Puttin' on the Dog

While the animation isn't quite as excellent as it usually is, but as it is an early Tom and Jerry cartoon, the backgrounds were not that bad at all. The music is rousing, pleasant and overall excellent, and there are a number of truly interesting gags. And of course there are some funny moments, especially Jerry imitating a dog, and cute doing it, and Spike screaming like a girl. Tom is funny and stupid here, but in some ways you do feel for him, and Jerry is quite cute and dastardly. The story is simple but effective, and the gags are a lot of fun and are delivered thick and fast.

Overall, very funny and well worth watching. 9/10 Bethany Cox

Puttin' on the Dog (1944)

*** 1/2 (out of 4)

Jerry runs into a dog pound where he thinks he's safe but Tom puts on a dog's mask so that he can walk around without being noticed. Of course the poor cat gets in over his head and soon that mask isn't working. After the success of Butch joining THE BODYGUARD, it's no shock that MGM would bring him and other dogs back for this next entry in the series. This here once again features a great number of laughs and there are many creative moments as Jerry is constantly on the run and Tom is constantly after him and trying to avoid the dogs. There are many great, funny moments here but the highlight has to be the scene where Tom gets buried by one of the dogs and must frantically search for his mask.

Tom is chasing Jerry, for the usual reasons I guess, until the mouse seeks refuge in a dog pound, where Tom's biggest enemy, Spike, is living. Not letting this get in the way, Tom nicks the head from a hollow dog-statue and sneaks inside in disguise to continue the chase and tricks.

Puttin' on the Dog is a cartoon I remember watching as a kid and it is very funny. A lot of T&J shorts I forget as they can be quite generic at times. But not this one. There are loads of visual gags and it's fun watching facial expressions change as Tom and Jerry fool everyone. There's a lot of inventive humor here and you will laugh out loud a good few times.

1944 was a good year for Tom and Jerry and like a fine wine, they've aged well. This one is consistently funny with several laugh-out-loud moments. One reason that the T&J cartoons of the forties are superior to the ones of the fifties is that the animation was not just fluent but funny. Tom's reactions to his increasingly desperate situation and Jerry's levity through it all (like blithely swimming backstroke through the hair of a sheepdog) make up half the fun.

Tom winding up in the middle of a dog pound and sticking around? Does catching Jerry the mouse mean THAT much to him that he would risk getting torn apart by a bunch of dogs? Apparently, but that's what he does here after Jerry races into the pound for protection after Tom had been chasing him around the neighborhood.

How Tom copes with all these dogs of all shapes and sizes, and especially Spike the bulldog, is the story. There aren't a lot of laugh-out-loud gags in here but its continually interesting as Tom goes from dog-to-dog situation unable to catch little Jerry, even with a fake dog mask.

Note: this was still an earlier enough cartoon that one could appreciate the watercolor artwork in the backgrounds....some really nice stuff in here even if it was muted to highlight the characters in the foreground.