I'm Just Wild About Jerry is a Tom and Jerry 1965 cartoon.
Plot
The cartoon begins with Tom chases Jerry down many flights of stairs down of a high-rise while the credits roll. They both make it to the ground and continue the pursuit. Tom almost catches the mouse, but Jerry sees a roller skate just ahead uses it to roll down the pavement, getting way ahead of Tom. Jerry hides behind a wall and pushes the roller skate out. Tom steps on it and rolls onto train tracks, where a train is approaching him fast. Tom blindfolds himself and the train runs over him. Jerry runs towards and through a mail slot. Tom revives himself, only to be run over by a second train.
Jerry paces into a large department store. Tom pops in through the mail slot formed into a package shape and then runs after the mouse, but Tom's tail is hooked onto the slot. Jerry runs around a pillar and Tom runs to the side of it. He sees his super-stretched tail and then he is pulled back into the door making his tail coiled up in long lengths and then sees the end of his tail hooked up to the mail slot. Tom comically grins and ties his tail around himself and hops away, but is soon confronted with Jerry driving a toy noise-making fire truck. Tom clutches the ceiling in fear until he sees Jerry waving at him. The cat slides down and sees the controls for the trucks.
Tom causes the fire truck to back up (thus losing its bell, ladder, and light accouterments in the process, while still retaining its siren), launch forward and throw the mouse off it, and then draw back once again and prepare to ram the mouse. Jerry barely keeps up with the fire truck and Tom periodically stops the truck to "allow" Jerry time to breathe, but he is only taunting his rival. Tom then fiddles with the controls some more and the truck comes alive, steps forward on its wheels, and tries to devour the rodent. The truck then chases Jerry across the floor until Jerry ascends a fixture and drops a bowling ball towards the truck. It creeps away in fear and the bowling ball rolls onto an escalator.
The bowling ball ascends to the second floor and bumps an oscillating statue, which bumps a china pot down onto where Tom is sitting. Tom looks up, sees the pot, then stands up and catches it at the last second. However, the bowling ball also falls off the balcony, and it crashes through the pot and onto Tom's head.
Jerry descends and hides in the next room where Tom sees a whole display of toy mice that look just like Jerry. Tom pulls their tails, causing four fake Jerrys to exclaim, "Mama!" until the real Jerry yelps. With an "A-HA!", Tom then takes the real mouse and plays ping-pong with Jerry by himself. Eventually, Jerry stretches the net across to the other side and grabs a croquet mallet before he is shot back at the cat. Tom prepares to dash to the other side and then sees the mallet approaching and gets launched back on impact. Jerry uses the fire truck to speed across the floor and open a pipe so that Tom squeezes through it. The cat snakes through the plumbing and is ejected into the opening elevator doors, falling down the shaft until he meets a spring placed by Jerry, and bounces off it and through the mail slot.
Tom rolls back out onto the train tracks, and a third train approaches the cat. By this time, Tom manages to blindfold himself and prepare for the inevitable. However, at the last second, the tram speeds past him harmlessly. It is shown that Jerry switched the points and saved Tom. For his selfless act of saving his rival, Jerry grows a pair of angel wings and a halo on his head, turns into an angel, flies out of sight and into the moonlight as the cartoon irises out.
Characters
Starring
Notes
- The title of the short is a play on the 1921 song "I'm Just Wild About Harry".
- This is one of eight cartoons where Jerry saves Tom. The others are Ah, Sweet Mouse-Story of Life, Cannery Rodent, Blue Cat Blues, Buddies Thicker Than Water, Puppy Tale, Just Ducky, and The Cat and the Mermouse.
- Tom successfully catching a falling pot with his own hands due to sheer anticipation before a bowling ball suddenly crushes him, is inspired by the many tropes of one of Looney Tunes' iconic characters, Wile E. Coyote, where the character's cunning instincts usually allows him to anticipate for such gags that will fall on him, thus allowing him to avoid getting hit as a result, only to be caught off guard by something completely unexpected.
- Arguably the most prominent example is in Operation: Rabbit, where Bugs Bunny gives Coyote a stick of dynamite disguised as a fountain pen. Coyote, upon noticing the lit dynamite as an obvious trap, attempts to disable the fuse to it, only to be caught off guard when another active fuse is located on the other end of the dynamite.
- This is also one of the three cartoons where Tom gets run over by a train. The others are The Flying Cat and Blue Cat Blues. However, in this cartoon, he gets run over by a train two times, whilst in the other two, he gets run over by one.
- The fire truck's gasp when it notices the bowling ball falling towards it is reused from the Hanna-Barbera cartoons.
- The shot of Jerry sliding down and making a turn was used in Bad Day at Cat Rock.
- The scene where Tom closely inspects the collection of toy mice that resemble Jerry is digitally reimaged with the classic 1940s style, on the cover of Tom and Jerry: Classic Collection 6 .
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