I was at Wal Mart today, and I decided to eat lunch in the McDonald’s inside the Wal Mart.
There was a TV showing OLD cartoons. (My guess is that it was a massive collection of public domain cartoons on DVD. You can find these in the dollar bin, or a similar locaiton.)
I am not sure if thre was any sound to the cartoons or not, as there was no volume on the TV. However, the cartoons were real old (Bosko era) and were experimental, that is to say, you could tell the animation medium was still exploring it’s space.
-In one cartoon, one of the characters was blowing music notes out of a saxaphone. Once the note came out of the sax, it would turn into a goose, with the body of the note changing into the body of the goose. Similar “effects” to this were also shown.
Intriqued by what I was watching (I knew I had never seen anything like this before) I continued watching the tv while I ate. To my surprise, the collection of cartoons were by Van Burren (I believe) and showed two men (Tall and skinny, and short and fat) by the (apparent) names of Tom and Jerry.
Tom and Jerry, courtesy of Wikipedia. You are correct. They are in the public domain.
Interestingly enough, Joseph Barbera began his career as an animator on this cartoon series, so he apparently lifted the characters’ names for the cat and mouse duo that he and William Hanna later created. Fleischer’s animators sometimes moonlighted at Van Buren’s studios, which were across the street, so there are stylistic similarities between these cartoons and Fleischer’s.
The Van Buren Tom and Jerry were renamed Dick and Larry when shown on television in later years to avoid confusion with the other well-known animated characters by that name.
There was also a well-known musical duo who performed under the name Tom and Jerry, although they’re probably better known by their real names- Simon and Garfunkel.
Maybe. But it equally well could be that the idea of naming the cat Tom would have been a natural idea anyway. And once you’ve got a character named Tom, the idea of naming the other Jerry follows (a Tom and Jerry was a popular cocktail).
And the cocktail itself was a reference to the celebrated duo of Tom and Jerry in Egan’s Life in London, or The Day and Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthorn Esq. and his Elegant Friend Corinthian Tom from 1821. The book gave rise to lots of different Tom-and-Jerry phrases and references through the 19th century, firmly associating the names as an established pairing.