The Cat-and-Mouse Chase That Started with a Boot

The studio bosses told them not to bother making another one. The audience had other ideas.

In the late 1930s, two MGM animators — William Hanna and Joseph Barbera — pitched their colleagues a cartoon about a cat and a mouse in constant conflict. The idea was dismissed as overdone; everyone had seen cat-and-mouse gags before. But producer Fred Quimby, head of MGM's short-film department, gave the pair the green light to make exactly one cartoon, and on February 10, 1940, that cartoon hit theaters.

It was called "Puss Gets the Boot." And almost nothing about it looked like the Tom and Jerry the world would come to know.

The cat wasn't Tom — he was Jasper, a scruffy, battle-hardened street cat, meaner than the character Tom would grow into. The mouse had no name at all (in pre-production he was called Jinx; an MGM magazine later referred to him as Pee-Wee). The short was loosely based on Aesop's fable "The Cat and the Mice," and the only name on the credits was producer Rudolf Ising — Hanna and Barbera went uncredited, even though Ising had virtually nothing to do with the production.

The plot, though, was pure Tom and Jerry from the first frame. Jasper torments the little mouse — even painting a fake mousehole on the wall so the mouse keeps running into it — until the Lady of the House (voiced by actress Lillian Randolph) delivers an ultimatum: if the cat breaks one more thing, he's getting thrown out. The clever mouse spends the rest of the cartoon weaponizing that threat, menacing the furniture until Jasper is the one living in terror.

MGM's executives were unimpressed and told Hanna and Barbera to move on to other cartoons. Audiences disagreed. The short was a hit, earning an Academy Award nomination — though it lost to another MGM cartoon, "The Milky Way," about three kittens who lost their mittens.

What turned a one-off into an institution was a single fan. Bessa Short, a businesswoman from Texas, wrote to MGM asking whether more cat-and-mouse cartoons were coming. Her letter helped convince management to commission a series, and the unnamed cat and mouse were christened Tom and Jerry.

The rest is animation history. The duo starred in more than 110 theatrical shorts, winning seven Academy Awards for Best Animated Short Subject. And the Hanna-Barbera partnership — born in that dismissed one-off — would last half a century, going on to create The Flintstones, Yogi Bear, The Jetsons, and Scooby-Doo.

All because a Texas viewer wrote a letter.

No photograph could be verified under a free license at the required size for this story, so it runs without a main image.