Busy Buddies is a 1956 Tom and Jerry cartoon produced and directed by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera.
Plot[]
Joan and George are going out and tell the babysitter, Jeannie, to look after an unnamed baby. Joan gives Jeannie specific instructions on where everything is and to call them at the Kirby's if there's any trouble. However, she is more interested in talking on the telephone with her girlfriends.
At first, Tom and Jerry take the opportunity to help themselves to some food, Jerry helps himself to some cookies and Tom helps himself to a watermelon and milk, but they soon discover the baby crawling away while Jeannie continues to talk on the phone, unaware. Tom and Jerry rescue the baby from increasingly dangerous hazards, such as the cupboards, the sink, a curtain rod, the heating ducts, the furnace, a flagpole, and a mailbox down the street (which leads to them being shot at by rogue police officers when they cut open the mailbox to rescue the baby).
Tom runs home with the baby, but snags his neck on a clothesline and the baby flies high up in the sky. Tom gets a stroller, and the precocious baby uses his diaper as a parachute, and floats right inside the stroller. Jeannie is completely oblivious and unaware through all of this (even when the baby crawls all over her), and at one point even hits Tom with a book for "bothering the baby" when he returns the baby to the crib. At the end, Joan and George return and ask Jeannie how things went, she explains that she had a little trouble with Tom, but the baby was "no trouble at all". The camera the cuts to the baby who winks at the audience as the short closes.
Notes[]
- The original working title for this short was "Buddy Guards".
- This short was withheld from being televised until early 1998 due to its propaganda of satirizing child neglect and endangerment, including sequences of the baby crawling underwater and unseen cops shooting at the titular mute duo and the baby.
Availability[]
- DVD - Tom and Jerry Spotlight Collection: Volume 3 (original CinemaScope format, remastered; Warner Bros.)
Gallery[]
