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This a fan-made experiment in which the 1956 Tom & Jerry short "Down Beat Bear" is remade in CGI with anime girls in the roles of Tom, Jerry, and the dancing bear. The characters don't appear to be random and likely represent some part of fandom of which I'm not aware. Even lacking that context, I still think it's a fascinating piece of work, not so much for its animation or technical merit as for its resurrection of (and reverence for) classic theatrical animation in a completely unexpected setting.

The Cartoon Network upfronts took place yesterday and the now Stu Snyder-free network presented its slate of upcoming shows for the 2014-'15 season to their advertising and promotional partners.

This joyously energetic medley of Tom and Jerry music composed by the legendary Scott Bradley was performed recently by the John Wilson Orchestra as part of the 2013 BBC Proms at London’s Royal Albert Hall.

Peter Morris, who arranged the performance with Wilson, has written extensively about the work:

We wanted to create a score that wasn’t too fragmented and that didn’t rely on visuals so the music you hear is a compilation of some of the best bits of Scott Bradley’s music. There is no single video for the music—it comes from eight different cartoons: Smitten Kitten, Sufferin’ Cats, The Framed Cat, Cat Fishin’ Just Ducky, Jerry and Jumbo, The Cat Comes to Dinner and Mouse for Sale.

John is a dab hand at reconstructing scores from audio. Check his Wiki page for info. In this case, however, we used score fragments, archives and a lot of patience. I used FCP to extract candidate snippets of video and linked them to create a 3 candidate narratives which John and I then worked on. Copyright is a nightmare (MGM, Warner, Sony, Turner, EMI have all owned bits in the past) – only JW has the clout to cut though that quagmire. Scores are as rare as hens’ teeth.

Bradley’s original scores were played by typically 20 to 25 musos. In fact, if you look at the beginning of the performance there are only 3 violins, 1 viola, 1 cello and 1 bass, to start with the original MGM sound. However, more instruments are added as the piece progresses to the full 100-piece orchestra at the end. Scott Bradley also preferred orchestral sound effects to ones added by the sound department, hence the big “shock chords” that you find at various places.

Animation director Michael Sporn has posted a fantastic treasure trove of images from the Golden Age MGM animation studio. The thing that I love most about these photos—and what makes them so different from any modern form of 2D animation production—is the tactility of the work.

The energy of classic Hollywood cartoons was initiated by the intense manual labor needed to produce the films. Every step of animation production required some kind of physical exertion or interaction with a physical object, from jumping on a desk to act out a scene to mixing paints with a blender to searching through boxes of sound effects to making facial expressions at a desk. With computers, we can never return to such an era of cartoon filmmaking—and, in fact, we shouldn’t—but these photos are lovely memories from an earlier period.

I wanted to find out what was the most viewed Tom and Jerry short on YouTube tonight, and it turned out to be Salt Water Tabby with 24.4 million views. But this is no ordinary copy of the short; it has a completely new dialogue track in a Moroccan Arabic dialect by Bouchana Abdelilah. By comparison, the non-Arabic version (i.e. the boring original) of Salt Water Tabby has a mere 346,000 views. Why does a remixed version of a classic short have seventy (yes, 70!) times more viewers than the original? And will an Arabic voice-over make any cartoon funny and popular? In that case, Allen Gregory could’ve used a whole lot of Arabic. I don’t claim to have the answers to such questions, but I’m intrigued by this YouTube anomaly.

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Two weeks ago I warned you informed you about the existence of Tom & Jerry Live!, Argentina’s new stage musical based on the MGM cartoon superstars. In case you didn’t believe me – here’s a 90 second clip… (I apologize for this in advance)

Lord have mercy. Scott Bradley is rolling around in his grave.

(Thanks, Jorge Finkielman)

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