Studio: MGM Animation/Visual Arts
Distributor: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Produced by: Chuck Jones
Short Synopsis
A crate of cheese is being loaded onto a ship. The smell drifts into Jerry's mousehole, takes on a life of its own, and drags the sleeping mouse out by the nose, bopping him on the head to wake him. But Tom is guarding the gangway. Jerry watches Tom salute the captain as he boards, so he dresses up as the captain, using a broom for height, and parades up the ramp while Tom salutes in confusion. Tom soon spots the mouse under the uniform and pushes the gangway aside; Jerry falls into the water and narrowly escapes a shark. Tom is laughing, until the real captain falls off the edge of the ship too and lands on him, driving him through a hole in the pier, where the shark goes for him. Stuck with his head in a board, Tom is spun round by Jerry like a helicopter, flies off, uses the board as a glider and chases Jerry into a vent pipe. The chase climbs as high as the stratosphere, where Tom passes an astronaut from a Gemini spacecraft on a spacewalk, who waves at him. In the end Jerry tries to feed Tom to the shark, and Tom flees with the shark in pursuit.
Why It Matters
- The film is full of the stretchy, graphic invention of the Chuck Jones unit: a cheese smell drawn as a living ribbon that grabs Jerry by the nose, a cat turned into a helicopter, and a chase that reaches outer space. The Gemini astronaut, a topical joke from the height of the space race, dates it precisely to 1966.
- It comes from the Chuck Jones-produced revival of Tom and Jerry at MGM, and it was the first short scored by Carl Brandt. Its premise reworks Hanna-Barbera's earlier shipboard cartoon Cruise Cat (1952), showing how the new team remade classic situations in its own style.
Notes and Trivia
- The title puns on "Puss in Boots".
- The cheese crate is stamped in Spanish, French and English.
- See also: Love Me, Love My Mouse (1966), The A-Tom-inable Snowman (1966).