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Truly Dreadful Film

Let's be realistic.

Fresh and Exciting

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

The Bowling Alley-Cat (1942)*** (out of 4)The action and laughs are the same but the setting is different. Jerry is at the bowling alley having some fun when he runs into Tom and chaos follows. THE BOWLING ALLEY-CAT has pretty much everything that the previous Tom and Jerry shorts did but the big difference here is that the action has gone from the house to a bowling alley. While there's really nothing new here there's no question that the new settling allowed for some creative fun. One of the highlights is when Tom plans on eating Jerry but instead gets pounded by some bowling balls. The animation is quite good as you'd expect and there's no doubt that the comic duo were really starting to come into their own.

Early Tom and Jerry cartoons have often been accused of being racist—with Mammy Two Shoes' character possibly being a servant and characters often getting a 'blackface' (amongst other stereotypical ethnic representations)—but now I'm starting to wonder whether I'm seeing examples of racism where there are none. I'm sure that there's one bowling ball in this short that is inexplicably made to look like a 'blackface'. Or maybe not.Anyway, regardless of my possible hallucinatory concerns, this is actually a pretty entertaining T&J caper, with the guys escaping the confines of their house to wreak havoc in a bowling alley. The fresh environment allows for a whole new wave of creativity, there are plenty of laughs to be had (as well as much cartoonish violence, as one would expect in a place full of machinery and heavy objects), and the animation is as highly polished as the bowling alley we see Jerry skating on, with convincingly weighty bowling balls that look like they could really hurt.

For at least one reason, this was better than the rest of these 1942 Tom and Jerry cartoons: they got out of their house. With new surroundings - in this case, a bowling alley, - it allowed for different and better gags than the normal house scenes.This starts off slowly, however, and I wondered if it was every going to produce some laughs, but it did, especially with Tom caught in the automatic pinsetter and then the caravan of bowling bowls was pictured as a train. Decent, overall, with the really clever stuff to come in a couple of years. This would have been much better, let's say, in 1945, with crazier stunts. Nonetheless, this cartoons starts to set the stage for the really funny (and violent) material that also was to come.

This is one of the first Tom and Jerry shorts that doesn't take place inside a generic 1940s house but inside, as the title would suggest, a bowling alley. This new environment allows for fresher gags and more imagination. There are some inventive sequences and it doesn't resort to the ancient clichés of Jerry plugging Tom's tail into a power socket or putting his tail in a mousetrap.There are no humans to be seen at all and it appears that Tom and Jerry at alone in the bowling alley. Which is good. I find that extra characters such as stray cats and unseen humans (including the staggeringly un-offensive Mammy-Two-Shoes) to be a distraction. New locations, new torture devices and no diversions would make Tom and Jerry funny every single time. Too bad they mostly never really turned out that way.