Tom & Jerry are Hanging Out 'In the Park'

In the Park (1933)
Starring: Anonymous Voice Actor (although this is basically a silent movie)
Directors: Frank Sherman and George Rufle
Rating: Six of Ten Stars

Tom and Jerry's quiet afternoon in the park is disrupted by a bratty baby.

"In the Park" is another Tom & Jerry adventure that shows those in charge of this series weren't clear on who the target audience for this series was. We have a little mature humor at the beginning and end, framing a series of cute and mildly amusing antics by our heroes and the baby they find themselves suddenly taking care of. I suspect that if I were nine years old, I would find the various visual gags absolute screamers, but at well over five times that age, they just make me smile. It's not that the jokes are bad... they're just juvenile and not set up as effectively as they could be. All that said, the gags come in a steady, constant stream and none drag on past the point of being funny. Even if the baby is annoying.

(The adult in me--and possibly because I'm a 2020s adult instead of a 1930s adult--also kept thinking that our heroes were going to be arrested for kidnapping or for being perverts, since they just started playing with a random baby that showed up. There was also a brief twinge of "don't they see the baby carriage 20 feet their right", but then I decided I was REALLY overthinking things. Plus, the cute squirrels that Jerry was feeding were coming from the opposite direction, so they never really looked that way. [Yeah... still overthinking...])

As with many of the "Tom & Jerry" films, the music is excellent. It's not a mini-musical like some of them are, but rather a silent movie with a great score that's perfectly timed to what unfolds on screen. For all the inconsistencies that plagued this series vis-à-vis tone, possible target audiences, and animation- and story-quality, the musical scores were almost always of the highest quality.

Animation-wise, this is both one of the best AND worst in the Tom & Jerry series. In the positive column, the sequences involving the cute squirrels are well done and very cute. We are also treated to honest-to-god backgrounds throughout most of this episode, something the animators working on "Tom & Jerry" too-often didn't bother with. In the negative column, the characters are sloppily drawn, especially Tom. He literally changes shape more than once and for no reason, with his arms and legs sometimes getting longer or shorter even within the same sequence. Similarly, the obnoxious baby seems to be bigger or smaller from scene to scene. It's distracting, and it's incomprehensible as to why there wasn't a little more quality control going on... especially when the extra effort to draw backgrounds.

And speaking of that obnoxious baby... I wonder if the Van Beuren company wasn't testing out a possible headliner for another series. It's one of only two recurring characters in the series--aside from Tom & Jerry themselves--and it always had a major role. (The Bratty Baby can also be found in "Pots and Pans" and "Puzzled Pals". The other recurring, more minor character, was a horse that appeared in "Rabid Hunters", "In the Bag", and "Hook and Ladder Hokum".)

In balance, "In the Park" isn't a brilliant effort, but it's among the better "Tom & Jerry" installments. It's worth checking out if you have nothing better to do with the next few minutes. Just click below and sit back.

And with this, every installment in Van Beuren's Tom & Jerry series has been reviewed and can be watched here at Shades of Gray. Click here to see an index of all them, as well as easy links through which to check them out.