Bad Day at Cat Rock

Anyone who has seen and loved Chuck Jones's Looney Tunes cartoons knows that the director is capable of making us laugh, but his particular brand of humour just doesn't seem to work with Tom and Jerry. This cartoon opens with a surreal gag in which Tom uses dashed lines emanating from his eyes to cross from one girder on a building site to another, while Jerry adopts the same technique to create a flight of stairs to escape. It's the kind of off-the-wall comedic content that might suit a Roadrunner cartoon, but here it is totally out of place. Likewise, Tom being blown sky high by a ton of dynamite is pure Wile.E.Coyote, but isn't what I want from a T&J short.

The ill-suited material soon becomes tiresome, Jerry himself becoming so bored that he hastily scrawls a 'The End' caption to put a stop to proceedings.

3.5/10, generously rounded up to 4 for IMDb.

Many of the MGM/Hanna Barbera Tom and Jerrys range from great to classic status, the late 50s cartoons are not as good but worth watching and the Gene Deitch output consist of two or three mediocre at best entries and the other 10 are abominations. The Chuck Jones output is hit and miss, none of the best ones are up there with the great/classic ones but none are genuine disgraces to the Tom and Jerry name. Bad Day at Cat Rock is neither among the best or worst of Jones' Tom and Jerry cartoons, instead it is a very comfortable average. There are some nice gags that do manage to be amusing, the opening credits sequence is very good, Tom and Jerry are still great characters and work very well together and the music while nowhere near the Scott Bradley and Carl Stalling standard is one of the more appealing and more inspired of the Jones' Tom and Jerry output. On the other hand, on the most part the story is very routine complete with a very disappointingly abrupt ending and while more energetic than other entries in Jones' output for the show it is just lacking in crispness. The animation is not great either, I give you that there have been worse looking Tom and Jerry cartoons- though also much better- but it does look rather flatly coloured and Tom looks scratchy. Mixed feelings also on the chase sequences, I admired that Jones tried to incorporate his own style here but at the same they do feel too much like the chase sequences of the Roadrunner cartoons and not enough of the Tom and Jerry style. All in all, average. While I wasn't expecting another Cat Concerto or Little Orphan it could've been much more, but at least it wasn't another Switchin' Kitten or Sorry Safari. 5/10 Bethany Cox