The duo was dreamt up from a place of desperation. MGM's animation department, where creators Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera worked, had struggled to emulate the success of other studios who had hit characters like Porky Pig and Mickey Mouse.
Out of boredom, the animators, both aged under 30, began thinking up their own ideas. Barbera said he loved the simple concept of a cat and mouse cartoon, with conflict and chase, even though it had been done countless times before.
Puss gets the Boot was the first they released, in 1940. The debut was a hit and won the studio an Oscar nomination for best animated short. Despite their work, the animators were not credited.
For the best part of the next two decades, Hanna and Barbera oversaw the production of more than 100 of these shorts. Each took weeks to make and cost up to $50,000 to produce, so only a handful could be made every year.
These Tom and Jerrys are almost universally considered the best, with rich hand-drawn animation and detailed backdrops helping win them seven Academy Awards and cameos in Hollywood feature films.
"I'll bet when you watched them as a child, or even if you look at them right now, you would be hard-pressed to know when they were made," says Jerry Beck, a cartoon historian who has worked in roles across the industry.
"There's something about animation. It's evergreen, it doesn't fade," he says. "A drawing is a drawing, it's like when you go see paintings. Yes, we know they're from the 1800s or 1700s - it doesn't matter and it still speaks to you today."
When producer Fred Quimby retired in the mid-1950s, Hanna and Barbera took over MGM's cartoon department just as budget cuts closed in. Studio bosses, threatened by the growing popularity of television, realised they could make almost as much money by re-issuing the old shorts as they could by making new ones.
When their department was closed down in 1957, Hanna and Barbera set up their own production company.
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