Designs on Jerry is a 93rd 1955 Tom and Jerry cartoon, with backgrounds by John Didrik Johnsen and layouts by Dick Bickenbach.
Plot[]
Tom admires the blueprint for his complex mousetrap.
In the attic of a large house, Tom is busy designing the "perfect" mousetrap; his blueprint details a Rube Goldberg machine designed to catch Jerry, and eventually become a worldwide success. In addition to the elaborate contraption, the blueprint also depicts stick figures of a mouse and a cat. After drawing the cheese and the mouse, tired from a hard day's work, Tom retires to his bed where he dreams of potential success, fame, and fortune.
While Tom sleeps, the stick figure mouse suddenly comes to life, abseils down the drawing board, and enters Jerry's mouse hole to warn him about Tom's plan that he is going use to finally kill him, which may soon threaten every mouse to extinction. Never having seen such a thing before, Jerry is skeptical and refuses to follow the stick mouse. When he is woken up again, stick mouse makes the decision for him, dragging Jerry to the drawing board and blueprint. Just then, the stick figure cat on the blueprint also comes to life; when the two mice pass by the cat, he reveals himself to them.
Promptly, Jerry hands the stick mouse an eraser, who erases the cat's teeth; he grabs a brush and draws a bigger set of teeth on himself before beginning the chase. The stick mouse draws a mouse hole on an empty space of the blueprint, which Jerry safely enters; however, the stick cat catches the stick mouse by his tail, which unravels him until he is nothing but legs. Jerry, with the pen and the eraser, walks behind the cat, draws smaller feet on this upper part of his legs, and erases the rest of them, causing the stick cat to fall down without him noticing Jerry erasing his long legs short. He looks down at his feet while chasing Jerry and discovers his modification (along with the realization that it cannot run as fast as before) and, in return, uses his tail as a lasso to retrieve Jerry.
Meanwhile, the stick mouse draws a bow and arrow and fires it at the cat, who pulls the arrow out of his rear and promptly deflates his own torso and blinks. The stick mouse runs away and camouflages himself as one of the flowers in a flowerpot on the blueprint; the cat suspects nothing. While the stick cat turned the other way, the stick mouse ladles the stick cat with a fork as one would do to spaghetti, then runs away as he unravels himself.
Both mice jump off the drawing board, with the stick mouse acting as a parachute, while the stick cat jumps down and bounces akin to a pogo stick until he reforms his body with his short legs grown long again and comes face-to-face with a jet of water fired from a soda siphon by the stick mouse. The stick cat disintegrates into white ink, and before anything more than his head can reform, Jerry sucks the evil cat doodle into an ink pen and empties him into Tom's jar of white ink. The two mice shake hands, but soon hear Tom yawning, about to wake up; quickly, they alter a key measurement on the blueprint, and both mice narrowly return to their original positions before Tom sees them. Tom gets to work building his mousetrap, not noticing anything amiss.
Jerry is shown around the blueprint by the sketch of the mouse, before they change a crucial measurement.
After his trap is completed, Tom hides in anticipation as Jerry emerges from his mouse hole and grabs a piece of cheese which Tom has tied to his creation. This sets off a complicated chain of events which eventually lead the release of a safe which is to flatten the mouse. Tom emerges from his hiding place and prepares Jerry for his demise by giving him a cigarette, but the altered measurement causes the safe to land two feet closer to the mouse hole and the cuckoo bird cuts the rope with a knife - then it falls onto Tom instead of Jerry. The safe door opens, and the cat walks out, now cube-shaped like the safe's interior. Unaware that the altering of the key measurement of the blueprint by the mice was the real cause behind the trap's malfunction, he curses over his failure (censored with horn noises) while leaning on the safe.
Characters[]
Starring[]
Notes[]
- The Tom and Jerry blueprints in this cartoon are later reused in the blueprints of the Tom and Jerry Tales opening.
- The climatic scene of this cartoon was reused in Shutter Bugged Cat. But some differences in the plotline.
- Tom plans to built a mousetrap just to kill Jerry once and for all after all of his failures of catching him, instead of eventually selling it to become rich and famous.
- None of the stick doodles on the blueprint come to life.
- Jerry is awake and watching Tom while he working on the blueprint, instead of sleeping in his bed in his bed.
- Tom immediately starts building the mousetrap after finishing the blueprint, instead of going to bed to rest.
- Jerry erases "15" to "12", while in this short, Jerry erases "10" to "12".
- Tom gets flattened by the safe that landed on him, instead of coming out cube-shaped.
- In 2020, the cartoon was restored along with Downhearted Duckling for Amazon Prime.
Gallery[]
- Main article: Designs on Jerry/Gallery
Errors[]
- The contraption does not match the blueprint.
- The contraption had a paper sign, but was never used. Instead, it is a wooden sign.
- When the trap is built, not all of the parts are used.