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00:00Hi, this is Michael Mallory, author of Hanna-Barbera cartoons, and I'm here to talk about one of my favorite comedy teams, Tom and Jerry, in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Mouse, directed by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera.
00:15This is interesting, if you know about Tom and Jerry, looking at the animators here, these are not all of their usual animators.
00:23They had a standard animation unit that stayed pretty constant for quite a while, but the name Michael Law, who worked frequently with Tex Avery, was in the list of animators, and it was rarer that Mike Law worked with Tom and Jerry.
00:40It's also a little bit rare in the careers of Tom and Jerry that they do a deliberate parody of a particular property, in this case, of course, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
00:52Tom and Jerry tended to be pretty universal in their themes, outside of simply the chase, the cat and the mouse, they didn't deliberately spoof particular characters or particular titles, but in this one they're doing a take on the classic horror story.
01:12This is kind of a transitional version of Tom, he's not quite the streamlined Tom that we know if you watch Tom and Jerry on television for the last 30 years or so, but he's not the rounded, harmonizing version of Tom that they started with, he's somewhere in the middle.
01:34The Tom and Jerry animators were enormously talented and skilled, obviously, you can see it up on the screen. They were hugely talented in terms of personality animation, which has a very specific definition, it's not just a broad term.
01:49Personality animation means that particular character is animated in such a way as to distinguish him from every other character and he cannot be every other character. So when you look at, say, two mice, Nibbles the mouse looks a lot like Jerry the mouse, except for relative size, but they don't act the same way, they don't move the same way.
02:12Nibbles the mouse has to walk about five times as fast as Jerry to cover the same area. So that is his personality, that's the personality animation that these fellows put in.
02:27It did come initially from Joe Barbera who was very facile with expressions and with body language and Joe himself would do little quick sketches to get across to the animators what he wanted and then they would take that sketch and flesh it out.
02:43One of the animators on the Tom and Jerry staff was a gentleman named Ken Mewes who was reputed to be the fastest animator in the industry. He could do his footage and that's how animation was measured. They call it footage, what it means is how many drawings it takes to fill up one foot of film, approximately 66 drawings as I recall.
03:06And he could whip out, they were supposed to do 25 feet of footage a week, he could do it by Tuesday.
03:14Tom has mixed up this stuff, he's obviously not simply out to play with Jerry here, he definitely wants to get rid of Jerry. Jerry being very curious, but a little bit wary, isn't sure if he's going to fall for it or not.
03:28Notice the expressions on both of these characters when they turn and look at us, you can tell exactly what is going on in their heads, that's how these cartoons were produced without dialogue because the animation was so good that you could see what they were thinking, you didn't have to have words to know.
03:59Tom obviously realizes he has made a very bad mistake, the music incidentally is interesting too because usually the Tom and Jerry jazzy music does not break for this kind of melodramatic, forceful, almost horror movie, robotic sound that we're getting now.
04:20The music was done by a fellow named Scott Bradley who did all of the MGM cartoons.
04:26One of the things that Joe Barbera always used to say is that the key to Tom's character is that he's a cat, above all, he's a cat.
04:34Whenever you forget the fact that he's a cat and make him too much of a human being, there's those great eyeball takes, then you lose the essence of Tom.
04:43Cats can be seen as bullies, they play with mice, they toy with things just the way Tom does.
04:49Jerry, on the other hand, is not a typical mouse.
04:54In this cartoon, as we'll see, he's probably at his strongest at this point.
04:59Though, in the end, he's not a typical mouse.
05:02He's not a typical mouse.
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05:51He's not a typical mouse.
05:52Because the camera zoomed along the entire length of a whole kitchen scene.
06:03Jerry is now...
06:05For those people who have only been around in the electronic age,
06:10that thing that Tom is using on the refrigerator is what used to be used to open cans.
06:15It was done manually.
06:17You simply don't see those anymore.
06:19A little bit of history here.
06:23Jerry has mixed up another batch of the stuff.
06:26Obviously he knows the recipe.
06:28So Tom is expecting to become Super Tom and extract his revenge.
06:34But perhaps Jerry didn't do it quite right.
06:44For the relative size to be done,
06:47because Jerry obviously would have to be a small drawing to be in the same field as large size Tom,
06:54the drawing here of Tom must have been so small,
06:58physically small for the cell painters to ink and paint.
07:02They must have had to use a magnifying glass.
07:05Because that is a tiny little drawing,
07:07but you can still see the body language and the expression.
07:11We hope you enjoyed Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
07:15Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Mouse, thank you for watching.