They've been plotting, conniving and running after each other's tail for 70 years, and they still manage to draw guffaws from a global audience, which surveys show comprises as many adults as children.
Tom and Jerry, the most loved cat and mouse duo in the world, have turned 70, having lived through bouts of politically correct sanitising.
We turn back the clock and trace the evolution of the cartoon series that was named one of the greatest TV shows of all time by Time magazine in 2000.
In the late 1930s, William Hanna, an experienced director, and Joseph Barbera, a storyboard writer at the MGM cartoon studio, created a cat- and mouse toon called Puss Gets the Boot.
The precursor to Tom's character was Jasper, a gray tabby cat - and Jerry didn't even have a name.
Puss Gets The Boot was previewed and released without much fanfare on February 10, 1940, after which Hanna and Barbera went on to direct other shorts that had nothing to do with cats and mice.
In 1941, the cartoon became a favourite of cinema theatre owners and of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which nominated the film for an Oscar. But it lost out to another MGM cartoon, Rudolph Ising's The Milky Way. This is when producer Fred Quimby, who ran the MGM animation studio, asked Hanna and Barbera to focus on a series featuring the cat and mouse. The Tom and Jerry series went into production with The Midnight Snack in 1941, and Hanna and Barbera rarely directed anything but the cat-and-mouse cartoons for the rest of their tenure at MGM. Tom and Jerry was in a controversy in 2006, when the UK channel Boomerang announced plans to edit those cartoons where the characters were seen to be smoking in a manner that made the action look "acceptable or glamourised". This followed a complaint from a viewer that the cartoons were not appropriate for younger viewers, and a subsequent investigation by the media watchdog OFCOM. In India, Tom and Jerry, untouched by any wave of political correctness, has been a big hit on Cartoon Network, which has been airing the series since its launch in 1995. The show is now available not only in English and Hindi, but also in Tamil and Telugu.
"Tom and Jerry is a piece of art that is created just once," says the channel's South Asia programming director, Krishna Desai. "Even after 70 years, it is growing more popular than ever. And our surveys show that nearly half of Tom and Jerry viewers are adults." Cartoon Network now plans to air special shows throughout April to mark the show's 70th anniversary. " We have 160 Tom and Jerry titles ( episodes) and six feature films. It is difficult to describe in words why it is so popular among all age groups. But it is working beautifully," Desai says.
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