Saturday Evening Puss

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Saturday Evening Puss Tom and Jerry series
The title card of Saturday Evening Puss.
Directed by	William Hanna Joseph Barbera
Produced by	Fred Quimby
Story by	William Hanna (unc.) Joseph Barbera (unc.)
Voices by	Lillian Randolph (as Mammy Two Shoes)
Music by	Scott Bradley
Animation by	Ed Barge Kenneth Muse Irven Spence Ray Patterson
Distributed by	Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Release date(s)	January 14, 1950
Color process	Technicolor
Running time	6 minutes 18 seconds
Preceded by	Little Quacker
Followed by	Texas Tom
IMDb profile

Saturday Evening Puss is a Tom and Jerry cartoon from 1950, and is the 48th of 114 Tom and Jerry cartoons directed by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera who created the cat and mouse duo ten years earlier. The cartoon was produced by Fred Quimby, scored by Scott Bradley and animated by Ed Barge, Kenneth Muse, Irven Spence and Ray Patterson.

[edit] Plot

That cartoon takes place in a house one evening when Mammy Two Shoes goes out to her bridge club for the night. Just as she leaves, Tom invites his feline pals Butch, Topsy and Lighting, who emerge from garbage cans outside of the house and rush in when Tom gives them the all-clear by showing them a sign written O.K. for the party.

The cats' rowdiness is preventing Jerry from getting his beauty sleep in Saturday Evening Puss.

The feline quartet have a ball in th house during Mammy's absence, playing loud jazz music. Then Tom gives to Lighting and Topsy sandwiches, and to Butch a big pie. However, not everybody is happy. Jerry is in his mouse hole, trying to get his beauty sleep, and the music is not helping. Jerry is shown becoming various instruments on his head. Unsurprisingly, his complaints to Tom meet with no success. Jerry is out handled by the four cats, so he tries to disrupt the proceedings personally, by removing the phonograph recorder, stuffing Shorty in a drawer, and closing the piano on Butch's fingers. Jerry flees into his hole and "zips" it up, causing the four cats to hit their heads on the wall. Tom then turns the recorder back on, drawing Jerry out of his hole again. Jerry pulls the plug on the phonograph and Topsy begins the chase, trying to flatten Jerry but instead getting four taunting caricatures of the little mouse imprinted on the trash can lid. Jerry sees the other cats approaching and flees through an open Dutch door, closing the top section such that all three cats run into it.

Mammy's face

Jerry runs into Shorty coming from the other direction as he rounds a corner, so he hides behind the curtain and steals Topsy's lid. Topsy runs back the other way, but runs into his own lid. All the cats chase her through the living room and Jerry unfortunately finds a hiding place in the windowsill. Tom pulls the string, causing Jerry to to be squished. Then he slowly lays flat on the window and pops back up. He tries to escape, but his effort to flee fails when Tom ties him up with it. Jerry swings down to the nearest table and uses the telephone to report Tom's activities to Mammy Two Shoes herself, who abruptly departs her bridge club to return and crash the cats' party.(actually crashing through the door in her anger) and evict the feline partiers, who are thrown into a street wall, as such, they form a totem pole. However, Mammy then decides to relax by playing the recording of the jazz that the cats were playing, leaving poor Jerry no better off than before.

[edit] Notes

In the re-animated version using the slim white lady, Jerry's stereotypical african line "Heeeyyy! Stop! I'm just in there trying to get a little sleep and you guys are out here with all the blah blah blah blah!" has been muted. The short makes it look like Jerry is yelling silently and Tom cannot hear what he is saying and decides to torment him.
Mammy's face can be briefly seen when running home to crash Tom's party.
This cartoon exists in several different forms:
- The original cartoon with black Mammy, with original voice characterisation by Lillian Randolph.
- A dubbed version of the same cartoon, with June Foray's voice in place of Lillian Randolph's.
- A re-animated version of this cartoon where Mammy has been completely removed and replaced with a thin white lady that has been rotoscoped in. Her voice was also dubbed over by June Foray. This re-animation was done by Chuck Jones' team in the 1960s This version has two replacement scenes. Instead of Black Mammy putting her bracelets and her traffic light necklace on and putting her underwear up, the white Mammy answers a phone call and tells the person she is on his way. She then hears the doorbell and says "Is Lover-Boy here yet? Good!" and puts her white shoes on and does a swing walk out of the house. And instead of her being at her bridge club, she is depicted dancing with a man at a dancing class. Note that her entire face is blackened when she is running home, and when Tom answers the door to see her, Butch, Topsy and Meathead vanish.
- In some airings, this white-lady version retains the voice of Lillian Randolph, so the white lady speaks in a black Southern accent; she is also depicted dancing with a young man, making her dialogue about being at her "bridge club" surreal at best.