Hacker Cinema
Tom and Jerry
2023 · TV series · 1 season
Tom and Jerry as you've never seen them before! With a fresh new look that was born and bred in Asia, they are ready for their adventures in the region. Starting off with Singapore, Tom and Jerry chase each other through the Marina Barrage, Joo Chiat or Bishan Park. Look out also for the Singapore River or your favourite HDB estate! Totally at home with our balmy weather because like true blue Singaporeans, they know exactly how to cool down. Their "kiasu" ways come in handy too as they make a new friend with Merli.
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23 comments on Hacker News
Like many other children’s books whxih stood the test of time, those we assume are written for children are more a cautionary tales for adults that children also tend to like as they (still) are lacking understanding of notions such as humility, compassion and all the abstract stuff we now know forms after age 10-12.
The good Tom and Jerry episodes are completely devoid of tact and care, yet marvellous as entertainment .
This article seems to be written by a religious zealot, and the fact that the article opens mentioning his concern of whether or not his friends at church nod in approval or not about what he does is very telling.
I have 2 young kids, and I select what they can watch. And I'm aware that when I was a kid I watched lots of violent shows like Tom and Jerry like someone else said, or even Dragon Ball which is a million times more violent, but I hesitate to let them watch other much more innocuous shows.
I'm an atheist, so I'm not burdened with religious prejudices, and I'm very open minded, I think everyone has a right to sleep with and love whoever they want, and to identify themselves as whoever they want, I also think no one should be discriminated against because of their skin tone, nationality, beliefs, identity, disabilities or anything else.
But I also understand the outrage against wokism. There is an episode in Ridley Jones which is a show for young kids, where there is a bison saying that it's non-binary and what are their preferred pronouns. This is completely unnecessary for the plot and those are subjects that go miles above the heads of the intended audience. Also in many of the latest Disney productions and other shows in Netflix there's been a lot of queer characters and gay/lesbian relationships, which is not necessarily a problem depending how it is treated, specially if the production is for teenagers and adults, but I think it's completely unnecessary and kind of force feeding to include that kind of topics in the shows for the youngest kids. That trend also brings us ludicrous contradictions like an upcoming version of Snow White and the 7 dwarves, which are not actually dwarves, I think there's maybe 1 dwarf only.
Having said that, there's so many examples of religious extremisms taking things to the, erm, well, extremes. And I'm not going to even mention Muslim Theocracies because I think those are ultimate level of autocratic religion fuelled fascist regimes. But for example in Catholic Poland, the children's show Teletubbies was banned because they said the purple teletubbie was gay.
I think there are lots of shows in Netflix that it would be wise to don't allow your kids to watch, depending on their age of course. But the concerns the article raises about Paw Patrol are honestly laughable. There's a lot of illogical things in kid's shows. Just look Spongebob Squarepants and you'll see that they're under the water but most of the time physics and everything else behaves as if they're not. In Paw Patrol I always asked myself how a 10 year old doesn't seem to have adult supervision and seems to have unlimited resources and money to fund his organization. But again, in this show puppies talk and can drive cars, so you can't expect it to be based on reality. Of course in this show there will always be some kind of trouble which the Paw Patrol will happily solve, but there wouldn't be much of a show if that wasn't the case, isn't it? I can think of many series I watched when I was a kid and teenager, that also show a different problem or villain in every episode, actually that's the case for a large number of series. Just think of those oldies Knight Rider, McGuiver, A Team... The same critiques applied to Paw Patrol in the article would applie to all of them.
Also it calls the Mayor in Paw Patrol tyrannical when there's no evidence of repression or autocracy in the show, and I find it funny that he fantasizes with a resistance composed of poets and religious types. As if religious types weren't on the oppressing end of autocracies most of the time along history.
Perhaps that's because you haven't been watching much children's entertainment in the last 30 years?
See eg https://www.netflix.com/sg/title/81154166
> Weren't 1940s animation shorts aimed at adult cinema goers?
Tom and Jerry were invented in the 1940s, but eg the 1960s episodes used the same format. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_and_Jerry for a timeline.
See https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MimeAndMusicOnlyCartoon for many more examples, though far from exhaustive.
As an 'intermediate example': Pucca has dialogue, but also very strong visual story-telling that means you can understand what's going on without the dialogue.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Animation/Pucca says:
> Pucca became popular worldwide because it relies on visual and gag humor rather than language, much like The Pink Panther, the Road Runner and other pantomime cartoons. Though the series has since picked up dialog, translation has worked well enough and the series remains mostly silent. Both show leads, Garu and Pucca, are Heroic Mimes, though they do laugh, sigh and make other sounds.
Yeah but that term is just you know comical. “Giants”. As if meant to inflate one’s ego, cover insecurity, and project power, like those tom and jerry cartoon episodes when they’d call in their giant friends to save the day. It amuses me every time.
+1 for his tip of "Search The Internet Archive".
The other day I searched for the Tom & Jerry full episodes on the web to no avail (streaming platforms and video platforms like youtube only have rubbish cuts).
The internet archive has every episode starting from the first one in 1940, in an easily accessible player without any ads or recommendations: https://archive.org/details/tom-and-jerry-all-114-episodes
Agree with you, but! In a Tom and Jerry episode, Tom Cat would be GPTZero and Jerry Mouse would be GPT3 ;)
And that is, IMHO, totally fine. We have Tom & Jerry DVD at home, bought years ago for the kids. I loved Tom and Jerry as a kid, the kids loved stuff like Willy E. Coyote, so I thought the DVD set was a good idea. Oh dear, that was the first time I realized that as kid I never saw the old episodes...
Those are good in a historical context to show just how racist cartoons can be, but certainly not for entertainment. Same goes for the early Tintin comics, especially those set in colonial Africa have serious racist undertones. Something even the author acknowledged. And those undertones are completely (?) absent from the later ones. Just shows how subversive racism can be when it is part of everyday culture, and that even non racist people fall prey to using those racist stereotypes in their work. The same goes for sexism and any other kind of systematic discrimination.
> Any Tom and Jerry episode involving Mammy Two Shoes
Since I watched Tom and Jerry cartoons many, many times, I just looked up who this is (although I kinda had inferred it, there aren't that many characters in Tom and Jerry :)) and why she's a problem.
Curiously, I always thought she was the owner of the house, so any racist undertones were totally lost on me (note that I'm not American). (I did get that they were quite sexist, no man doing housework ever).
I don't deny the racist intent, but it's funny how one needs the cultural context to get that. I hope in a few decades it will be lost on every kid.
Songs of the south
Any Tom and Jerry episode involving Mammy Two Shoes
A few WW2 era animations, Hitler-Donald duck springs to mind.
Even on all known re-releases, we know that some Tom and Jerry episodes have been altered. And 2 episodes, even in their "complete set," are completely absent.
I am afraid that rise of generative AI will result in a lot of junk being released and advertised as quality.
It shouldn't be like so, I think generative AI can yield great results if there is enough human supervision, I think it can be great if used to augmenting creative work. But I think many will chose the shortest path towards money and they will put in the least amount of work possible.
Imagine tens of thousands of movies spitted by AI based on sub mediocre screenplays, imagine millions of songs generated by AI based on sub mediocre lyrics.
Somewhere, in that ocean of junk, there is something valuable. Good luck finding it.
If we use CGI analogy I can say that all pre CGI Tom and Jerry cartoons are works of art but many of the cartoons released after aren't so great, while some are. And CGI still requires some effort, so not everyone is be able to release movies. Generative AI will require far less effort and knowledge.
> no franchise longs survives resort to time travel.
Time travel and multi-verses, at least for me, end up reducing the stakes of the movies and for me make them more cartoonish like Tom and Jerry. No matter what happens, you know Tom and Jerry will be back, good as new.
I wonder what it was like for the NSA workers who had to search for steganographic messages in Osama bin Laden's Tom and Jerry episodes.
You can download 121 episodes of Tom and Jerry from the CIA's public release of Osama Bin Laden's Abbottabad compound computer files. As far as I can tell, it is the most complete collection available online for free or though paid services. The runner up is HBO max with a paltry 77 episodes.
https://www.cia.gov/library/abbottabad-compound/index_video.html
https://medium.com/fan-fare/hbo-max-is-failing-the-classic-tom-and-jerry-57b86117b57d
Interestingly enough, I watched this growing up in Saudi Arabia. In the late 80s, early 90s there were only 2 TV channels.
Channel 1 was in Arabic. Channel 2 was mostly English and had a lot of old school American programs. We watched sesame streets, the electric company, old episodes of Tom and Jerry and Looney Tunes.
I can't say it taught me how to read, but it taught me English for sure.
> Take the detective character Fargo North, Decoder (get it?), who would solve missing letter mysteries. "Kids don't know Fargo, North Dakota," Fowles points out.
There was a show my wife watched when she was a kid in Florida. One of the main character was called LaCienega Boulevardes. It sounded like any other name. Until a couple years ago she moved to California. She started laughing hysterically when we drove on La Cienega Blvd.
This makes me think of Whoopi Goldberg's introduction to the second volume of the "Tom and Jerry Spotlight Collection" published in 2005 [0]. Warner Bros faced the same kind question that we see these companies grappling with now and decided it was best to keep a majority of the offensive content in the collection. Most importantly, the collection was prefaced by Whoopi Goldberg and she explained why the offensive clips were included. I highly recommend anyone who reads this comment to watch the video below.
I personally feel as though it would be better to do something like this with Dr. Seuss' books rather than ceasing their publication.
[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_oEOdIBOpU
Edit - Whoopi Goldberg also did something similar for the third volume of the collection as well --> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCT1clqci3I
> What niches would those be?
I can't enumerate all niches that exist in a large back catalog of media. My point wasn't that HBO should cater to 1,000 different "I wanna see the racist stuff" niches. Rather, there are a thousand different subsets of their subscriber base that all have an outsized interest in something otherwise obscure. Or largely unpopular. I was responding the to general point about the tradeoff between serving those small subsets vs. avoiding the ire of the wider subscriber base.
> Why is HBO Max responsible for all of them
I didn't say they were. Just reframing it as a business decision that they could make. The long tail is a thing that has been traditionally hard to cater to, but is easier with the technology we have today. (i.e. Physical video stores don't have 1/10th the floorspace that would be required, but online streaming does. Once a title has been tagged and categorized, you let your software take care of the curation with 0 marginal cost)
> I don't even know why OP and yourself are going after HBO for this.
I'm not "going after them". I was responding to the parent's comment with my own ideas how the situation could be navigated. If HBO decides that, no, they'd rather just sidestep the whole issue, I don't blame them! Their math might work out different than mine. (Okay, maybe I "blame" them, but I get it. Can't say I'd be Mr. Principled Archivist in the same situation)
As for OP, I figure he really loves Tom and Jerry, and would love to see all the episodes.
> Almost seems like a dog whistle if I had more evidence.
No. The "I'm a sensible adult" is fine by me on its own merits. I don't need to whistle. Like I said, mark these episodes "TV-MA".
I guess I'm frustrated because I wish streaming services weren't so ephemeral. The one that really got me was the episode of Community where the group played D&D for the first time. It's one of the best episodes of that show, but it's no longer available to watch. But it's reasonable for me—a non-bigot—to like that episode, right?
>Your point is valid regarding the size of the niche here, but there are probably a thousand other niches that would combine—long tail fashion—into a good chuck of market share.
What niches would those be? Why is HBO Max responsible for all of them? Their parent company made committments to censorship before HBO Max even existed back to when DVDs were being introduced, as stated in the article. I don't even know why OP and yourself are going after HBO for this, apparently Warner Bros made this decision twenty years ago.
> As far as families being upset about their kids auto-playing into offensive content, HBO has already solved for this. They have Sex and the City and The Sopranos on that platform.
Dunno if you use HBO Max or not but, like Netflix, they separate UI and content by age group of the current user
> Mark the naughty T&J episodes as "TV-MA", and a kid-filtered view won't show them, right? (I guess the question is whether they have this ability per-episode, or only at the series level)
Or just not, and not deal with any further possible ramifications. All of these "historical"/"archival purposes/I'm a sensible adult" arguments for Tom and Jerry apply just as well to Amos & Andy since we're really talking about censoring jokes about Black people's physical appearance. Almost seems like a dog whistle if I had more evidence.
Totally agree, and I also generally find the article poorly written. I would reduce it to the following statements: 1. HBO is not showing the entire Tom and Jerry collection, which is bad because even though some episodes contain offensive stereotypes the show is culturally significant and unavailable elsewhere. 2. HBO streaming has bad UX.
Most of the article seems devoted to 1 and focused on the 'cancel culture' reasons why HBO might not be showing the full catalog while also admitting that there is also a large amount of the catalog not on HBO that is not plausibly part of the several episodes that would be targeted for being cancelled. Seems like the premise of the article kind of falls apart at that point, a little self-refuting.
Having the Jetsons and Flintstones on streaming has been a blast for me as well.
Tom and Jerry is one of my favorite cartoons and I still watch them once in a while.
> When their department was closed down in 1957, Hanna and Barbera set up their own production company.
> But only a few years later, MGM decided to revive Tom and Jerry without its original creators. In 1961 they outsourced to a studio in Prague to save on costs. Chicago-born animator Gene Deitch was tasked with heading the remake, but struggled with a tight budget and staff with no knowledge of the original.
> His studio also secretly made episodes of other cartoons, including Popeye. Czech names were Americanised on the credits to stop viewers associating the shows with Communism.
So much in here. I hope we also remember these instances when we talk about copyright, trademark or stealing IP.
This is like Tom and Jerry if instead of constantly matching wits and ending in stalemate, Tom put a plain old mouse trap in front of the hole and killed Jerry within the first 5 seconds of the show and then Tom patted himself before the episode abruptly ended.
Maybe it is just me but in older episodes of Simpsons, there was a lot more music for different situations and at times, classic or what I would term 'wholesome' music was played to highlight cathartic situations or trials/tribulations of human lives.
These are things that to me play a major part as a viewer. To me, a TV serial is not about 30 min episode, it is a mini-play or chapter in a play.
Think back to days of Tom and Jerry (the ones before mid-1960s) as well as the older Mickey Mouse & Co (up till 1970s) and you will see the recurring pattern -- music was just great and played a huge part in involving the user.
That and also, there is something about the super-sharp, ultra modern type of animation modern day Simpsons have. I understand it is high-tech and latest stuff, but it does take away from the art and appreciation of what the viewer experiences. If you don't believe me, watch an episode of 1940s/1950s Mickey Mouse or Tom & Jerry and compare with their modern day renditions.
> it's amazing to see what we used to watch
My wife and I are working through the old Tom and Jerry cartoons with our toddler, and we are shocked to see how much blackface there is. Like, okay, I get it was a different time- but the quantity is shocking. Episodes where it doesn't even have to happen, they'll just quickly mock black people and then get back to the plot.