Puss Gets the Boot

Lore & Background

In the world of "Puss Gets the Boot," the cat Jasper is a lazy, scheming feline who spends his days napping and plotting to catch the clever mouse Jinx. The human owner—often referred to by fans as Mammy Two Shoes, though that name was never used in the short or by the studio—is a stern woman with a thick accent who threatens to throw Jasper out if he breaks one more dish. This sets the stage for a high-stakes game where Jinx exploits the cat's fear of punishment to outwit him. The short is notable for its rough-around-the-edges animation—Jasper's fur is a bit too angular, Jinx's movements a tad jerky—and the character's later revision due to racial stereotypes, which gives the short a complicated legacy in animation history.

In Their Own Story

The rain patters against the window as Jasper the cat dozes on a rug, dreaming of a world without mice. But Jinx, a tiny gray mouse with a mischievous glint, scampers across the floor, nibbling cheese and taunting the cat. Jasper springs to life, but his clumsy chase sends a vase crashing to the floor. The owner's voice booms from the kitchen: 'If you break one more dish, you're out!' Jinx grins, knowing the game has changed. What follows is a frantic ballet of near-misses, shattered plates, and a cat's desperate attempt to avoid eviction while still catching his prey.

Reader's Guide

The short opens with Jasper the cat sleeping, only to be awakened by Jinx the mouse stealing food. Jasper chases Jinx through the house, but his pursuit causes him to accidentally break a vase. The human owner warns him that one more broken dish means he will be thrown out. Jinx overhears this and uses it to his advantage, deliberately provoking Jasper into chasing him near fragile objects. Jasper tries to avoid breaking anything, but Jinx's clever tricks—like luring him into a china cabinet—lead to a series of disasters. The climax involves Jasper being tricked into breaking a stack of dishes, and the owner kicks him out. Jinx celebrates, but the final gag shows Jasper sneaking back in, ready for round two.

Did You Know?

• The cat was originally named Jasper and the mouse Jinx; they were renamed Tom and Jerry for subsequent shorts after a studio contest.
• This short was nominated for the 1940 Academy Awards in the category Best Short Subject, Cartoons, helping to launch the series.
• The human character, often called Mammy Two Shoes by fans, was voiced by an uncredited actress in this short, not by Lillian Randolph, who voiced the character in later shorts.

Creative Origins at MGM

In the mid-1930s, MGM's animation division was struggling. The studio had been producing shorts based on The Captain and the Kids comic strip, but these weren't finding an audience. When Louis B. Mayer decided to shake things up and push his artists toward fresh character concepts, Joseph Barbera—who had joined the Ising unit in June 1937—saw an opening. Teaming up with fellow animator William Hanna, Barbera pitched the idea of two evenly matched characters locked in perpetual conflict. Their initial concept involved a fox and a dog, but the pair ultimately settled on a cat and a mouse. They brought the proposal to Fred Quimby, head of the short film department, who was openly disinterested but nonetheless gave them permission to produce a single cartoon. This reluctant green-light set in motion what would become one of the most iconic animated series in history, though neither Hanna nor Barbera could have predicted the magnitude of what was to come.

The Film and Its Characters

Puss Gets the Boot, released to theaters on February 10, 1940, presents a scruffy, battle-worn street cat named Jasper who takes sadistic pleasure in tormenting a thin, unnamed mouse—referred to as Pee-Wee in an MGM magazine. The short draws its basic premise from Aesop's Fable The Cat and the Mice, and the action follows a familiar escalation: Jasper grabs the mouse by the tail, tricks him with a painted hole in the wall, and chases him through a room where a Greek pillar crashes down. A stern housemaid enters to scold Jasper, issuing an ultimatum that any further destruction will result in his ouster. The mouse, ever resourceful, uses a glass held over a table edge as leverage, then turns the tables by pelting Jasper with dishes. In the climax, the mouse swims in Jasper's milk bowl, uses his tail as a towel, and kicks him, causing a cascade of broken china that frames the cat. The maid hurls Jasper out with a broom, and the mouse waves goodbye, sticking his tongue out before placing a HOME SWEET HOME sign in front of his hole.

Reception and the Road to a Series

The studio's own executives were underwhelmed by Puss Gets the Boot, and management advised Hanna and Barbera against producing any further cat-and-mouse shorts. The duo dutifully turned their attention to other projects, including Gallopin' Gals and Officer Pooch. Yet audiences told a different story. The short was nominated for an Academy Award, ultimately losing to The Milky Way, another MGM production featuring three kittens who lost their mittens and had to go to bed without their milk. The film's public enthusiasm eventually reached the attention of Bessa Short, a Texas businesswoman who wrote to MGM inquiring whether more cat-and-mouse cartoons would be made. Her letter helped tip the scales, convincing management to commission a full series. A studio-wide naming contest followed, won by animator John Carr, who proposed Tom and Jerry—names drawn from a popular Christmastime cocktail, which itself traced back to characters in an 1821 stage play by William Moncrieff, an adaptation of Pierce Egan's Life in London.

Establishing the Formula

Though neither character is called Tom or Jerry in this first installment, Puss Gets the Boot laid the groundwork for everything that followed. Ted Sennett, writing in The Art of Hanna-Barbera, distilled the premise into a single phrase: a cat stalks and chases a mouse in a frenzy of mayhem and slapstick violence. That formula—equal-opportunity chaos, physical comedy driven by pursuit, and a resourceful underdog who outwits a larger adversary—became the DNA of the series. Jasper, more malicious and rough around the edges than the Tom audiences would come to know, and the thin, unnamed mouse who would grow into Jerry, established the dynamic that defined the franchise. Leonard Maltin called the short "very new and special" and credited it with changing the course of MGM cartoon production. The fact that only Rudolf Ising received on-screen credit, per MGM's standard practice for shorts at the time, underscores how unassuming the project appeared before it reshaped the landscape of American animation.