DVD Reviews

Kids’ View Review: Tom and Jerry: Tricks & Treats

By Tanner D. Luce (13 Years Old) Oct 5, 2012, 17:34 GMT

Tom and Jerry are in for spooks galore in this monster collection. With 20 eerie episodes plus two bonus episodes, your goodie-bag will be overflowing with fun! Tricks and treats are at every turn, from ancient Egypt to Transylvania, from creepy houses to haunted forests, the hair-raising hilarity is non-stop! Our favorite cat and mouse mingle with ghosts, mummies, werewolves and witches in these terrific tales. Of course Tom and ...more

Tom and Jerry are back to scare you as they run through haunted houses, dark forests, and witches’ houses. While Tom and Jerry have never been designed to make people scream, the jokes are so funny that they will “haunt” you for hours.

I found myself laughing for the 100th time as Jerry’s magic cousin stunned Tom and went inside of him to free everything he had eaten. I laughed when Tom vacuumed Casper, the friendly ghost, up. I’ve seen the episodes at least 100 times across thousands of Tom and Jerry discs, but they still make me laugh.

The collection includes 20 different episodes (almost 3 hours) from across three series. Episodes from the Hanna Barbara, Chuck Jones, and Tom and Jerry Tales series are all in the collection, which is good for people who prefer one over the other. I have always preferred the main Hanna Barbara series, as Tom and Jerry Tales has an annoying musical score and the Chuck Jones cartoons are sometimes a little too crazy.

Most of the shorts come from Tom and Jerry Tales, and they aren’t bad but they could use some improvement. As mentioned earlier, the musical score is pretty dreadful. The jokes are probably the least funny out of all three, as they are repeated constantly and were already used 50 years ago. The only advantage Tom and Jerry tales has to the others is that it has more Halloween orientated cartoons and better animation.

Pretty soon, it becomes quite obvious that they ran out of spooky episodes. I don’t exactly know how a Tom and Jerry Fantastic Four / Green Lantern parody goes a with Halloween theme. It was definitely bizarre and rather funny, but not anything scary. After that came an episode where Tom has discovered treasure inside one of the pyramids of Egypt. It didn’t fit the general point either.

As it turns out, almost half of the episodes lacked Halloween / fall / spooky elements. Some were medieval, others were more Sci-fi, and some had nothing to do with the cover at all. To make it even more painful, somebody decided to leave out Fraidy Cat (1941), which proves that they were not even trying (If Tom listening to a ghost story and Jerry terrorizing him by chasing him around with a vacuum cleaner disguised as a ghost is not Halloween enough, I don’t what is).

Yeah, I laughed at the jokes in the cartoons, but who doesn’t?  Tom and Jerry have always been funny. However, the episodes put onto the disc were put in at no attempt to meet the title, cover, or description.

If I want to watch a collection of Tom and Jerry I can easily pull out my deluxe 2 disc anniversary set, or the complete Chuck Jones collection, or Tom and Jerry Tales: Season 1. This gets 2 stars.

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