The untold truth of Tom and Jerry

There aren't many cartoon series that are older or more enduring than Tom and Jerry. From the early 1940s to the late 1950s — the quintessential era of lushly animated, beautifully scored short cartoons that screened in movie theaters before a film — a grey cat named Tom and a brown mouse named Jerry fought each other to the near-death dozens of times. Why? Well, Tom was a cat, and Jerry was a mouse. It's the natural order of things. Also, Jerry was much smarter than Tom and tended to always foil the cat's plots and inflict just as much violence in return (or more).

Head-to-head animated combat, pop culture duos, and delightful mayhem just wouldn't be the same had Tom and Jerry not laid out the template 80 years ago. And the two characters have lived on in TV reruns and numerous revivals and re-creations, from brand new cartoon series to feature films. And today, we're taking a look at some little-known details about their long, wild history. From their award-winning achievements to their strange feature film, here's the story of the original cutthroat cat-and-mouse cartoon pair.

Would Jasper and Jinx have been as successful?

"Tom" and "Jerry" sound like two perfectly generic, ethnically vague, mid-20th century American male names. In other words, they were perfect for the names of a stylistically simple cartoon cat and mouse. But creators William Hanna and Joseph Barbera didn't come up with those names — the ones for their iconic, undying creations — until after they'd already produced a cartoon about the pair. The first Tom and Jerry cartoon, 1940's "Puss Gets the Boot," is actually a "Jasper and Jinx" toon. Jasper was the name of the cat and Jinx the name of the mouse. Hanna and Barbera just didn't think those monikers suited their creations, and seeking ideas from crew members, they went with animator John Carr's suggestion of Tom and Jerry

Tom and Jerry was one of the first name brands in cartoons, and various studios churned out shorts featuring the cat and mouse at each other's throats from 1940 to 1967. But Tom and Jerry never really went away after they stopped starring in theatrical shorts. A library of nearly 200 cartoons was packaged for television, and these episodes have been rerun countless times since. Those old toons always being on TV kept Tom and Jerry in the collective consciousness, creating a demand for new material starring the duo, no matter how much of a stretch it could be.

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