"The Bowling Alley-Cat" is another Hanna Barbera cartoon starring Tom and Jerry as you may have guessed from the title already, a pretty nice play on words there and even if the title only features Tom, Jerry is the one who keeps having the last laugh like so many other times. At exactly 8 minutes, this one's slightly longer than they usually are and it was released back in 1942, so during the days of WWII, and this means that it had its 75th anniversary last year already, which makes it one of the oldest T&J cartoons and from Tom's looks you can see that pretty well as he changed a lot physically from his original form the more cartoons got released over the years. Actually this is number 007 (Bond anyone?). The two are at the bowling alley and it is really just the duo at that point, o other customers, no other animals, no other employees, just the cat and the mouse he is trying to catch. This results in several funny and witty sequences that in fact not only involve jokes on pins and balls (and their faces), but also jokes on other sports like ice skating very early on. I enjoyed the watch here. It's among the better, but not best Tom and Jerry cartoons I have seen (and I have seen lots) just like it is among the more, but not most, known cartoons starring this duo. Go see it, it's worth it in my opinion.

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.

The Tom-and-Jerry shorts were unquestionably, UNQUESTIONABLY, the most violent cartoons of the golden age. I recall reading that, in terms of bashings, stabbings etc. per minute, the Pink Panther cartoons are the most violent, followed (not surprisingly) by the Road Runner - but we know better than to trust such statistics. It's the Tom and Jerry cartoons that make you say "ouch". This is a tame sample, actually, from the days before Tex Avery came to MGM. Orthodoxy (for instance, Leonard Maltin, "Of Mice and Magic") has it that even the cartoons directed by Hanna and Barbera perked up after he arrived, and orthodoxy is correct. This is still a good cartoon. Watch it, and you'll see the violence I'm referring to clearly enough.It's a clash between two forces that makes Tom and Jerry so bracingly brutal. Firstly, there's the detailed, polished, true-to-Newton realism. That bowling alley floor really is slippery, and the bowling balls really are heavy - one could get hurt playing with such things. Secondly, there's an element's somewhat muted in this pre-Avery cartoon, although it's still there - the hyper-exaggerated, sadistic anarchy which Avery brought over from Warner Brothers, back when that studio really was producing loony 'toons (mostly not very good ones, it must be admitted). Put them together and you have a bowling ball that will go out of its way to injure a cat, as only a cartoon bowling ball could - except that, somehow, it also behaves like a REAL, genuinely dangerous bowling ball. Ouch.Tom and Jerry were at their best in the years following this cartoon, when the balance between realism and cartooniness was precisely maintained. At some hard-to-pinpoint moment in the 1950s, the realism got lost, and the cartoons became unbalanced in the opposite direction.Another factor which enhanced Tom and Jerry cartoons, right through to the end, was their uncertainty. Usually, we side with Tom (the cat), who is mean-spirited but at least honest about it - and usually, it's Tom who is roundly walloped. But Jerry rarely emerges unscathed himself (unlike the Road Runner, or that unendurable creation, Tweety Pie). And sometimes, just once or twice, he gets the worst of the exchange. We suspect that Tom will somehow end up losing the battle, but we don't KNOW that he will - which, I suppose, makes his defeat sting all the more.