Carmen Get It!

Right, I do not think this is the worst Tom and Jerry cartoon, that dishonour goes to Switchin' Kitten. But saying that, I did not like Carmen Get It! Now the idea was absolutely great, but the execution could have been much, much better.

The good things were that I loved hearing the excerpts from Bizet's wonderful opera Carmen and the opening credits were funny. Though I also think the opening credits were the funniest Carmen Get It! got. And the fact that Tom and Jerry were present helped elevate.

Where Carmen Get It! was let down considerably was the animation and the sound. The animation is horrible here, the transitions are choppy and forced and the colours are too bright and diluted. Then there is the character animation, Tom and Jerry are animated fine but the conductor is drawn very poorly. The sound effects are very bizarre almost as bizarre as the ones in Switchin' Kitten and that had sound effects that made my stomach churn, and while Bizet's music is great, the added music is incredibly repetitive and annoying. It also doesn't help that the story is nothing special, and the pacing meanders a lot.

Overall, I wanted to like Carmen Get It! as I love these musical Tom and Jerry cartoons, I consider The Cat Concerto and Tom and Jerry at the Hollywood Bowl as two of my all time favourite Tom and Jerry cartoons. But due to the messy execution it didn't work. 4/10 Bethany Cox

Yes this was the last of the abysmal gene deitch era and it's not that bad. The gags are actually not that bad and are kind of funny. However the conductor is scary as hell.

I am so very, very grateful that Gene Deitch stopped making Tom and Jerry cartoons after this. I can sort of appreciate some of his cartoons as representative of an era--a sparse, artsy, '60s look with a harsh, "hip" sound. But aside from that, all these cartoons are terrible. "Carmen Get It" is probably the Deitch cartoon that I hate the most passionately. I've always loved the musical Tom & Jerry cartoons. In the 1940's these cartoons were elegant tributes to the music they were they were using. "Cat Concerto" even won an Oscar, although "Mouse in Manhattan" is my favorite. "Carmen Get It," like all Deitch cartoons, tries to repeat this previously successful formula, but fails entirely.

The sound and animation quality is appalling. The images are choppy and uneven--backgrounds and characters disappear and reappear, and all movement is jerky and unpleasant. The classical music they are supposedly focusing on, Bizet's Carmen, is continuously interrupted with acrid sound effects and Steven Konichek's repetitive themes. Eventually the music from Carmen is abandoned entirely as Jerry "mixes up" the musical notes and harried Tom is forced to conduct increasingly fast and difficult music. This could be fun to watch, but it just isn't. It isn't done with any sort of beauty or style. The music is abused and wasted, and the images on the screen are unattractive and unmemorable.

Jerry is being chased through the city by Tom before escaping into The Metropolitan Opera which is putting on a production of Bizet's Carmen. Tom manages to sneak into the building disguised as a musician and joins the orchestra, but takes every available opportunity to try and catch the mouse.

I can only assume that Carmen Get It! was director Gene Deitch's attempt at replicating the success of The Cat Concerto, winner of the 1947 Academy Award for Best Short Subject. But while the two cartoons share a common musical theme, they couldn't be further apart in terms of quality, Deitch's effort being another scrappily animated effort with some really weird sound effects. Needless to say, a golden statuette failed to make its way into Deitch's hands.

2 out of 10, with a very generous bonus point for somehow shoehorning in the marching ants, particular favourites of mine (even if they are badly animated in this instance).

This thirteenth and final episode of the Gene Deitch era of Tom and Jerry is the third worst of this incarnation. The main positive is that the music syncs up really well with the animation but I'd still say just skip it. 4/10.