Rock 'n' Rodent

Rock 'n' Rodent
Directed By	Abe Levitow
Produced by	Chuck Jones
Story By	Bob Ogle
Music By	Carl Brandt
Animation By	Ben Washam Dick Thompson Tom Ray Don Towsley Ken Harris
Distributed By	Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Release Date	April 7, 1967
Color Process	Metrocolor
Title reference	The musical genre rock and roll
Preceded By	Guided Mouse-ille
Followed By	Cannery Rodent

Rock 'n' Rodent is a Tom and Jerry 1967 cartoon, produced in 1966. It featured music by Carl Brandt, with additional music by David Benoit.

Plot

In Tom and Jerry's penthouse apartment room around 11:00 PM, Tom finishes reading a book and prepares to sleep, setting his alarm clock to ring in the morning. Unfortunately for Tom, this is also time for Jerry to get up. The mouse's alarm-watch rings and Jerry showers (using a wrench on a pipe) and grooms himself before setting out for a tiny elevator in the wall. He hears Tom snoring and stops briefly before he enters the elevator and descends to a nightclub with a sign that says "Le Cellar Smoqué" ("The Smoky Cellar" in French) displayed at its entrance.

Jerry arrives at the bar and has a martini (of which he only eats the cheese on the toothpick, leaving the bartender to drink the rest of the martini). Then, Jerry begins playing the drums with a band, which puts the club into full swing!

Shortly afterward, being woken up by the noise, Tom opens the elevator, only to get blasted by the music. He tries to block the elevator doors with a pillow, but it's not enough to stop the noise. He lowers a hose into the elevator shaft in hopes of drowning out the noise. His smug laughter is interrupted by Spike, who drags Tom downstairs and throws him into his flooded apartment room.

Dripping wet, Tom goes back to his own apartment room, and then decides to stop the noise at its source, by grabbing some tools and heading down to the basement through the air vents. Hearing the music through the floor, Tom saws a hole in the floor and uses the plunger, but the music is coming from a radio, and to make matters worse, Spike (whom the radio belonged to) pulls Tom up through the floor and punches him back up to his apartment room through the floors and his bed.

Now, completely bruised and sleep deprived, Tom cries over this and puts corks in his ears, wraps up his head with bandages and tries to settle down to sleep. Thankfully, the music stops, causing Tom to wake up with a start, lose the bandages, and pop the corks. Then, a tired Jerry is seen leaving the elevator toward his hole.

Tom gleefully goes back to sleep, only to be awoken seconds later by his alarm clock, then, however, having been woken up by the noise, Jerry turns on the light in his mousehole, peeks out, and signals to Tom to turn off the alarm clock by shushing him, but this action from Jerry immediately causes Tom to scream (since Jerry kept him up all night) and run straight out through the wall leaving a Tom-shaped hole. Jerry just shrugs this off, thinking that Tom's gone bonkers, imitates Charlie Chaplin's silent film walk while going back to bed, and the cartoon ends.

Characters

• Tom Cat
• Jerry Mouse
• Jerry's Band
• Spike Bulldog

Voice Actors

• Mel Blanc as Tom (laughing)
• June Foray as Mouse Scream
• William Hanna as Tom (screaming when he pulls up through the floor)

Availability

Tom and Jerry: The Missing Mouse (VHS)

Vid-ee-oh! Rap Toon Show (VHS)

The Art of Tom & Jerry: Volume III: The Chuck Jones Cartoons (LaserDisc)

Tom and Jerry: Classic Collection Volume 6 (DVD)

Tom and Jerry: The Chuck Jones Collection (DVD)

Tom and Jerry: Fur Flying Adventures - Volume 1 (DVD)

Tom and Jerry's Musical Mayhem (DVD)

Tom and Jerry: Mouse Trouble (DVD)

Tom and Jerry: Chaos Concerto (DVD)

Double Trouble (Blu-ray)

Notes

• The title is a pun of Rock 'n' Roll.
• This cartoon is similar to the Warner Bros. DePatie-Freleng cartoon Swing Ding Amigo (1966), where Speedy Gonzales runs a nightclub right under Daffy Duck's house and the latter tries to put a stop to it after the music played in the nightclub disturbs the duck from his rest.
• This cartoon is essentially Saturday Evening Puss with the roles reversed, featuring Tom's sleep disturbed by Jerry's noisy music band in a nightclub, like how Jerry's sleep is disturbed by Tom and his alley cat pals' noisy house party.
  • However, unlike Saturday Evening Puss, in which both Tom and Jerry lost, only one of them lost (Tom) while the other one won (Jerry) in this case.
• Aside from appearing in stock footage in Matinee Mouse, this is the first and only appearance of Spike Bulldog in the Chuck Jones-era.
  • Spike Bulldog is heavily redesigned in this short as well, where here he has brown fur, and is far shorter and plumper in stature (similar to Tex Avery's Butch Dog) rather than tall and muscular like in the original Hanna-Barbera era cartoons of the 1940s and 1950s.
• Jerry's blinking sounds like the jingle of his waving in the Chuck Jones opening.

Gallery

Jerry and his band prepare to play the music that will irritate Tom and keep him up all night long.

Jerry and his band playing music.