Oscar Horrors: "Dr Jekyll and Mr Mouse"
Monday, October 24, 2016 at 7:11PM Boo! It's time for "Oscar Horrors". Each night at 7 through Halloween we look back on a horror film or horror-adjacent film's Oscar nomination until Halloween. Here's Nathaniel R...
Here's an odd statistic to consider. Did you know that Tom & Jerry was Oscar's favorite character-based cartoon franchise? The MGM cat and mouse team won seven Oscars in the Best Animated Short category, more than any other series but for Disney's "Silly Symphonies" which also won seven times. Tom & Jerry's very first short was nominated and they won for four consecutive years from 1943-1946 at the peak of their fame.
That winning streak was interrupted on their fifth nomination for the Halloween appropriate Dr Jekyll and Mr Mouse (1947), a riff on the classic horror story Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in which tiny Jerry gets super sized and super strong when Tom tries to poison him because he doesn't want to share his milk...
Who knew that mice liked milk?
Tom's concoction is made of Acid, Bleach, Bug Powder (lolwhat?), and a whole lot of moth balls. The recipe is finished with one drop of ammo (who knew it came in liquid form?!), one drop of unnamed poison and a melted spoon.
The potion recipe is clever as is Tom's terror at Jerry's new muscle bound figure... he can tear through phone books and fire pokers don't even faze him in a funny sight gag. But overall its a slight short and beyond the large beclawed shadows it doesn't make full use of the horror gags it could pull from.
One wonders why Tom & Jerry cartoons were so much more popular with Oscars than their contemporaries? Dr Jekyll and Mr Mouse lost the 1947 Oscar to Tweetie Pie another cartoon franchise based around a cat predator and his smarter prey Sylvester & Tweetie. But Tom & Jerry would triump three more times for The Little Orphan (1948), The Two Mouseketeers (1951), and Johann Mouse (1952). All in all the series was nominated an incredible amount of times.
COMPLETE "TOM & JERRY" OSCAR HISTORY
Well over 100 shorts in the original MGM run (1940-1958)
13 nominations and 7 wins
- Puss Gets the Boot (1940) nominee and the very first "Tom & Jerry" cartoon
- The Night Before Christmas (1941) nominee
- The Yankee Doodle Mouse (1943) winner
- Mouse Trouble (1944) winner
- Quiet Please! (1945) winner
This same Oscar year -- during the heighth of Tom & Jerry's popularity, Jerry also appeared in the Best Picture nominee Anchors Aweigh dancing with Gene Kelly - The Cat Concierto (1946) winner
- Dr Jekyll and Mr Mouse (1947) nominee
- The Little Orphan (1948) winner
- Hatch Up Your Troubles (1949) nominee
- Jerry's Cousin (1950) nominee
- The Two Mousketeers (1951) winner
- Johann Mouse (1952) winner
- Touché, Pussycat! (1954) nominee
The franchise continued on with regular shorts through 1967 but it switched production houses / teams several times after the 50s. From the 70s onward Tom & Jerry have had a short-lived television series built around them in every single decade. Staying power, or Hollywood's desperate need for content that's familiar, you decide.
Can you imagine anything winning 7 times in our modern era? Even Pixar, if you stretch and count it as a single franchise, has only won 3 times. The only franchise in modern history that might compare to the old series that used to dominate the category is Wallace and Gromit. Of their four short films the first three were nominated and two of them won. Their debut feature Wallace & Gromit and the Curse of the Were-Rabbit also won its category.
Season 3 Oscar Horrors is a Wrap
The Bad Seed - Supporting Actress
Bram Stoker's Dracula - Makeup
Flatliners - Sound Editing
Fatal Attraction - Film Editing
Kwaidan - Foreign Film
Misery - Actress
Pan's Labyrinth - Production Design
The Sixth Sense - Picture
Sleepy Hollow - Production Design
Sweeney Todd - Best Actor
The Uninvited - Cinematography
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? - Cinematography
Reader Comments (5)
Oh my god, childhood!!! (via Eastern European TV, that is - I'm not from the 40s)
"From the 70s onward Tom & Jerry have had a short-lived television series built around them in every single decade. Staying power, or Hollywood's desperate need for content that's familiar, you decide."
Now that you mention it I'm shocked we haven't gotten a big-budget CG animated Tom & Jerry a la the Chipmunk movies, but with more stabbing and poison. Did Itchy & Scratchy make Tom & Jerry's slightly tamer antics seem dated?
The title "Oscar Horrors" always reminds me of the likes of James Stewart in The Philadelphia Story, Grace Kelly in The Country Girl, Don Ameche in Cocoon or Renée Zellweger in Cold Mountain. That's genuinely frightening.
Of course, the part of this story that's never mentioned is that Hanna and Barbera would never have pushed the Tom & Jerry cartoons to their level of wild action and story sophistication if they hadn't been completing with M-G-M's *other* short cartoon unit, Tex Avery's.
To a lifetime animation scholar like me, H&B are very much followers - first of Disney in the thirties (luscious "realistic" animation with cutsie stories), then of Avery's even-wilder-than-his-tenure-at-Warners work at M-G-M in the forties and early fifties. They were solid talents, but not originators, and it's too bad that they monopolized the cartoon Oscar for so long. Pretty much the M-G-M way, right? Make it more opulent than the other studios and suck up the awards! (The internal M-G-M motto was, "Make it right, do it big, give it class!")
Me, I'll take any of Avery's insanely brilliant one-shot M-G-M cartoons (Who Killed Who?, King-Sized Canary, Little Tinker, etc.) over the technically great... but endlessly redundant plots and gags of the Tom & Jerry shorts.
ahaha first tim jerry attack to tom