Neapolitan Dogs

Any Tom and Jerry cartoon with cute, girl-sounding, foreign-accented mice is cringe-worthy, but I really like the dog designs in “Neapolitan Mouse.” Whether they’re by Dick Bickenbach or Gene Hazelton, I don’t know.



The cartoon’s weird. The Italian girly mouse recognises Tom and Jerry from cartoons. That means the whole Tom and Jerry world realises its living in a cartoon. And the big climax scene has the dogs thumped into the ocean by wheels of cheese which evidently have minds of their own, as they churn away from the cartoon after performing their deed.

But the dogs haven’t been vanquished. Like fanbois, they happily wave goodbye to Tom and Jerry to close the cartoon. Yeah, after the blue dog beats Tom into a hand-accordion earlier in the short.



The Hanna-Barbera unit’s usual animators are all here—Ed Barge, Irv Spence, Ray Patterson and Ken Muse.