Between 1961 and 1962, MGM released 13 Tom and Jerry cartoons produced at a Czechoslovakian animation studio under the guidance of expatriate Americans Gene Deitch and William N. Synder. It is safe to say that very few people adore these films – with their cheapjack animation, irritating sound effects and stupid scripts, these Tom and Jerry endeavors represent some of the shoddiest animation ever put forth by a Hollywood studio.
The 1962 “High Steaks” is the worst of the 13 shorts. Unlike the zany but harmless slapstick extravaganzas of the Oscar-winning Tom and Jerry shorts created by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera during MGM’s Golden Era, “High Steaks” serves up crass and sadistic violence in lieu of humor, resulting in a dismally unpleasant work that should never gone into release.
“High Steaks” is set in the unusually large backyard of Tom’s oversized and ill-tempered owner, who is entertaining himself by preparing a lunch of barbecued steaks. Tom is eager to share the steak lunch, but the cat is not willing to allow the interloper mouse Jerry to participate. However, Tom’s attempts to eject Jerry from the scene results in repeated accidental assaults against Tom’s owner, who is unaware of Jerry’s presence and responds to the indignities created by his cat with excessive cruelty.
When Tom’s attempt to lunge at Jerry with a fork results in the fork going into the owner’s backside, the owner clamps a hot grill over Tom’s head until it resembles a flat waffle. When Jerry hides in a shuttlecock under a badminton net, Tom grabs a racket and hits the shuttlecock skyward, but it lands in the owner’s mouth – the man breaks Tom’s racket over his head.
Jerry then shakes a bottle of “Kooky Kola” and opens it, releasing a torrent of soda that drenches the man’s steak. The man thinks Tom is to blame, so he shakes another bottle and forces the contents into Tom’s mouth, turning his body into grotesque shapes.
But perhaps the worst of the film has Jerry trapping Tom’s tail in the hot barbecue grill. The cat is unable to pull the tail out and goes careening wildly around the backyard while shrieking at the burning pain torturing his lower body. Tom knocks over his owner while he is trying to eat his steak. Tom dives into a swimming pool to extinguish the burning on his tail, but the weight of the grill pulls Tom to the pool’s bottom and he faces drowning. The owner pulls Tom up by the neck, but we don’t witness the beating inflicted on the cat – we only see Jerry covering his eyes while loud sound effects suggest a horrific off-screen fate.
The owner ties a traumatized Tom (who sports two black eyes) to a lawn chair and goes off to salvage his afternoon’s meal. Jerry moves the lawn chair out of the backyard and attaches it to the bumper of a car that stopped for a red flight. The frantic Tom cannot extract himself from his bondage as the car zooms away, leaving a jubilant Jerry to happily return to the backyard and steal a steak for his lunch.
“High Steaks” is a horrible experience at every imaginable level. The major problem is Tom’s owner as the antagonist – the hotheaded man is an utterly mean being with a malicious smile that bares shark-like teeth when he excessively punishes the cat. Tom is completely helpless against this miserable bully and he nervously bites his fingernails while he awaits his owner’s wrath. This character turned up in two other of the Deitch-directed shorts and functioned only as a merciless punisher whenever Tom accidentally gets in his way while chasing Jerry.
As for Jerry, the mouse quickly realizes that he can get the best of the not-bright cat and becomes obnoxious in making Tom’s life miserable – especially with the sequence with the tail in the barbecue grill, which is devoid of humor due to the anguished terror that Tom expresses while his tail is being burned and then when he is drowning in the pool. Did Deitch really think this was amusing?
In terms of animation style, “High Steaks” has no style – is bottom-of-the-barrel crap. If there are any saving graces here, it would be the very brief snatches of voice actor Allen Swift as the owner when he is happily singing while preparing his meal and a blink-and-you-miss-it gag when the lawn chair is hitched to the car. If you look carefully at the street signs at the corner where the car is stopped, you’ll see it is the intersection of Snyder and Deitch – which, in this case, is the wrong neighborhood to be in if you want to see quality animation.