The CinemaScope Remake Six (Tom and Jerry, Droopy, Tex Avery, MGM)

You're better off watching their respective Academy ratio originals instead, not these remakes.

The CinemaScope Remake Six is the collective group name of six cartoons originally produced and released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, featuring 3 Tom and Jerry cartoons, 1 Droopy cartoon, and 2 more MGM animated cartoons (one directed by Tex Avery, and the other directed by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera) in CinemaScope.

List of Cartoons

1. "Good Will to Men" (1955; remake of "Peace on Earth" [1939]) - MGM Animated One-Shot
2. "The Egg and Jerry" (1956; remake of "Hatch Up Your Troubles" [1949]) - Tom and Jerry
3. "Millionaire Droopy" (1956; remake of "Wags to Riches" [1949]) - Droopy
4. "Cat's Meow" (1957; remake of "Ventriloquist Cat" [1950]) - Tex Avery MGM Cartoons
5. "Tops with Pops" (1957; remake of "Love That Pup" [1949]) - Tom and Jerry
6. "Feedin' the Kiddie" (1957; remake of "The Little Orphan" [1949]) - Tom and Jerry

Why They Suck

1. All six of them are extremely pointless and unnecessary, as almost every single one of these shorts are just shot-per-shot remakes of their original counterparts without anything new being done to them.
2. Subpar animation. Due to the low budget cuts in the mid 1950s, this has affected the CinemaScope era for MGM's cartoon studio as a whole.
   • With the notable exception of "Good Will to Men", the title cards as seen in these CinemaScope remakes are also a massive downgrade from their respective Academy ratio originals as they appear to look cheap and simplistic with notable use of flat colors and poorly-rendered typography, as pictured above.
3. Some of the cartoons have washed-out, dull, or overly bright colors with even off-model art designs that even apply to the characters ("Cat's Meow" being the worst offender).
4. There were even occurrences where characters have their colors replaced with a different color. Such as Butch the Irish Dog somehow going to a white skin in the short "Cat's Meow", despite his carryover appearance and color from original cartoons as shown in "Millionaire Droopy".
5. The redraws suffer tremendously through tight deadlines for completion because of the budget cuts.
6. For some reason, most of these shorts often overuse the brown color palette for the backgrounds.
7. Many of these CinemaScope remakes have very poor use of widescreen framing, as the original animation of these cartoons were originally made for the smaller Academy aspect ratio, yet they were still animated the same way for the CinemaScope remakes except that reused animation from the top and bottom of the screen are often cut off by the widescreen mattes, ignoring the fact that the camera shots needed to be expanded out into wider shots for better widescreen framing. Consequently, this resulted all the widescreen camera shots used for these CinemaScope remakes look very ill-executed and awfully cramped, as objects or characters fill up the screen entirely with parts of them being awkwardly cropped off by the CinemaScope widescreen mattes.
   • Not helping is the fact that in the pan-and-scan versions of these six cartoons seen on TV and VHS versions, these cramped widescreen shots are cropped further to fit the 4:3 television screens, resulting to a huge loss of certain important visual elements in some scenes.
8. Some shorts even cut off aspects of original shorts due to low budget and tight deadlines as a matter of fact. For instance, one gag in "Millionaire Droopy" and Mammy Two-Shoes' on-screen appearance in "Feedin' the Kiddie" were both removed.
   • Despite the glaring omission of Mammy Two-Shoes' on-screen appearance in "Feedin' the Kiddie", "Feedin' the Kiddie" still unfortunately retains the same blackface gag brought in from Tom getting burnt by the candle which was present in it's 1949 Academy ratio original, despite that the MGM cartoon studio had dialed down the amount of racial stereotypes (particularly African-American stereotypes) in their cartoons as of the mid-1950s.
9. A couple of animation errors. For example in "The Egg and Jerry", due to the original episode's conversion to CinemaScope widescreen format, in the scene where Jerry forces the baby woodpecker out on his own, Jerry's legs are now visible despite the fact he goes back inside his house and slams the door.
10. Being that "Cat's Meow" is the final cartoon directed by Tex Avery for MGM, "Cat's Meow" is not a good way to end Avery's career at MGM.
    • On that topic, since Tex Avery by that time has been long gone from MGM (having left the studio to a brief stint at Walter Lantz Productions in 1954), his CinemaScope remake cartoons "Millionaire Droopy" and "Cat's Meow" were basically redone by the Hanna-Barbera unit but still credits Avery's name as director despite Avery having absolutely no involvement in those two cartoons, hence tainting Avery's reputation in the process.
11. These cartoons overall started the decline of the MGM cartoon studio following Fred Quimby's retirement in late-1955.

Redeeming Qualities

1. The cartoons still keep the original audio, and the animation is still faithful to the originals.
2. Much like the CinemaScope era of Tom and Jerry and other cartoons based on the remake six, no one is out of character in all these shorts
3. "Good Will to Men" is the only good cartoon of the group, mostly because it actually modernized the plot of the original ("Peace on Earth" was made before the nuclear bomb, hence the change in focus from chemical warfare to nuclear warfare) whilst retaining all the strong points of the original, and is still animated in high quality animation like in the 1939 original, since this said CinemaScope remake was still produced during Fred Quimby's tenure as producer before the MGM cartoon studio started cutting the animation budgets following his retirement. It received an Academy Award Nomination for "Best Animated Short of 1955".
4. This was the first attempt for CinemaScope widescreen animation before being adopted by Terrytoons, although both Disney and MGM previously attempted CinemaScope widescreen animation as early as 1954 (albeit also with alternate Academy ratio versions accompanying it, for certain theaters which were not ready for widescreen aspect ratios at the time).

Trivia

• Cat's Meow was the final MGM cartoon to credit Tex Avery. It is also the final one-shot MGM cartoon produced by the original studio.
• As of 2021, all the CinemaScope remakes have already been restored except for "Cat's Meow".

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