The Twirling Tom Cycle

Jerry’s anger causes him to develop super-human, er, mouse strength in the penultimate scene of “The Milky Waif” (1946). He swings Tom around in a cycle that takes up a half feet of film and a third of a second.










The animators listed are Ed Barge, Ken Muse and Mike Lah. Mark Kausler, who knows better than anyone, says this is Barge’s work. It looks like Lah after this when Tom is bashed by the garbage can lid then begins to feed milk to the orphan mouse but I don’t pretend to be an expert on picking out animators.

Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera later re-worked this cartoon for TV as “Nice Mice,” except the milk-hungry orphan taken in by mice Pixie and Dixie is a kitten.

By the way, did Joe Barbera have some kind of spanking fetish? The orphan mouse is spanked in this cartoon. I just finished watching “Professor Tom” (1948) and there’s spanking there, too. In both, the animals sprout human-like butts with cleavage. And that doesn’t even take into account the cartoons from the Hanna-Barbera unit featuring someone being stabbed or hit in the butt.