In 'Tom and Jerry,' there was hardly any dialogue at all. It was all action. It required a great many drawings to make.
Every week when my batch of weekly cartoons would go to FedEx, it felt like a small miracle. Then in a few days, it's 'Here we go again.'
We used to make a 'Tom and Jerry' short every six weeks and they were about six minutes long, so we were producing about a minute of animation a week.
I think we had made 160 'Tom and Jerry' cartoons.
I started working at Hanna-Barbera in '92 on 2 Stupid Dogs.
On the 'Tom and Jerry's,' Joe and I would sit across a desk from each other and develop the story. Joe would do the storyboard and I'd do the timing and the direction of the animation.
I started, actually, to make my first animated cartoon in 1920. Of course, they were very crude things then and I used sort of little puppet things.
I was invited to join the MGM cartoon department. But if I'd started work in animation I'd have had to take a cut in salary, so I didn't.
I'll just say that America - us included - has a long way to go to catch up with the animated work being done in a handful of countries, namely Japan.
I don't think there's more than half-a-dozen cartoons that I've been really truly happy with in all the time I've been doing it.
I saw one of the old 'Tom and Jerry' cartoons the other day. I hadn't seen it for 30 years and I didn't remember it. We made 160 of them! I thought it was a very funny cartoon.
