In Gene Deitch’s essay for Cartoon Research about his work on Tom and Jerry, he wrote, “I worked personally on every phase of the project.” That work included “designing the backgrounds.” Therefore, he was responsible for the first few seconds of his series finale Carmen Get It (1962). Those few seconds present a unique, abstract view of New York City, and the city’s image reflects Deitch’s perspective of the city and his interpretation of Tom and Jerry there.
The cartoon begins with Tom chasing Jerry through city streets. Jerry’s arrival at the Metropolitan Opera ultimately reveals the city as New York. However, the previous seconds present New York’s various theaters in one neighborhood despite their actual locations in separate parts of the city. The Astor and the Embassy were on Broadway, but the Apollo was—and still is—in Harlem. If Deitch oversaw the backgrounds, he would have had to instruct the background artist to place those theater names in the scene. Also, Tom and Jerry run through New York with an ease reflecting Deitch’s previous years in New York before moving to the Czech Republic. They do not come across as country bumpkins, as Jerry is in Mouse in Manhattan (1945).
Especially poignant is that, of all the theaters in the background, the Apollo is at the forefront of the background. Deitch’s familiarity with the Apollo as part of New York is part of a tradition of New York animators’ references to local African American entertainment—a tradition dating back to Max Fleischer’s animators visiting the Cotton Club in the 1930s. Back then, Betty Boop cavorted with characters played by Cab Calloway and Louis Armstrong, and the characters’ settings of caves and jungles symbolized Harlem. In contrast, the placement of Tom and Jerry by the Apollo suggests that they are in Harlem itself. The chase from the point of view of the animals shows only the legs of human passers-by. Therefore, the film leaves open the possibility of some of those passers-by being African Americans walking through Harlem. Moreover, unlike those Fleischer films, Carmen Get It does not depict Harlem as a scary and dangerous place for anyone not African American. Rather, it is just another section of New York City.
In a sense Carmen Get It contains Tom and Jerry’s last nod to African American culture. When William Hanna and Joseph Barbera directed the series, they restricted the references largely to music. Scott Bradley occasionally incorporated African American compositions into his scores for episodes, and Louis Jordan’s “Is You Is Or Is You Ain’t My Baby” is the musical centerpiece of Solid Serenade (1946). However, these references and Tom’s donning of a zoot suit in The Zoot Cat (1944) are in settings far removed from African Americans themselves. The street scene in Carmen Get It finally places Tom and Jerry in the neighborhood that shaped so many of the references.
Deitch’s essay mentions his removal by MGM from Tom and Jerry because of the departure of the distributor’s president Joe Vogel in early 1963. As a result, Deitch could not further integrate his perspective of New York into the characters. His successor Chuck Jones kept them out of New York, and no further cultural references to African Americans appear in the series. Meanwhile, the Civil Rights Act did not end legal segregation until 1964, and MGM distributed Deitch’s films to segregated venues. Therefore, the appearance of Tom and Jerry by the Apollo in Carmen Get It was somewhat progressive, because it showed an African American neighborhood as a fundamental part of an American city and without “white only” and “colored only” signs separating the population. It was a subversive ode to tolerance from a series not always known for its subtlety or its ethnic progressivism.
Christopher P. Lehman is a professor of ethnic studies at St. Cloud State University in St. Cloud, Minnesota. His books include American Animated Cartoons of the Vietnam Era and The Colored Cartoon, and he has been a visiting fellow at Harvard University.
My only exposure to the Gene Deitch “Tom and Jerry“ cartoons for MGM before losing my sight completely in 1976 was due to my seeing the feature length presentation of classic MGM cartoons under the banner “the Tom and Jerry Festival of Fun“. These did indeed Extend to the later “Tom and Jerry“ cartoons, not created by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera.
They did not include the Chuck Jones years, just the Deitch years. I may be wrong about this, because it has been years since I was exposed to the film and reacquainted with it, But I was hoping that it would even include some of the happy harmonies films. The happy harmonies films dealt with African-American culture, but only as stereotypes. They were compositions by African-Americans and others throughout the happy harmonies series, including the representation of an old Looney Tunes character now realized as an African-American boy.
When I saw those cartoons broadcast on our local ABC affiliate back in the late 1950s and early 1960s, I did not realize that Tom and Jerry were part of that history. The cartoons were not broadcast on television until after the four mentioned “Tom and Jerry festival of fun“ feature length presentation. I only knew them through comic books before that. I actually wish I had seen “CARMEN get it”, for all the reasons that you pointed out in this detailed review. I never even got the chance to see “Mouse in Manhattan“; So I never got to see the depiction of New York in that film either. I’m sure both were unique.
I love Gene Deitch’s work at Terrytoons in the late 1950s. Some of that stuff to me where works of art in simplified animation. It was a shame that the Terry Studios did not allow for popular songs to filter out through the scores. If that were so, I think the Terry scores would have been more varied and more interesting, especially the jazz elements!
Years ago I dated a girl whose father had lived in New York in the early 1960s, and he used to go to the Apollo Theater all the time. He said that Harlem was a safe neighbourhood for white people in those days — hardly “a scary and dangerous place for anyone not African American.”
What I find intriguing is the excellent likeness of the façade of the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center, which had not yet been built in 1962. Construction on it only began in late 1963, was delayed by the 1964 World’s Fair, and was not completed until 1966. Gene Deitch must have found an artist’s rendering of the proposed building’s exterior; such pictures would have appeared in any number of magazines at this time. However, the design of the opera house’s interior in the cartoon bears no resemblance whatsoever to that of the New Met: Deitch’s design is far more streamlined and modernistic than the real thing, the proscenium arch is trapezoidal rather than rectangular, and the proscenium itself lacks the weird bronze sculpture that opera lovers have dubbed “the car wreck.”
It’s worth mentioning that after the new opera house opened in 1966, the Met began to feature African-American singers in major roles to a much greater extent than ever before. For example, Grace Bumbry starred in the Met’s 1967 production of “Carmen”, and Shirley Verrett in their 1968 production of that opera, both to tremendous acclaim. Both women had previously played the role dozens of times in European opera houses
That looks more like the rounded marquee of the Apollo Theatre on 42nd Street, not the Apollo Theatre in Harlem. Which was right near the other theaters in that shot. So I think this whole essay is misguided. https://cinematreasures.org/theaters/1079
Buddies Thicker Than Water also took place in New York, near the East River and the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges. While the apartment was a luxury penthouse, the area was the Lower East Side, which was notoriously a poor section with a lot of minorities.
Dietch loved American jazz music, was considered a serious jazz historian, and drew many jazz cartoons for record collector publications. Perhaps he wanted to acknowledge the Harlem Apollo’s significant role in jazz history.
Growing up in New York (Long Island), I watched Tom and Jerry on good ol’ WPIX, channel 11 and remember the Gene Deitch cartoons. Reading your article was like a portal back to that time (I even sought out the cartoon after reading). I never realized how it reflected the city and its cultural significance. Thank you for sharing!