Tom & Jerry by Corgi

Mike Pigott looks at the many models made by Corgi of the famous cartoon cat and mouse duo and their pals over the years.

The cat and mouse duo Tom & Jerry was created in 1939 by the now-legendary team of William Hanna and Joseph Barbera. As domestic animals, they were unlikely subjects for a range of diecast vehicles, but they were modelled by Corgi on a number of occasions, spanning three decades.

Hanna and Barbera both worked for the MGM animation studio during the 1930s, but in 1939 they were teamed up in the hope of creating a new cartoon character to rival Mickey Mouse or Bugs Bunny. Bill Hanna was a skillful writer and director, while Joe Barbera was a brilliant and very fast cartoonist.

Their first collaboration was Puss Gets the Boot, which featured a cat named Jasper and an unnamed little mouse. In the cartoon, Jasper spends his time tormenting the poor mouse, but in doing so he breaks an ornament, and is warned that if it happens again he’ll be thrown out of the house. From this point on, every time the cat comes near, the mouse threatens to break an item. Eventually the mouse is caught, but he manages to push over a stack of plates, resulting in Jasper being ejected from the house.

Puss Gets the Boot was only intended as a one-off cartoon, as the directors felt there weren’t many more original things they could do with a cat and mouse. However, when the cartoon was nominated for an Academy Award, and theatre owners bombarded MGM with letters demanding further shorts featuring the characters, Hanna and Barbera decided to make it a series.They streamlined the two characters and renamed them ‘Tom & Jerry’. Several cartoons followed over the next few years, and were of such high quality that they dominated the cartoon Oscars, with seven in total, including four in a arrow (1943-46). Other supporting characters were introduced, including Spike the bulldog and his little son Tyke, Jerry’s little grey mouse friend Nibbles (also called Tuffy) and an annoying duckling called Little Quacker.

Tom and Jerry cartoons continued to be produced until 1957 when the financially-strapped MGM closed its animation studio. Hanna and Barbera left to for their own studio, producing a range of very successful made-for-TV cartoons.

Re-runs of Tom & Jerry shorts remained popular in cinemas, so in 1960 MGM comissioned a new series of shorts; these were made in Eastern Europe and were not very good. A few years later a new batch of cartoon were produced, this time by former Warner Brothers director Chuck Jones, best known for Bugs Bunny and the Road Runner. Jones alter the appearance of Tom & Jerry to suit his own style, but did not use any of the supporting characters such as Spike or Tuffy. Some of the cartoons were funny, and some were awful, but in terms of quality they were not a patch on the originals by Hanna and Barbera.

After MGM stopped making new cartoons in 1967, the original shorts were re-packaged for TV, bringing the famous cat and mouse to a new generation of children. It was the popularity of these re-runs on British TV that led to Corgi producing the first Tom & Jerry models.

Corgi’s first models based on Tom & Jerry were released in 1970, and this was probably because their cartoons were being aired on British TV. Like most Corgi Juniors of this era, they were well made and finished, with hand-painted plastic figures. They formed part of the Corgi Juniors ‘Extras’ range, which were all miniature character vehicles.

TOM’S GO-CAT

Tom’s Go-Cat was made to look like something Tom had whipped up himself out of junk. It had a flat base which was painted yellow, with a pair of crutches attached to the sides. The ‘bonnet’ of the car is a metal rubbish bin (cartoon cats always seem to be hanging around bins). With little regard to health and safety, he is using a box of dynamite as a headrest, with a dustbin lid on top as a type of canopy. The figure of Tom is in light grey, with his face, chest and paws painted white, ears in pink and eyes in yellow, and he is holding a large black machine gun. For some reason he has one leg in a plaster cast, which I guess explains the crutches. Tom is very recognisable, and looks quite faithful to his appearance in the classic MGM cartoons, as does the image of him stuck to the front of the rubbish bin.

JERRY’S BANGER

Jerry’s Banger is also a weird home-made vehicle. It is basically a roller skate with a cannon mounted on it! The skate is painted red with a bare-metal base. The nicely-cast cannon is in a brass effect, although the size may be slightly out of proportion, as I have never seen a shoe-sized cannon. A tiny box of cannonballs and a rather small barrel of gunpowder are attached to either side. Jerry is using the roller skate strap as a seat belt, and holding a lighted match to the fuse. Unlike Tom, Jerry is not a very good likeness. He isn’t very well moulded, he is too dark a shade of brown, and his face and ears are touched up in pink instead of tan.

These two models were available separately, in a twin-pack, and also in a set called the ‘Tom & Jerry Crazy Race’, which included both models and a Corgi Rockets track layout.

THE 1980s

By the late 1970s, Corgi was producing lots of licensed character models, so it came as no surprise when the Tom & Jerry cars were revived. Well, sort of…

TOM’S GO CART

Tom’s Go Cart (note the different spelling) used a modified version of the old casting. The base was the same, with the crutches as sides, but there were wheel arches added, and the body was painted a lighter yellow. The dustbin still formed the front end, but the gun was gone, and instead there was a rear-view mirror on one side and an opening for the exhaust manifolds on the other. A red plastic exhaust pipe went from the bin along the left side of the car, where it was attached to a headrest that replaced the former bin-lid canopy and dynamite. Tom was a very poor likeness, typical of the decline in quality of Corgi Juniors around this time. He looked more like a monkey than a cat, molded in a very dark grey with only his eyes and snout painted. There was a different sticker on the front, showing the Chuck Jones version of Tom.

JERRY’S BANGER

This item had the same name as its predecessor, but was a totally new casting. Instead of a roller skate, it was more like a weird dragster. The body was painted orange with a green plastic base and a chromed rear engine. The cannon was also green plastic, and could now swivel up and down. There was a pile of red plastic cannonballs behind it. The Jerry figure was actually quite well-proportioned, and not a bad likeness, but would have looked better if painted accurately.

Both of these items are extremely common, but look out for the hard-to-find yellow version of Jerry’s Banger.

THE 1990s

Corgi’s next encounter with the cat and mouse duo was not until 1993, when a new range was released in anticipation of an upcoming movie. This was at a time when Corgi was owned by Mattel, but the models were marketed as Corgi rather than Hot Wheels; possibly this was because Corgi had a history with the characters.

At the time these models were made, the MGM cartoon franchise was owned by Turner Broadcasting System, and presumably to attract more licensing royalties, the characters were given a new ‘trendy’ look with clothes that were allegedly fashionable at the time. Tom and Jerry did not appear in any cartoons in this way, the tacky sporting gear only appeared on licensed products.

There were four items in the range, which consisted of the same vehicle in different finish together with a well-painted character figure. The cars were rather strange-looking; they had the side profile of an Austin A35 and the grille of a Lincoln Zephyr. The quality and design were not typical of Corgi at all. Each car had a diecast body, with the windscreen as part of the casting and painted silver. The base and bumpers were in white plastic, while the one-piece wheels were black plastic with silver painted hubs. The characters’ names were tampo printed on the boot. As the cars were rolled along, the floor of the vehicle would move back and forth a few millimetres. The packaging claimed ‘Figures move as the car is pushed along!’; but the movement was so slight that it looked more like they were shaking.

Tom had a red car with a dark blue interior. The packaging showed his car with flames printed along the sides, but it was not issued like this. Tom’s figure was not a bad likeness, but he was wearing a hideous shell-suit in blue with pink padding.

Jerry had a blue car with yellow fenders and a yellow interior. The figure was a giant-sized Jerry in a pink track-suit jacket with blue bottoms and white trainers.

Spike the bulldog was driving a yellow car with tan sides and a black interior. Although this vehicle was of interest for being the first (and only) diecast model with Spike, he had been heavily re-designed and looked nothing like the big grey bulldog from the classic cartoons. He now had brown fur, and was wearing a red hooded tracksuit, a white cravat and blue trainers.

Spike’s young son Tyke had a light blue car with dark blue fenders and red interior. Tyke toys were even less common than ones of Spike. He was wearing a blue tracksuit with red trainers and an awkward-looking studded collar. This was actually a very poor representation of Spike, and if I had seen this figure without the packaging, I wouldn’t have known who it was.

TOM AND JERRY: THE MOVIE

The first of a series of Tom & Jerry feature films was released in 1993. It was a supposedly ‘heart-warming’, Disney-style plot, in which Tom and Jerry befriended and orphan girl, helped her escape the clutches of her evil aunty, and eventually reunited her with her long-lost father. Not only was the movie totally devoid of humour, and filled with stomach-churning songs, but worst of all, Tom and Jerry could talk – and in really annoying voices.

To accompany the movie, Corgi brought out a ‘Tom and Jerry: The Movie’ set. Although the movie was awful, the set was actually very well presented. It contained a diecast car and six PVC figures of the characters. The figurines were nicely painted and fairly accurate representations of the characters in the film. Tom was a very good likeness, but Jerry was massively oversized and had ears like saucers. Also included was Robyn, the little blonde girl that Tom and Jerry helped, and Aunt Figg, Robyn’s fat, greedy guardian. Figg’s lazy, obese sausage dog Ferdinand was so fat he had to use a skateboard to move around, and the set included a diecast skateboard to clip him to. Finally, Figg’s crawling, spineless crony Lickboot, a dodgy lawyer, was included as a half-figure cropped at the waist so he could fit in the car.

The car was a good replica of the one seen in the film, but not to scale, as there was no way Figg could squeeze her corpulent rear into the toy one. The vehicle can be identified as a Corgi as it rode on standard 1/36 scale chrome wheels. However, it’s pretty economically made, with only a red-painted metal body, black metal base and clear windscreen. The set was presented in a ‘photo-frame’ shaped box. The figures were also sold separately in sets of two.Unfortunately, there were 13 sequels to this awful film, all of which were direct-to-video releases. When Ted Turner sold his company to Time-Warner, Tom & Jerry was merged into Warner’s animation division, which – ironically – now included their creators’ company Hanna-Barbera. But if you really want a good laugh and top-notch animation, you really can’t beat the original MGM cartoons from the 1940s and ‘50s.