Quiet Please!

"If I hear one more sound, I'm going to skin you alive!"

That's all Jerry needs to hear after eavesdropping on Butch's threat to Tom. Poor Butch had been trying to take a nap and been constantly interrupted by Tom making a racket chasing Jerry around the house.

The lengths Tom goes to keep things quiet, and the things Jerry does to produce noise so that the big bulldog will wake up and beat the tar out of the cat are all very funny. There are some excellent sight gags connected with the above, many defying the law of physics!

This cartoon also featured the first time I've ever heard Tom sing a lullaby to Spike, and that was funny, too. "Go to sleep, go to sleep, close your big, bloodshot eyes," is just one of the verses he sings. "You're a dope, you're a lug, and I hope you don't wake up."

My favorite "bit" was Tom's drum solo on the out-cold dog.

This cartoon, by the way, won an Oscar. I have no arguments with that.

Spike the dog is desperate for some shut-eye, but finds sleeping impossible with Tom and Jerry causing a ruckus around the house. The stressed-out bulldog warns Tom that he'll skin the cat alive if he is woken one more time; Jerry naturally takes this as his cue to try and make as much noise as possible.

'Quiet Please!' won an Oscar for best animated short in 1945, but to be honest, I cannot see why (unless, perhaps, there was not a lot of competition that year). The cartoon is admittedly funny, with the usual plethora of violent gags providing laughs mostly at Tom's expense, but it is pretty standard fare for the cartoon cat and mouse and nothing we haven't seen many times before.

Spike the dog is attempting to sleep and if there's any commotion that wakes him up he will beat Tom the cat to a pulp. Out of this simple plot, comes one of the best Tom and Jerry shorts, as Jerry does pretty much everything in his power to get Spike to wake up so Tom can get a vicious beating. Simply great, genius in it's simplicity and utterly hilarious. And goes to show what a great addition Spike truly was to the comedic duo of Tom and Jerry. Kudos all around. This award winning cartoon can be found on disc one of the Spotlight collection DVD of "Tom & Jerry"

My Grade: A

Spike is stressed out and in need of a good sleep. Which is kind of hard to do when Tom is chasing Jerry, blasting at him with a shotgun and trampling over poor Spike. Threatened with silence or death, Tom backs off, but has to deal with Jerry running around deliberately making noise.

This short won an Academy Award back in 1945, but I wouldn't really say that's THAT funny. For a T&J cartoon it's pretty much in the middle. Yes, there are laughs but not Oscar material laughs and it's not too inventive. There is actually some dialogue too, further proving the awful 1992 movie wrong, but no one is credited for providing the voices.

Quiet Please! (1945)

**** (out of 4)

Oscar winning Tom and Jerry short has an angry bulldog trying to sleep but Tom keeps getting blamed for Jerry waking him up. I think this is one of the best T&J shorts as it contains non-stop action and plenty of laughs including the scene where the dog gets blown up with dynamite.

Warner has released most of the Tom and Jerry shorts onto DVD but there are storms of controversy around the releases. Many of the shorts are edited so do some homework before you buy. Foreign sets are also cut. As of right now the only way to get uncut shorts is if you were lucky enough to record them off TV years ago.