<P> Mammy Two Shoes is a heavy - set middle - aged mammy who often has to deal with the mayhem generated by the lead characters . Voiced by character actress Lillian Randolph, she is often seen as the owner of Tom . Her face was only shown once, very briefly, in Saturday Evening Puss . Mammy's appearances have often been edited out, dubbed, or re-animated as a slim white woman in later television showings, since her character is a mammy archetype now often regarded as racist . She was mostly restored in the DVD releases of the cartoons, with an introduction by Whoopi Goldberg explaining the importance of African - American representation in the cartoon series, however stereotyped . </P> <P> "Tom and Jerry" was a commonplace phrase for youngsters indulging in riotous behaviour in 19th - century London . The term comes from Life in London, or Days and Nights of Jerry Hawthorne and his elegant friend Corinthian Tom (1823) by Pierce Egan . However Brewer notes no more than an "unconscious" echo of the Regency era original in the naming of the cartoon . </P> <P> William Hanna and Joseph Barbera were both part of the Rudolf Ising unit at the MGM cartoon studio in the late 1930s . After the financial disaster of a series of MGM cartoons based upon the Captain and the Kids comic strip characters, Barbera, a storyman and character designer, was paired (out of desperation) with Hanna, an experienced director, to start directing films for the Ising unit . In their first discussion for a cartoon, Barbera suggested a cat - and - mouse cartoon titled Puss Gets the Boot . "We knew we needed two characters . We thought we needed conflict, and chase and action . And a cat after a mouse seemed like a good, basic thought," as he recalled in an interview . Hanna and other employees complained that the idea wasn't very original; nevertheless, the short was completed in late 1939, and released to theaters on February 10, 1940 . Puss Gets The Boot centers on Jasper, a gray tabby cat trying to catch a mouse named Jinx (whose name is not mentioned within the cartoon itself), but after accidentally breaking a houseplant and its stand, the African American housemaid Mammy has threatened to throw Jasper out if he breaks one more thing in the house . Naturally, Jinx uses this to his advantage, and begins tossing any and everything fragile, so that Jasper will be thrown outside . Puss Gets The Boot was previewed and released without fanfare, and Hanna and Barbera went on to direct other non-cat - and - mouse related shorts such as Gallopin' Gals (1940) and Officer Pooch (1941). "After all," remarked many of the MGM staffers, "haven't there been enough cat - and - mouse cartoons already?" </P> <P> The pessimistic attitude towards the cat and mouse duo changed when the cartoon became a favorite with theater owners and with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which nominated the film for the Academy Award for Best Short Subject: Cartoons of 1941 . It lost to another MGM cartoon, Rudolph Ising's The Milky Way . </P>

When did the first tom and jerry cartoon air