Mammy Two Shoes - Theatrical Tom and Jerry Cartoons

Theatrical Tom and Jerry Cartoons

Mammy first appeared in Puss Gets the Boot, the first Tom and Jerry cartoon (except Tom was called "Jasper"). She always referred to Tom as his given name Thomas and almost always used "is" in conjunction with a pronoun ("is you" and "I is"). The character went on to make many appearances through the entire series until 1952 and her last appearance in the short, Push-Button Kitty. William Hanna and Joseph Barbera initially portrayed Mammy as the maid of the house, with the real owners unknown to us. Later, Hanna and Barbera seemed to suggest, through dialogue and occasional behavior, that the house was Mammy's own.

Mammy was originally voiced by well-known African-American character actress Lillian Randolph. In the 1960s, the MGM animation studio, by then under the supervision of Chuck Jones, created censored versions of the Tom & Jerry cartoons featuring Mammy for television. These versions used rotoscoping techniques to replace Mammy on-screen with a similarly stocky white woman (in most shorts) or a thin white woman (in Saturday Evening Puss); Randolph's voice on the soundtracks was replaced by an Irish-accented (or, in Puss, generic young adult) voice performed by white actress June Foray.

The original versions of the cartoons were reinstated when Turner Broadcasting acquired ownership of the Tom & Jerry property. But in 1992, the cartoons featuring Mammy were edited again; this time, to replace Lillian Randolph's voice with that of Thea Vidale, who re-recorded the dialogue to remove Mammy's use of potentially offensive dialect. These re-recorded versions of the cartoons are aired to this day on Turner's Cartoon Network-related cable channels, and have at times turned up on DVD as well. However, some European TV showings of these cartoons, especially the UK, retain Randolph's original voice. The Region 2 Complete Collectors Edition DVD boxset has Vidale's voice on the first DVD and Randolph in a number of the episodes after that (such as A Mouse in the House and Mouse Cleaning).