La Parrillada de Tom

The whole Gene Deitch series... some of the comments that have made about them, like they were made in a third world country...

In truth, they WERE farmed out. Metro closed its animation studio in 1957, whereupon Hanna Barbera took about a year to retool their team to produce their legendary fodder for American television, including Huckleberry Hound and Yogi Bear.

By 1960, Metro belatedly realized that they had made a telling financial blunder (even though the last handful of shorts by H-B for Metro were, to a one, pitiful) and contracted with Deitch to produce exactly one "season" of Tom and Jerry cartoons at a fraction of the budget they had earlier enjoyed.

In a move that presaged all the later cartoon outsourcing to Korea, Deitch farmed all the work out to a low budget studio in Czechoslovakia. The Czech people were known for their production of innovative and iconoclastic cartoons - and let us be clear, Deitch was an artistic genius. You can tell from his work from the post-War period forward (largely collected in a coffee table book by Fantagraphics years later). But this stuff... this stuff... disastrous.

Other commenters here have gone over the malevolent violence of the "owner" character in this series, and the bargain basement schlocky music, and the ghastly, soulless drawings that truly took character animation back a full 30 years. However, there is one moment in "High Steaks" which has confused me for a long, long time.

In a sequence where Tom goes fleeing out of the yard (the grill might be burning on his tail or something), Jerry follows him as far as a street corner, then stops. Then a telephone is heard to ring.

This is the WTF moment of the whole cartoon. It has no context. I am more or less convinced that a phone rang during the recording session for the rinky-dink music, and it was just left in there. It's sort of like when Ringo Starr, drunk and stumbling, knocked over some gear during a recording session for the "Yellow Submarine" soundtrack, and the sound was left in for all eternity.

It's been said - and not without accuracy - that the Chuck Jones T&J's of 1964-66/7 were no great shakes, that they looked brilliant on screen but had none of the soul of the HB originals. Chuck Jones himself was on record agreeing with this assertion. Personally I do disagree but only for the few shorts in which Jones, Michael Maltese, and composer Eugene Poddany collaborated - the results are classic Jones and wonderful to behold. But even the lamest entries in the series Jones produced show cohesiveness, attention to quality and detail, and the ability to build a story out of a series of chase gags.

With little if any exception, the Deitch T&Js show none of these qualities. The only thing WORSE than these, are the T&Js that H-B themselves produced for TV years later in which - for the sake of Standards & Practices - Tom and Jerry are toothless, dimensionless friends in which Jerry sports a disastrous red bow-tie for no reason. Years later, this was lampooned in "The Simpsons" in the episode where Itchy and Scratchy succumb to PC pressure and "share, and share, and share and share and share."

Tom and Jerry are always violent...everyone knows that. However, this kind of violence I found disturbing. I am fine with 2 anthropomorphized animals hitting each other with mallets and anvils...but to watch a human strangle Tom after he was being tortured by Jerry? no. That's too much. The Gene Deitch (spelling) shorts are all terrible. They have humans being cruel to Tom non stop...usually after Jerry does something terrible to him to start. The old H B shorts had them switch who was the aggressor and they both got licks in. The Deitch ones are 100% one sided in that Jerry is always the aggressor and Tom never gets his own licks in because that "owner" of his would always grab him the second he catches up to Jerry and starts to mercilessly beat him. The worst part was when Tom pleads for his owner not to hurt him and he, without a seconds thought, beats him. It's really awkward to watch...to bad my son can't get enough of Tom and Jerry and I have to be in the same room as this and the other Deitch shorts on a daily basis.

I saw this one and Sorry Safari when I was a kid and they've stuck in my head. I just plain hated it then and hate it now. It isn't just that the animation is bad and the sound effects like something out of a nightmare; these cartoons have a sadistic streak a mile wide. When I watch these entries in the Tom and Jerry series I can't help but dislike Mr. Deitch, not just for the shoddy production values but for even thinking these things up in the first place. Jerry is just plain evil here and in the others, and Tom exists to be tortured. In the Deitch year Tom and Jerry really was about like the Itchy and Scratchy cartoons on The Simpsons. The only one of the lot that's any good at all is the Tom and Jerry Cartoon Kit.

Gene deitch who made these shorts thought these were better than Hanna and Joe's shorts. Sorry this short has bad music as well as bad jokes. At least the owner is not as bad as he is in sorry safari. Still this is a bad cartoon.

This ain't no way to treat Tom and classifies as animal cruelty. Person who made that episode should have been banned from TV networks for lifetime.

Level of aggression in this episode is unbearable and doesn't compare at all to early HB episodes where black lady was the villain.

For me it appears that Gene Deitch had some kind of a grudge against cats and wanted to visualise his trauma on the screen. Maybe childhood trauma, I don't know, a psychologist should examine it. Otherwise I find no reason to picture Tom like this, no child watching this episode will learn good things from it, it only perpetuates vigilantism on cats.