as the series’ 1940s peak.  Tex Avery’s unit was shut down in 1953, though Michael Lah directed a few Droopys afterwards.  Eventually, MGM came to a fateful conclusion:

The Tom and Jerry cartoons were successful and showed no signs of flagging. But the studio’s Arthur Loew, Sr. reviewed the books and concluded that re-releasing an old Tom and Jerry would bring in 90 percent of the income generated by a brand-new one – without, of course, any of the cost of new production.  At the time, early in 1957, it was Bill and I who ran the MGM cartoon studio.  But the call – and it was just a single phone call – came down from the front office, not to us, but to our business manager: “Close the studio. Lay everybody off.”

Joseph Barbera, My Life In Toons

MGM closed down their in-house cartoon studio on May 15, 1957.  While at first it looked like their careers were over, Hanna and Barbera looked to that new medium that the movie studios were treating with disdain – television.  One problem was that TV couldn’t afford the comparatively large budgets that theatrical animation required.

But they had a solution to that too.

The Hanna-Barbera Connection

Remember that limited animation technique that they had pioneered for Puss Gets The Boot?  Well, Hanna and Barbera decided to expand upon it and codify it for television animation.  They formed H-B Enterprises, later Hanna-Barbera Productions, and recruited most of their animators from MGM to staff up the new studio.

H-B’s cartoons for the small screen would use a fraction of the drawings required for a theatrical cartoon.  Character designs were radically simplified, more complicated actions would happen off-screen, and characters would only move when necessary.  This allowed the studio to bring in each of their cartoon shorts for just $3,000 each – a far cry from the $65,000 that Tom and Jerry required by the end of their run.

The studio focused heavily on creating memorable characters that could carry the cartoons.  And it worked – the initial years of the studio produced many classic characters, such as Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear, Quick Draw McGraw, Top Cat, and the studio’s arguable pinnacle, The Flintstones.  All of these were kept in circulation for decades on television stations around the world.

While Hanna-Barbera Productions was thriving, Tom and Jerry also had a life beyond Hanna and Barbera.  The characters were still popular in theatres, and MGM decided to commission new shorts.  Starting in 1960, Gene Deitch was tasked with directing a series of new Tom and Jerry cartoons from behind the Iron Curtain.  These shorts stick out immensely compared to almost every other Tom and Jerry short ever produced, thanks largely to the visibly limited animation and, well, their profound weirdness.  The Deitch run is divisive – you either late them or you love them.  Me, I actually dig them – they’re not great cartoons, but that weirdness is, to me, actually quite charming.

After 13 of these shorts, MGM moved production back to Hollywood and contracted recently fired Warner Bros. legend Chuck Jones to direct 33 more cartoons.  The animation is markedly improved, but aside from that and an absolutely charming opening title sequence, these shorts are seen as lackluster.  A lot of this is honestly a mismatch between the director and the series itself.  

Jones – by his own admission – never really “got” Tom and Jerry.  Jones’ most famous “chase” cartoons remain the Coyote and Roadrunner shorts, and at times it feels like those characters are cosplaying as Tom and Jerry.  Jones’ tenure at MGM wasn’t all bad – it was here that he directed one of his finest works, the animated TV adaptation of Dr. Seuss’ How The Grinch Stole Christmas.  

The Jones team also helped with the initial packaging of the cartoons for television, which included censoring the installments with the racist Black maid caricature by retracing, recoloring, and redubbing her as a white woman voiced by the legendary June Foray.

While the final shorts were released in 1967, Tom and Jerry – like so many classic theatrical cartoons – became huge television successes.  According to 1979 press advertising from MGM, Tom and Jerry was the number one kids cartoon in syndication – even scoring some choice 7:30pm timeslots in some cities.  I grew up with Tom and Jerry, with fond memories of watching the classic cartoons every weekday afternoon, despite being so terrified of the MGM lion I’d run from the room in fear.  (Seriously, that version of the lion was so threatening.)

In 1975, Hanna-Barbera were reunited with the duo when MGM commissioned their studio to produce The Tom and Jerry Show for ABC.  One problem – the new show was produced for Saturday Morning, aimed explicitly at kids (unlike the theatrical shorts, which were aimed to all audiences), and censorship standards had become far tighter than when the original cartoons were released to television.  The result is a weird show where the characters, almost always portrayed as adversaries previously, were now the best of friends.  Cartoon violence was kept to a minimum.  The theme song is a banger, yes… but when these shorts were run alongside the theatrical classics, it also signaled several minutes of utter banality.

This was followed by a 1980 effort by Filmation for CBS, The Tom and Jerry Comedy Show.  This was a mixed bag.  Sure, they at least returned to the classic chase format, which is a plus.  But it was produced by Filmation, a company routinely considered to be the worst animation studio ever.  Where H-B’s 1975 effort was a bad idea decently executed, the Comedy Show is a decent idea with horrendous technical execution.  The animation is cheap and lifeless, and the music is absolutely wretched.  This is a problem because there is no dialogue, so the music and animation need to be top notch, and when they’re not, the short collapses.

This would be the last Tom and Jerry effort produced by MGM.  MGM’s fortunes had been declining for years, especially under the ownership of Kirk Kerkorian, who used the name on hotels and casinos before combining the studio with United Artists.  In a long sale process, Ted Turner would first acquire MGM from Kerkorian, then in a matter of months sell it BACK to him. But Turner opted to keep most of the MGM film and TV libraries, which by this point included every MGM film prior to 1986, every Warner Bros. film prior to August 1, 1948, and a number of MGM and UA TV efforts like CHiPs and Gilligan’s Island. 

Last but not least, Turner now owned a sizable number of theatrical cartoons – the pre-1948 Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, every theatrical Popeye, and, of course, the MGM shorts including Droopy and Tom and Jerry.  These shorts would enter heavy rotation on Turner’s cable networks.

Meanwhile, Hanna-Barbera entered a slump as the 1980s dawned.  At its 1970s peak, it controlled a staggering 80% of the domestic TV animation market, almost entirely on Saturday mornings.  But by the 1980s its market share was dwindling, largely due to the breakthrough successes of newer animation studios like Marvel Productions, DiC, and co-owned Ruby-Spears.  It largely missed the boat on the syndication boom, opting to exploit its library of characters rather than go all-in on toyetic properties.

By 1988, classic cartoons were en vogue again.  Roger Rabbit was taking the box office by storm.  And Joseph Barbera was looking to the past.  The 50th anniversary of his partnership with Bill Hanna was fast approaching, and thus so was the 50th anniversary of Tom and Jerry.  This prompted him to make contact with Turner Broadcasting and discuss a partnership to do something with the cat and mouse team.  Turner was enthusiastic, and the two quickly came to a deal – they would make a full-length Tom and Jerry movie.

At that point, however, there was restructuring at the studio’s parent company, Taft Broadcasting.  The new owners, Great American Communications, decided to bring in a new president to the studio – David Kirschner.  We’ll talk more about him in our next episode, but Kirschner advised the studio to pull out of the movie project.  Ultimately, Film Roman produced the movie for Turner, and since the movie had the characters talking, let’s just say the results didn’t turn out well.

Anyway.  So they didn’t do the movie, but the two sides clearly still wanted to work together.  Ultimately, a new TV iteration of Tom and Jerry was put into development.  As Turner wanted to keep this new show separate from the 300 theatrical and TV shorts it was still syndicating, the decision was made to do a kiddified version of Tom and Jerry.  This was something Hanna-Barbera was, in a word, obsessed with, having recently produced Flintstone Kids and Pup Named Scooby-Doo for Saturday Morning.

Turner and Hanna-Barbera announced Tom and Jerry Kids in July of 1989.  And Turner made the decision to really invest in this show, giving it what Variety described as a “theatrical-type animation budget.”  (Sidenote: while I haven’t been able to find any solid listings, the very first short, Flippin’ Fido, was available in an HD print with theatrical-style titles on Boomerang, suggesting it was at one point released to theatres.)

While Turner had their cable networks as a possible home for the new show, the budget required to bring it in at the quality they wanted meant that they needed to make the show for broadcast television first – either for the big three networks on Saturday morning, or first run syndication.

And that’s where Fox Kids comes in.

PART THREE: THE FOX KIDS IMPACT

I previously indicated that the original Fox Kids lineup was assembled by executives who weren’t involved with the network, as Margaret Loesch was still tied up with her Marvel contract.  I’ve since spoken to Loesch, and according to her, that is false – no lineup was ready at the time she actually was able to start at Fox in March 1990 – six months before the network was to go on the air.

So that meant the network was starting out on the back foot.  But she was able to use her connections, and Tom and Jerry Kids was still available for pickup.  When the first Fox Kids lineup was announced in April of 1990, Tom and Jerry Kids was included as one of the inaugural Saturday morning titles, and was ready to go on day one of Fox Kids – September 8, 1990.  It even got a special week of shows from October 1-5, 1990, subbing in for the troubled Peter Pan and the Pirates.

So Fox Kids was giving this show a nice push pretty much out of the gate early on.  Which isn’t surprising.  Tom and Jerry was undoubtedly the biggest known property the new network had at that point.  That show was something most seven year olds knew, either through its enduring presence on local broadcast stations or the growing number of households that could see it on Turner’s cable networks. 

The classic shorts were still in wide circulation when Fox Kids started airing the show.  And that was essentially a selling point – hey kids, you like Tom and Jerry, right?  Well, these are new Tom and Jerry shorts!  Made for the 90s!  And you can only see it on this new network!

It was also a natural pickup for Margaret Loesch, given her history.  She previously worked as a supervising executive at Hanna-Barbera from 1979 to 1983, and was on a first name basis with Joseph Barbera.  So when the show was being shopped around, naturally Loesch was an interested buyer.

And the show, by all accounts, did pretty well on Fox Kids.  The first year of the network was challenging, as the network put a lot of muscle behind the failure that was Peter Pan and the Pirates, and there were some notable strikeouts on the Saturday Morning schedule.  But Tom and Jerry Kids was one of a number of shows that did well enough to make it to the network’s second year. 

It was also one of two shows from that first year to survive to Fox Kids’ breakout 1992-93 season.  Fox Kids ended up commissioning a full run of 65 episodes, making it the network’s first wholly original series to land on the weekday roster, the only one in 1992-93 not to be associated with Warner Bros., and predated Bobby’s World on the schedule by two years.

It even did well enough for a spinoff series to hit the Fox Kids Saturday Morning lineup in 1993; Droopy, Master Detective, spinning off the Droopy and Dripple characters as private eyes.  We’ll cover that once we hit 1993-94 on the Fox Kids Club calendar, don’t worry.  Droopy’s popularity itself was on a bit of an upswing at this time.  Not only was he one of the many characters who made an appearance in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, but he also was in the well-received Roger Rabbit shorts that were released during Tom and Jerry Kids’ run.

There is a weird artifact of Droopy’s time on Tom and Jerry Kids that showed up in an unusual place.  During the heyday of the Game Boy Advance in the 2000s, the classic MGM characters were licensed out for cheap shovelware video games.  Tom and Jerry got a few games, mostly based on later productions, but Droopy got a tennis game that released only in Europe.  It’s not good, but it’s notable that the Tom and Jerry Kids names for the characters were used.

PART FOUR: THE VERDICT

So after all that, just how well does Tom and Jerry Kids hold up?  Well, my opinion is mixed.

Let’s start with the positive.  It’s a far more technically and conceptually proficient reboot than either of the two television efforts that preceded it.  That “theatrical-type” budget is pretty evident in most of the episodes, as it’s of a generally higher quality than a typical Hanna-Barbera entry of the time.  This actually looked a lot better than I remembered it looking.  The animation is often pretty good, with a few episodes crossing over into outright greatness.  Nothing that exceeds the shorts from the 1940s, mind, but for television animation of the era, especially Hanna-Barbera, it’s really very solid.

And the visual design is really sharp – vibrant colors, attractive backgrounds, character designs that feel real and three dimensional.  They really did take the time to make this show at least look the part.  And the first short, Flippin’ Fido, was at least made with a theatrical release in mind, and the high production values of several other shorts make me at least suspect that more were planned before Tom and Jerry Kids was picked up by Fox Kids.

The same goes for the conceptual premise of the show.  Again, previous efforts to revive the characters took tremendous liberties with the characters – hell, contemporary efforts took tremendous liberties.  It was nice to see an attempt made to capture the essence of the shorts.  Tom and Jerry are antagonists, there’s enough of the requisite wild takes and fourth wall breaking in the Droopy segments, and Spike and Tyke… well, okay, those are Augie Doggie segments in Spike and Tyke drag, but at least that’s understandable.

Of the three regular segments, the ones I thought were strongest were, oddly enough, the Droopy ones. That shocked me because Tex Avery is such a hard act to follow. They are nowhere near as good as the Tex Avery classics, of course, but they’re a decent enough emulation.  Some of the gags are actually really clever, and there’s even some high concept ones, like the all-hip hop “Rap Rat Is Where It’s At.”  You can see why Droopy was the segment to get its own show.

But while Tom and Jerry Kids was well made and well produced overall, there are flaws that start surfacing when you poke around with this show.

How Tom and Jerry Kids Held Up

I’ll be blunt.  One problem with doing a follow up to a franchise from the golden age of animation is, well, you’re doing a follow up to a franchise from the golden age of animation.  Budgets were relatively high, all of the animation was produced in the states, and executive meddling was extremely low.  (Harry Warner, one of the Warner Bros., famously thought his studio made Mickey Mouse cartoons.)  By the 90s, those conditions simply didn’t exist – if Hanna and Barbera didn’t have to do limited animation for TV, they almost certainly wouldn’t have.

It’s for that reason that the best follow ups generally don’t try to directly compete.  WB has produced a number of Looney Tunes revivals since 1990’s Tiny Toon Adventures, and most actually hold up pretty well – particularly the ones that were consciously not trying to be the originals.  Taz as the petulant teenage child of a nuclear family.  An exploration and expansion of Chuck Jones’ classic Duck Dodgers.  Bugs and Daffy as wacky roommates in a sitcom.

Tom and Jerry Kids, unfortunately, winds up in that “direct competition” bracket.  Despite aging down the characters, these are just… an attempt to do modern versions of classic cartoons on a television budget.  The Tom and Jerry Kids cartoons aren’t BAD, but they do come off as… rather flat.

Again, this isn’t a flaw of Tom and Jerry Kids specifically.  The original Tom and Jerry shorts were some of the most lavishly produced animated shorts of the 40s and 50s.  It was a level of craftsmanship that, again, could not happen on a television budget in 1990, even if Turner gave this a “theatrical-type budget.”

There’s one thing that I think really lets it down – the music and sound design.  Tom and Jerry boasted some incredible music by composer Scott Bradley.  Shorts like Mouse in Manhattan or The Two Musketeers are vastly improved by his work.  Tom and Jerry Kids uses treacly canned music in every cartoon, and it got to be pretty grating as I worked my way through the series.  I also couldn’t help but notice the arguable overuse of those ubiquitous Hanna-Barbera sound effects.

Part of that is the target audience.  While they became kids TV staples, the original shorts were aimed at general audiences. They’d air not just before kiddie films, but major MGM motion pictures like their musicals. (Hell, Tom and Jerry were in a couple of those musicals.)  Some of Tex’s cartoons, like Red Hot Riding Hood, pushed the very boundaries of the restrictive Hays Code.

Tom and Jerry Kids was on Fox Kids, and was subject to Fox’s standards and practices department.  And they were judging it on a kids show level, not a Simpsons level.  That means the show is restrained in the amount of cartoon violence it was able to show.  This cuts both ways; Tom and Jerry Kids feels a bit defanged compared to the originals, but I can also see its value as a “safer” way to introduce kids to the characters without the more intense violence and sketchier content.

What I can pin on T&J Kids specifically is the listlessness of its writing.  Calaboose Cal is a great character, but one can’t help but wonder what he would be like if it were John Schwartzwelder or Conan O’Brien giving him dialogue and not Pat Ventura.

Calaboose Cal is a symptom of another problem endemic to the Tom and Jerry segments specifically  I’ll just say it – they have Poochie.  Actually, scratch that – they have a rotating cast of Poochies.  The original Tom and Jerry shorts did have these characters – but not all the time, what dialogue they had was kept short and sweet, the shorts still focused on Tom and Jerry, and you only saw them every so often.

That isn’t the case here; these side characters have starring roles, extensive dialogue, and take focus away from Tom and Jerry.  They drive the plot in a way the side characters of the original shorts never really did.  Take the short “Two Stepping Tom,” from late in the show’s run.  Despite what the title suggests, this is actually about Tundo, an elephant who appeared in a previous short, here depicted as a country-western singer.  Tom and Jerry don’t even show up until halfway through the seven minute runtime, and despite being in the title of the short, Tom is really only there to be repeatedly crushed by Tundo.

The side characters became so prominent that, in addition to showing up all over the show’s second title sequence, they got several solo cartoons in the back half of the show’s run.  My guess is they were trying to see if any of them could show up either in a solo spinoff or as secondary segments on Droopy Master Detective, but ultimately nothing ever came of them.

I think the biggest drawback, however, is that the emulation of classic cartoons is ultimately surface level.  It makes an attempt, but it’s held back in enough places that it ultimately feels weak.  Specifically, it pales in comparison to two very similar shows on the air during its run: Tiny Toon Adventures and Ren and Stimpy.

Tiny Toons is kind of an apples and oranges comparison, but it is essentially the same “kid versions of classic cartoon characters” premise that guides this show. It’s also made by a bunch of Hanna-Barbera veterans, most notably Tom Ruegger, who oversaw another kiddified franchise in the excellent A Pup Named Scooby-Doo.  What elevates Tiny Toons over Tom and Jerry Kids is the production values – better overseas studios, better writing, and most importantly – fully orchestral custom scores ala Carl Stalling and Scott Bradley.

The more direct comparison is Ren and Stimpy.  The crew behind that show also looked to classic cartoons, though more Bob Clampett than Tex Avery or Hanna and Barbera.  Instead of being a surface level emulation, Ren and Stimpy adopted the production methods that MGM and Termite Terrace utilized – storyboards and not scripts, a unit-style director system, etc.  The results are undeniable – it’s a far more convincing take on “let’s do a modern version of the classic cartoons we love”.

Tom and Jerry Kids was good for what it was – an attempt at doing new Tom and Jerry shorts on a larger than average TV budget.  But it falls a little short of its promise..  

PART FIVE: AFTER TOM AND JERRY KIDS

I’ll be honest here – Tom and Jerry Kids didn’t have a ton of impact on Fox Kids.  It was one of only two first year shows that the network didn’t have a direct financial stake in, so the promotional muscle was elsewhere.  If you turned on your local Fox station, you were more likely to be blasted with ads for Peter Pan and the Pirates, whatever syndicated shows they were offering, and then maybe something for Bobby’s World.

And that remained true as the network expanded.  Tom and Jerry Kids was a comfortable presence on the lineup, but from 1992 onwards, the network’s focus was on the flood of Warner Bros shows and the continued development of in-house offerings like X-Men and Eek the Cat.  This was the first “well, let’s put this on while we wait for what we want to see” show.  And while there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, I do think it’s a shame, because Tom and Jerry Kids is ultimately an easy watch even if it doesn’t entirely live up to its promise.

Tom and Jerry aired its last new show on Fox Kids in late 1993, and reruns continued to air on the network until August 12, 1994.  This would not be the last time Fox Kids went to the classic cartoon well.  They picked up Tiny Toons starting in 1991, reruns of the Ralph Bakshi Mighty Mouse in 1992, the classic cartoon inspired Animaniacs in 1993, Casper in 1996, and The New Woody Woodpecker in 1999.  They even straight up aired old Looney Tunes for a few years.  This type of programming was a key part of the Fox Kids programming mix.

While Tom and Jerry Kids was enjoying its long run on Fox, dramatic changes were happening behind the scenes at Hanna-Barbera.  The most important development was the 1991 sale of the studio to… wait for it… Turner Broadcasting.  Not only did Turner own the characters and the series, they now owned the studio producing the show as well. 

While Turner was considered a dark horse bidder, it’s pretty important to note that there were actually some pretty strong ties between the two parties that predated the purchase.  Turner aired Flintstones reruns for years prior to buying the studio.  As stated previously, they were going to make a Tom and Jerry movie together.  And a special celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Hanna-Barbera partnership aired on Turner’s TNT in 1989.  Both sides had an active working relationship with each other, and when Hanna-Barbera was put up for sale, Turner had enough knowledge to make a serious play for it.

When Turner took charge of the studio, they chose to keep it in operation, but made some significant management changes.  I’ll save the full story for next time, but Turner installed a new president with a decidedly different outlook on cartoon production.  Tom and Jerry Kids was one of the few shows that survived the ownership change, likely because everyone involved – Fox, Turner, H-B – was satisfied with the show.

Hanna-Barbera would prove central to one more Ted Turner initiative you might have heard of.  On October 1, 1992, Cartoon Network launched on cable systems across the country.  And the first character to be seen on Cartoon Network?  None other than Droopy, and from what I can tell, he’s voiced by his Tom and Jerry Kids VA, Don Messick.

Cartoon Network would showcase the entirety of Turner’s vast cartoon holdings.  There were 24 hours to fill, so well-known classics like Flintstones and Jetsons shared space with things like The Gary Coleman Show.  Nearly the entire Hanna-Barbera catalog could be seen at one point or another on Cartoon Network.  As previous deals expired and the new network’s coverage of the country increased, Hanna-Barbera shows would slowly migrate to be shown on Cartoon Network exclusively.

Legacy and Impact of Tom and Jerry Kids

Tom and Jerry was, unsurprisingly, a day one pickup for Cartoon Network, and Tom and Jerry Kids made the transition to Cartoon Network in 1995.  Tom and Jerry cartoons were popular on the network – Tom and Jerry Kids remained on the schedule until the early 2000s, and the OG shorts remained on the network well into the 2010s.

After Turner was sold to what was then Time Warner in 1996, stewardship of the Tom and Jerry franchise passed to Warner Bros., with the Hanna-Barbera studio morphing into Cartoon Network Studios.  The franchise proved just as enduring as ever, with WB producing new Tom and Jerry animation beginning in the 2000s.  To date, four separate revivals, a slew of direct to DVD movies, and another theatrical film have all been produced under Warner’s oversight.

Since then, Tom and Jerry Kids has fallen through the cracks a little bit.  Only the first season has seen a domestic home media release, and it’s missing from Max, though it was available in full through the Boomerang streaming service until its 2024 shutdown.

Final Thoughts on Tom and Jerry Kids

Its place in the franchise has been obscured, and I do think that’s a bit of a shame.  Because I do think Tom and Jerry Kids is worth seeking out.  It’s not a great version of Tom and Jerry – the originals will always be superior – but it’s worth an easy Saturday Morning watch.  Its impact on Fox Kids may have been minimal, but it helped the network get through those rocky first two years – and that’s not something to sneeze at.

NEXT: The second of the two first year Hanna-Barbera shows on Fox Kids.  It’s time to set sail, because we’re off to find the 13 lost treasures of rule.

If you want to learn more about Hanna-Barbera, I highly recommend checking out My Life In Toons, the early 90s autobiography from Joseph Barbera.  There’s a solid chunk dealing with his time over at MGM, and his information about the Tom and Jerry movie helped fill in some of the research gaps in the late 80s.

Thanks for watching.  Sorry this took so long to come out, but hopefully we’ll be back on track this year.  2025 promises to be absolute garbage, but I hope my videos this year will ease some of the pain.  Don’t forget to like this video, subscribe to this channel, and hit the bell icon to get notifications.  Pirates of Dark Water is next, one of my favorite cartoons as a kid.  I’m excited to see if it holds up.

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