Sorry Safari

You can't blame MGM switching to Chuck Jones and company to do Tom and Jerry. I never saw his award winning cartoons, but Gene Deitch made Tom and Jerry rather nauseating and creepy.

Here we see them on a safari, with one macho mad man who gets p***ed at Tom for every little bad thing he does, especially when he attempts to get Jerry the mouse. The mad man is EXTREMELY bitter towards Tom (you feel sorry for the poor feline).

The music and scenery is far from relaxing and the music seems to get to your head like nausea. This is true of some of the other Gene Deitch T&J shorts.

The jungle safari man is so one-dimensional and cold that he isn't funny. Some of the dog foes of Tom, most noteably Spike, had a personality and audiences could laugh every time Tom caught him, but this guy...

This particularly falls with the rest of the Gene Deitch T&J ones...his directing style did NOT fit Tom and Jerry. It's like putting a round peg into a square hole.

There are pros and cons for this Deitch entry.

The main con is that, once again, we got the brutish master from "Down and Outing" and "High Steaks" beating up on Tom, who's only trying to help (Though I do admit that the scene where Tom goes deaf forum the loud gun was pretty funny).

The pros are few, but good. The jungle music sets the mood for the setting and I kinda like the design on that elephant. The violence, while still mean at times, is a little more downplayed this time around. Some of the jokes are pretty clever (like the hunter choosing a gun by swinging them like baseball bats, plus the aforementioned deaf scene), plus I did like it when the elephant freaked out when he saw Jerry. Finally, it's a bit nice to see the thug get some violence onto him (being scratched up by a lion and tied to a stick at the end).

Overall, it's not the best of Deitch's efforts, but I find it the most tolerable of the three "fat man" shorts in this bunch.

An obnoxious fat man with an uncontrollable rage goes on safari in Nairobi, accompanied by his cat Tom, and stowaway mouse Jerry. Chaos ensues, but laughter doesn't.

A jungle-bound Tom and Jerry cartoon offers so much scope for decent gags—quicksand, man-eating plants, snakes, monkeys, crocodiles, lost civilisations—and yet director Gene Deitch limits Sorry Safari to having Tom and his owner fall off the back of an elephant and get chased by a purple rhinocerous. Excruciatingly bad animation and horrible sound effects abound, making this yet another stinker to be avoided by all but the bravest of animation adventurers.

This 11th episode of the Gene Deitch era of Tom and Jerry falls somewhere between good and bad but it's more good than bad so it's enjoyable. The drawings of the characters are at their ugliest but the cartoon moves along at a quick pace. Using the same format as Down and Outing and High Steaks, it is the weakest of the three but voice actor Allen Swift gives his best performance as the foul tempered, grouchy semi- Clint Clobber. The music and coloring are also effective. There is also an interesting Jacob's Ladder gag. Despite some flaws, I recommend checking this out. 7/10.

The title says it all - this is a sorry cartoon. Story and animation match each other, they're equally bad.

The style of the 1960's cartoons does not please me in general. However this is one of the worst.