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Nobody wanted Hanna and Barbera to make Tom and Jerry
"Puss Gets the Boot" got the greenlight!
Before Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera were the kings of the Saturday morning cartoon, they were two animators who wanted to make a name for themselves and their first project together was an ancestor to Tom and Jerry cartoons.
February 20 is the anniversary of Puss Gets the Boot, the prototype for Tom and Jerry but in this cartoon their names were Jasper and Jinx. The year was 1939 and MGM's animation department was floundering. They had struggled to find real leadership for the animation department - and a real hit cartoon. Having gone through several managing producers in their tenure, the environment was tense, and Hanna and Barbera were worried. The two colleagues' desks were across from each other and they knew they would make a great team. Convinced it was their last chance to make something together, Hanna and Barbera set off making a cat and mouse cartoon.
Not a single person supported the idea. Barbera recalled the reaction of his colleagues "We were greeted with a universal chorus of jeers and raspberries. A cat and a mouse! How unoriginal can you get? And how much variety can you milk out of such a hackneyed, shopworn idea? How many cat-and-mouse cartoons can you make?" The two animators were unsupported - but not stopped. They quickly got to work on Puss Gets the Boot. With very limited resources, the duo had to experiment and this led to the creation of a method they would later use at their own studio: limited animation.
While not getting too technical, limited animation meant that they could create a cartoon with 1800 individual drawings versus the 13,000 or more most cartoons required at the time. They also used camera movements so they could animate less and get the cartoon done faster, like smacking the camera whenever the cat ran into the wall to "shake" the house. The result of these innovations was a finished cartoon before anyone really noticed that Hanna and Barbera were off doing their own thing.
Finishing the cartoon, they presented a preview to the MGM higher brass, which Hanna described as "When Quimby and his staff entered the projection room, they looked more than a little dubious over whether this thing might go over. A few minutes later, however, the room was literally rocking with laughter as the clattering film in the movieola spun out a series of frantic chases and mysterious antics of two precocious characters that we hoped might prove to be a winning cartoon duo for MGM." The duo was given the green light to complete the cartoon, but it wasn't given any special fanfare, rather, as Joe Barbera puts it "It was just dumped in theaters."
Puss Gets the Boot turned out to be wildly popular and was even nominated for an Academy Award. It was a hit, running for weeks at the theaters and was considered the most successful MGM cartoon so far. Despite the success, Hanna and Barbera were instructed to not make any more Tom and Jerry cartoons. Quimby did not want to put all the eggs in one basket, to which Barbera later reflected "Before Puss Gets the Boot, MGM hadn't had a single good egg to put into any basket." So, Hanna and Barbera continued to work together but on other cartoons, which all flopped. What brought Tom and Jerry back to life was the fans - specifically Besa Short, a Texas theater exhibitor.
Short wrote to Quimby "When are we going to see more of those charming cat-and-mouse cartoons?". Finally, Quimby changed his tune and asked Hanna and Barbera to make more Tom and Jerry cartoons.
