Saturday Evening Puss is only the second Tom and Jerry film of the 1950's and proves that in this new decade the cat and mouse duo were still at the top of their game.
In this short film, Tom's owner leaves for a bridge game. Tom then decides to throw a party with all his cat friends. The party involves loud music, which makes it impossible for Jerry to go to sleep. Jerry tries to tell them to stop the party, but Tom and his friends simply brush the mouse off. Jerry decides that this means he has to get revenge on the various cats.
This is a top-notch cartoon in every way. The whole film is full of a great sense of energy that never lets up. From start to finish, this cartoon moves by at a fast pace that makes it still a lot of fun no matter how many times you watched it. Throughout this fast-paced film, there is gag after gag after gag. Most of these gags are simply wonderful and there are a lot of great laughs to be had here. Not one gag in the entire film misses. Each gag is also made better by how simply perfect William Hanna's timing was in this film. While there have been many great cartoon makers, few had the incredible sense of timing that William Hanna did, and this film is a perfect showcase for his talent. The music is also simply wonderful. For a cartoon where the story revolves around music, this is very important. Luckily the music is just as fast paced and fun as the action on screen. Not only does the music enhance the action on the screen, but I would still enjoy just simply listening to this music if it wasn't attached to the cartoon. The ending of this film is especially perfect as it twists our expectations of how a Tom and Jerry cartoon should end.
-This film features Tom's owner, who is known to many Tom and Jerry fans as Mammy Two Shoes. As many Tom and Jerry fans know, you rarely see her face on screen. This cartoon is one of the rare exceptions as you can briefly see her face as she is running home towards the end. However, in the Tom and Jerry comics and story books, her face was shown much more often than in the cartoons. Mammy Two Shoes being a bit of a black stereotype has been censored in various TV airings of these cartoons. This film features the strangest version of that. Often times in the 1960's June Foray would provide a different voice for the character and the character would have her skin color re-colored. The censorship of this film took a very different approach, where Mammy is replaced by a white teenage bobbysoxer girl. Instead of going to a bridge game, she was going to a dance hop. A VHS version of this cartoon had an odd mistake, with the animation from the censored version and the audio of the original.
The credited animators on this film are Ed Barge, Irven Spence, Kenneth Muse and Ray Patterson. However, the Tom and Jerry Wiki states, "Despite the credit, Ray Patterson does no animation on this short." The cartoon would be reissued to theaters in 1957. It would also be included in the feature length compilation, Tom and Jerry Festival of Fun (1962). Though this movie featured no new animation, Jerry's Diary (1949) was used as a framing device to make it feel like a feature length movie instead of simply a selection of cartoons. The cartoons included in this movie were Old Rocking Chair Tom (1948), The Little Orphan (1949), Jerry’s Cousin (1951), Professor Tom (1948), Mouse Cleaning (1948), Yankee Doodle Mouse (1943), Mouse Trouble (1944), Nit-Witty Kitty (1951), Push-Button Kitty (1952) and Saturday Evening Puss.
Below is the movie poster for this film.
Resources Used
https://tomandjerry.fandom.com/wiki/Saturday_Evening_Puss#Trivia
https://cartoonresearch.com/index.php/tom-and-jerry-festival-of-fun-1962/
https://cartoonresearch.com/index.php/party-animals-and-other-species-part-5-leftovers/
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