Hatch Up Your Troubles
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| Hatch Up Your Troubles | |
|---|---|
| File:Hatchupyourtroublestitle.jpg Hatch Up Your Troubles title card. | |
| Directed by | William Hanna Joseph Barbera |
| Produced by | Fred Quimby |
| Animation by | Ed Barge Ray Patterson Irven Spence Kenneth Muse |
| Color process | Technicolor |
| Distributed by | Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer |
Running time | 7 minutes' 50 seconds" |
Hatch Up Your Troubles is a 1949 one-reel animated cartoon made in 1948 and is the 41st Tom and Jerry released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, short produced by Fred Quimby and directed by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, with musical supervision by Scott Bradley and animation by Ed Barge, Ray Patterson, Irven Spence and Kenneth Muse. The cartoon was produced in Technicolor and released to theatres on May 14, 1949 by Metro-Goldwyn Mayer. In 1955, the cartoon was remade and then rereleased in CinemaScope, titled "The Egg and Jerry".
Plot
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| This article's plot summary may be too long or excessively detailed. (February 2010) |
Template:Spoiler It begins with a mother woodpecker leaving her nest for a brief lunch. The egg that she was nesting jumps up in her absence and falls to the ground, rolling into Jerry's mousehole and into his bed. Jerry wakes up to find himself sitting on the egg, which begins to hatch (and causes him to cover his legs in embarrassment and shock). Out comes a baby woodpecker who instantly takes to Jerry as his mother. The adorable, but naturally, peckish woodpecker cannot resist pecking away at Jerry's furniture.
Jerry returns the woodpecker to his nest, but the little bird follows Jerry back to his hole. Eventually, Jerry gives up on the woodpecker and orders him out. With nowhere to go, the despondent baby woodpecker wanders around the garden, where he comes across an unsuspecting Tom, who is sitting in a deckchair, drinking and reading a magazine. The woodpecker carelessly pecks slightly at the deckchair's leg. An irritated Tom pours his drink onto the woodpecker, who then proceeds to peck through the entire leg of the deckchair, causing it to fold up with Tom still sitting on it.
Mayhem ensues. Tom begins to chase the bird, who screeches "Mama! Mama! Mama! Mama!" Jerry emerges from his mousehole and decides to intervene, stopping Tom with a rake. However, Tom manages to grab hold of the rake, trapping Jerry in the process, who cannot run away. The woodpecker pecks off the end of the rake, allowing Jerry to run off, and sending Tom hurtling backwards into a mailbox. Tom hurls the long remainder of the rake handle at Jerry and the bird, but the bird quickly pecks it down to a stub. In the ensuing chase, Tom swallows the bird. The bird pecks deep inside Tom's stomach, which vibrates violently. Tom drinks from a bucket of water, only for the water to seep out through tiny holes in his body. Jerry knocked Tom's tail and the woodpecker eventually pecks his way out through Tom's teeth, and as Jerry runs off, he runs straight into an axe and is knocked out cold. As Tom attempts to disembowel Jerry, the woodpecker continually pecks at the cat's head. Tom grabs the woodpecker in his hand and corks his beak, rendering the woodpecker useless at attacking him. Tom then ties the woodpecker to a telegraph pole. However, the woodpecker manages to free himself, and noticing that Jerry has very little time to escape, quickly performs a complicated calculation in order to stop Tom and rescue Jerry. He pecks the post and Tom almost gets Jerry, but the falling telegraph pole lands on Tom's head, bouncing repeatedly and hammering him into the ground. And then repeatedly pushes him down into the ground. The woodpecker pecks away at the telegraph pole which comes crashing down onto Tom's head, hammering him down into the ground. He pecks at the post and Tom almost kills Jerry, when he is tired. But it hits Tom's head and hammering him to the ground and it kills him. He pecks the post and Tom almost gets Jerry, but the falling telegraph pole lands on Tom's head, bouncing repeatedly and hammering him into the ground.
Jerry is thankful for the woodpecker's help. However, the mother woodpecker flies into the scene. The baby woodpecker realises just who his mother is after all, and is whisked away by his mother. Jerry realises that he will miss his avian companion more than he thought he would. Just then, the baby woodpecker flies back to Jerry, gives him a big loving kiss and flies away again, as Jerry waves him off happily.
Notes/Trivia
- The name of the magazine that Tom is reading in this short is Saturday Evening Puss, which is the name of a 1950 short where Tom throws a party in Mammy Two Shoes' absence.
- The cartoon was nominated for Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 1949, but lost to For Scent-imental Reasons, a Pepe Le Pew cartoon from Warner Bros..
- Tom was also hammered down by a tree to the ground in the episode Little Quacker.
- The plot of this is referenced in That's My Mommy. Which the woodpecker thinks that Jerry is his mother and in That's My Mommy, Quacker thinks that Tom is his mother.
- The Egg and Jerry is a CinemaScope remake in Perspecta.
- In The Yoshi Show episode "Fortune Cookie", the woodpecker has a pencil to snap with new Spongebob screaming audio from Spongebob Squarepants episode "Pranks a Lot" added on T.V.
- The magazine that Tom was reading while sitting on the deskchair is called "Saturday Evening Puss". That name would later be used in an upcoming cartoon in the '50s.
Release and reaction
Hatch Up Your Troubles gave Tom and Jerry their ninth Oscar nomination, but the short lost out to the Looney Tunes cartoon For Scent-imental Reasons, featuring Pepe Le Pew. Nevertheless, Hatch Up Your Troubles remains one of the cat and mouse duo's most fondly remembered shorts.
In 1956, the cartoon was re-made in CinemaScope as The Egg and Jerry, featuring the same animation, but re-drawn onto cels with thicker lines, and with more stylised background art, presumably to exploit the advantages of widescreen, as cinematics were losing their popularity to television by the late 1950s.
The magazine that Tom was reading, was the 1950 Saturday Evening Puss comics.
Availability
DVD
- Tom and Jerry Spotlight Collection Vol. 3, Disc One
- Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Academy Awards Animation Collection Disc 1
- Tom and Jerry Golden Collection Vol. 2, Disc One
External links
- Articles lacking sources from May 2008
- Articles needing cleanup from September 2006
- Cleanup tagged articles without a reason field from September 2006
- Wikipedia pages needing cleanup from September 2006
- 1949 animated films
- Tom and Jerry short films
- English-language films
- Films directed by Joseph Barbera
- Films directed by William Hanna
- 1940s American animated films
- American films
- 1940s comedy films
- Animated films about birds
- Films scored by Scott Bradley
- Best Animated Short Academy Award nominees
- Best Short Film Academy Award nominees
- 1948 films