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From the early days of modern animation, during the silent film era, the cat and mouse combination has been a mainstay of animated series – from the comic strip to film to television. As we learned in our last class, one of the first cat and mouse series was “Krazy Kat & Ignatz Mouse.”  This cat versus mouse storyline has carried forward to probably the best known cat and mouse animated team – “Tom and Jerry”; and continues to the present with The Simpsons’ “Itchy and Scratchy.”

For the most part, these cat and mouse series’ main characters have an adversarial relationship.  With “Krazy Kat & Ignatz Mouse” the mouse seems to have an innate need to hit the cat in the head with a brick, as can be seen in the below comic strip excerpt.

Krazy Kat & Ignatz Mouse strip circa 1920

“Krazy Kat & Ignatz Mouse” was created by George Herriman, the first African-American animator.  We watched one of the first animated shorts – the 1916 “Krazy Kat & Ignatz Mouse at the Circus” – in class.  While this short is obviously primitive by today’s standard, it did have some appeal to me.  The close-up of the cat’s tail filmed from behind with the mouse looking up as the tail swings back and forth and occasionally spins around was very interesting.

Probably the best know cat and mouse animation is the “Tom and Jerry” series.  “Tom and Jerry” was a series of animated shorts created by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera between 1940 and 1959.  The show centered on a never-ending rivalry between a housecat (Tom) and a mouse (Jerry) whose chases and battles often involved comic violence.  The animation follows a similar pattern to other cat and mouse animations, in which Jerry gets into mischief and Tom unsuccessfully tries to catch him or get him caught.  Tom invariably gets the worst of it.  Despite their many battles, the comic violence never results in any actual bloodshed.

A very similar animated series to “Tom and Jerry” is “Herman and Katnip” – to the point that one could state that if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then “Herman and Katnip” definitely flatter “Tom and Jerry.”  This series followed in the footsteps of “Tom and Jerry” and ran from 1950 to 1959 as theatrical animated shorts.  Herman the mouse in particular looks very much like Jerry the mouse; but there is not much resemblance between Katnip the cat and Tom the cat.  The plot lines of the two animated series’ are very much alike as well, as I have already noted, with the rouge cat.

Chasing the cute and endearing mouse, and the cute mouse gets the better of the cat in the end.  Also in line with the cat and mouse formula, there is lots of violence throughout the show, but again no actual bloodshed.  One major difference between these two shows was that in “Herman and Katnip” both characters spoke, whereas the original “Tom and Jerry” has no characters talk.

Another cat and mouse animated short series was “Pixie & Dixie and Mr. Jinks.”  This was another Hanna-Barbera cartoon that aired from 1958 to 1962.  It starred two mice, Pixie and Dixie, and a cat, Mr. Jinks, and again in many ways resembled Tom & Jerry and the other predecessors, that featured a warring cat and mouse – but in this series it was two mice.

The current iteration of animated warring cat and mouse is “The Itchy & Scratchy Show” – featured as a regular segment of the television series The Simpsons.  As with “Tom and Jerry,” the premise is a basic one: Itchy the mouse constantly battles with Scratchy the cat; and like “Tom and Jerry,” Itchy and Scratchy do not speak.  The difference between this series and the other animated cat and mouse series is that Itchy constantly kills, maims and/or tortures Scratchy in the most violent ways imaginable; and this animated short has poor Scratchy bleed a lot. These violent incidents sometimes can take just a few moments using such weapons as guns, knives or even a flamethrower; and sometimes they can take decades – such as when Scratchy got married to some extremely long-fused explosives.

So, I think it is safe to say that this animated cat and mouse genre has legs.  It first appeared at the outset of animation in 1916, and is still going strong today as it nears the century mark.  No matter your favorite, I think everyone has seen at least one of these animated series.  And if, by chance, you haven’t – I encourage you to compare and contrast any or all of them.

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