"Barbera and Hanna, who died in 2001 at age 90, met at the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
film studio in 1937 and first worked together on the cartoon, 'Puss Gets the
Boot,' which led to the creation of famous cat and mouse friends, Tom and
Jerry."
My condolences to the families and friends of Joseph Barbera and it would seem he lived a long creative life.
The excerpt above is one more little shred of conjecture on my trail of finding the facts. "Puss gets the Boot" led to the creation of Tom and Jerry. In a newspaper interview in Florida, Gaylord Dubois said (regarding Tom and Jerry) "Yes, I created those two...".And there is more -- the dialogue of creating Tuffy with Oskar Lebeck in a phone call has been noted on several occasions and in several published places and it was my belief this was at some point after Tom and Jerry had been being published. I now have the first 'Our Gang" comic that Tom and Jerry appeared in and Tuffy is already a character.Anyone out there have anything they can add -- shed any light on this?
2 comments:
I know little of his comics work prior to what is recorded in the published Account Books. The info about Tuffy is news to me. I never heard of Tuffy. Where can I find out more? The sources you mention: what are they?
As to Tom & Jerry: When he said he created them, did Gaylord Du Bois mean he originated those cartoon characters for MGM? Or did he mean he created them as comic book characters? (I would assume the latter.) The Account Books record 4 Tom & Jerry scripts he wrote for Our Gang Comics, beginning in late summer, 1943, which is where the published Account Books begin. One can surmise that any such early entries indicate series he was already working on, the which would have been recorded in the prior account books which were lost in a house fire, so we can never know for sure. But we can extrapolate backwards.
David, I am replying to this in my next blog post... "It's in here somewhere"
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