The New Tom & Jerry Show (1975): One Season, 48 Episodes, and the Chase That Needed Nothing Else

The New Tom & Jerry Show aired 48 episodes on ABC, from September 6 to December 13, 1975. One season. Hanna-Barbera Productions made the series with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Television for Saturday mornings, based on the theatrical shorts and the characters William Hanna and Joseph Barbera created.

That is the record. The show carried the names of its makers and the studio that owned the cat and mouse.

What ABC Got for Its Saturday Mornings

The premise did not change. Tom chases Jerry. The chase fails. The chase resumes. The genres listed for the series are Kids, Animation, Family and Comedy.

The cast list is thin: John Stephenson voices Tom, Don Messick is credited as a voice, and Joe E. Ross is credited as a voice. No character names are attached to Messick or Ross in the record.

What it had instead was volume. Forty-eight episodes in roughly fourteen weeks. That is a schedule, not a season, and it tells you what the network wanted: product, delivered fast, in a package children would recognize before the first gag landed.

The 1975 Show and the 2014 Show

Warner Bros. Animation and Turner Entertainment Co. produced The Tom and Jerry Show that premiered in 2014, animated by Renegade Animation, from the same Hanna and Barbera characters. The two series share a lineage and almost nothing else.

The 2014 series got five seasons and a run that stretched to 2021. The 1975 series got one. Same cat. Same mouse. Different era, different owners, different patience.

Where the 2014 Show Went That 1975 Did Not

The later series had settings. Detectives in Tolucaville. Tom as a butler in a Downton Abbey-style estate. A farm. A Transylvanian environment. Modern-day urban backdrops where the rivalry played out against a city rather than a bare stage.

That is the gap. The 1975 show had the chase and the ABC slot and not much else on the record. The 2014 show had roles, places, a premise that could be re-dressed week to week. Hanna-Barbera’s version trusted the characters to carry 48 episodes on their own legs.

The fourth season of the 2014 series premiered on February 1, 2021, on Boomerang SVOD and the Cartoon Network app. The fifth season was released on the Cartoon Network app and Boomerang on February 1 and 15, 2021, respectively. It was later removed from the service.

One Season, and What It Left

The New Tom & Jerry Show ran one season and stopped. There is no shame in a short run when the run is 48 episodes.

Here is the schedule that mattered.

Following the conclusion of the 2014 series, HBO Max launched Tom and Jerry Special Shorts and Tom and Jerry in New York, the latter debuting on July 1, 2021.

The comparison table above is the argument. The 1975 series is the leaner, plainer article: one network, one season, three credited voices, no named roles beyond Tom. The 2014 series is the fuller one, with five seasons.

Which one is better is not really the question. The 1975 show is the version that trusted the chase. The 2014 show is the version that built a house around it. Both work. Only one of them needed a second season to prove it.

The 1975 series holds up as a clean, uncluttered run of the thing itself. Tom and Jerry, no scaffolding, no detective agency, no country estate. Forty-eight episodes, one autumn, done. The TMDB audience score for it sits at 7.7 out of 10 across 1,174 votes: a good show, not a landmark, remembered for what it was rather than what it became.

1975 TV · ABC · animation history · Hanna-Barbera · Saturday morning cartoons · Tom and Jerry