Truly Dreadful Film

Good concept, poorly executed.

A lot of fun.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

As the voice-over for director Gene Deitch's The Tom & Jerry Cartoon Kit explains: "Anyone can now enter the lucrative field of animated cartoons". We know, Mr. Deitch—you're living proof!This one does away with a plot entirely, the cartoon consisting of totally random and surreal action, and keeps the need for drawing to an absolute minimum by making all of the backgrounds flat colour. What next? Pure white backgrounds? That would keep the costs down even further.Others here on IMDb seem to like The Tom & Jerry Cartoon Kit slightly more than Deitch's other efforts, but I don't get it, finding this just as wretched.

Growing up, I didn't realize that this short had narration. When I was watching the same short in another state years later, I suddenly noticed the narration (especially the coffee and cigarettes part) but every time I saw this on the WPIX NY station, there was only music and sound fx. That made for a trippy ride. But then again, I grew up on a lot of cartoons that were considered trippy. A lot of cartoons today are either too talky or everyone's shouting. But it does raise the question, why was there a version of this without narration? But this is one of the Gene Deitch T&J cartoons that I remember the most. It looked like it was set in some sort of two dimensional Be-bop Jazz world, which actually worked for the music that was playing. It never occurred to me that these were not American made, only that they were different from the Chuck Jones cartoons as much as the Chuck Jones toons were different from the Hanna Barbera (40s-50s) versions. Of course the classic HB shorts are the best, but I would put the Deitch versions a close second just because I like the atmospheric mood. It's just too bad that Gene Deitch hasn't been more prolific. His trippy style, while admittedly unusual for T&J, would have been ideal for serious science fiction adventure cartoons.

Fans claim that Chuck Jones' Tom and Jerry cartoons were the worst, but for my money the theatrical lowpoint for the cat and mouse were when MGM contracted Gene Deitch and William L. Snyder to direct and produce a series of low-budget, low-quality Czech-animated adventures. "Landing Stripling," "Switchin' Kitten," "Sorry Safari," "Buddies...Thicker Than Water," "Down And Outing," "Dicky Moe," "Calypso Cat" ... painful to behold, all. (Although they're still better than Filmation's horrid "The Tom And Jerry Comedy Show.")Only two of them are halfway watchable, "Tall In The Trap" and this one, "The Tom and Jerry Cartoon Kit" (any relation to Bob Godfrey's "Do-it-Yourself Cartoon Kit"?), which supplies animators with a mouse, a cat, and assorted deadly weapons ("The coffee and cigarettes are for the cartoonist"), and leaves them alone to muck about for a few minutes. Basically, this is Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer admitting that anyone could do better than the lot they had under contract, and while it's not very clever and as sloppily animated by Vaclav Bedrich and company as ever, it passes the time less painfully than the others.You should still take the ones made before the 1960s, though. We all should.

A toy set contains implements for a Tom & Jerry cartoon, including Tom andJerry themselves (hence the title). The cat and mouse come to life and usevarious items in the kit to outdo one another.That's basically it, and as usual Gene Deitch fluffs it up in spectacular fashion with his barely-fluid animation; diabolical, tinny sound effects and uninteresting story (and when it's not dull it's just plain stupid in a way that even being a cartoon cannot rectify). And I just wanted to shoot that narrator...URGH! I can't even imagine kids liking this.