Tom and Jerry: The Complete Cartoon Collection, Blu Ray Review

 

fWord has it that these 23 shorts -- as well as the three bonus shorts below -- were all sourced from inherited masters created several years ago, with additional work performed more recently including manual cleanup and color correction. The results look quite good from a base-level perspective and offer soft but solid image detail, striking color palettes (especially in the back half), and an overall commitment to film grain preservation, which certainly varies from short to short but never is completely absent from the picture. ("Muscle Beach Tom" and "Tot Watchers") look smoother than most on the whole, but I'll leave that up to viewer opinion.) Both frame-by-frame and in motion, these shorts seem to strongly advance on earlier home video presentations -- at least the ones I've personally seen -- but are presumably identical to those included as bonus features on a handful of semi-recent Warner Archive Blu-rays.

So, what's the catch? It appears as if all of these masters -- which again, were created years ago and inherited by Warner Archive as "the best available elements" -- display at least small amounts of gate weave, otherwise known as "telecine wobble", which means the source elements weren't completely stabilized during film scanning and thus move around slightly. (The exact level varies from short to short, and again is often very slight but more noticeable in select ones such as "Pup on a Picnic", "The Egg and Jerry", and "Feedin' the Kiddie".) The good news is that it's usually only a distraction during the opening credits, which are of course completely static, as Tom and Jerry's generally quick pace means that such tiny frame movements won't pose any kind of real issue during the actual cartoon. That said, it's again up to viewer opinion, which may also depend on screen size; in other words, someone watching these via projection might consider this a more notable problem than another person using a 50" TV. I can say with confidence that it didn't really dampen my overall enjoyment of these shorts and, while of course a totally stable image would be ideal, the careful manual cleanup and color correction done to these imperfect masters is more than a fair trade-off.

If you are interested in buying this awesome blu ray collection, you can buy it on Amazon.com for around $22.