Today, October 28, is International Animation Day, an event observed in more than 50 countries across every continent to celebrate animation. What better way to honor this special day than to blog about the Tom and Jerry billiards short film “Cue Ball Cat,” released in November 1950 by MGM Studios.
In this particular one-reel, seven-minute cartoon, shown in its entirety below, Tom is in an after-hours pool hall, practicing his bank shots, and taking some feline liberties to ensure the balls go in the pocket. He soon discovers that Jerry is sleeping in one of the pockets. Since a pool hall is no place for a mouse, Tom proceeds to torment Jerry with a variety of shots that leave him spinning, reeling, running, chalked, and even imprinted (temporarily, of course) with an 8-ball on the backside. Jerry, never one to back down from the big kitty, fights back, batting billiards balls into Tom’s eyes, shooting the bridge like an arrow into Tom’s mouth, sending Tom crashing into a drink machine, fooling Tom into swallowing seven balls, and in general, adhering to the violent formula of sight gags and ensuing mayhem that made Tom and Jerry one of the most successful cartoons ever, including winning seven Academy Awards.
http://youtu.be/eEJycmLk80I
As one reviewer noted in the blog The Acme Factory, “The best Tom and Jerry cartoons are the ones that really stay away from any kind of story and just feature the cat and mouse beating the tar out of each other…Such is the case with “Cue Ball Cat”…Both Tom and Jerry take their knocks in this one, an equally painful competition which is always nice to see.”
“Cue Ball Cat” would not be the last time these two nemeses scuffled in a pool hall. Fifteen years later, in the 1965 cartoon “Of Feline Bondage,” Tom and Jerry again briefly engaged in a billiards brawl, though that episode exits the pool hall once Jerry’s fairy godmother intervenes.
Interestingly, the pool table has been the setting for farcical violent animation through the history of billiards short animated films. In the 1915 stop-animation short film Pool Sharks, W.C Fields and his billiards rival get into a fight over a woman that leads to balls flying and goldfish bowls breaking. At the other end of the timeline, in 2004, Stan Prokopenko created A Game of Pool, a 3D-animated short film about a rack of billiard balls that split into two teams – solids and stripes – and proceed to “battle” by knocking one another into pockets, with the last ball standing facing off against the 8-ball.
Guess it proves that just because one’s not on the gridiron, on the racetrack, or in the ring, it doesn’t mean the sport can’t be bellicose. Just look at billiards, after all.
