Designs on Jerry is a 1955 one-reel animated cartoon and is the 93rd Tom and Jerry short directed by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera.
Plot[]
Tom is busy designing a mousetrap in the attic, inspired by a quote stating that fortune will come to someone who designs an effective mousetrap. Tom successfully creates a massive Rube Goldberg machine designed to capture Jerry, complete with a blueprint depicting stick figures of a cat and mouse. After finishing his blueprint, Tom goes to bed. While Tom sleeps, the stick-mouse suddenly comes to life and enters Jerry's mousehole, waking him up to warn him about Tom's plan. Jerry, stunned (thinking it's a ghost), goes back to sleep, so the stick-mouse re-enters the hole and promptly drags Jerry to the plan. As they look over it, the stick-cat also comes to life. Promptly, Jerry hands the stick-mouse an eraser to erase the cat's teeth, though it re-draws a bigger set before chasing them.
The stick-mouse draws a mousehole on the blueprint to help Jerry escape, but is then caught by the stick-cat. Jerry draws shorter legs on the cat and erases its bigger legs, causing the cat to fall down. Now unable to run fast, the cat uses its tail as a lasso to catch Jerry, but the stick-mouse draws a bow and arrow and shoots the cat with it to save Jerry and deflate the cat's torso. The mouse then camouflages itself as a flower and ladles the cat with a fork. Both mice then jump off the drawing board with the stick-mouse acting as a parachute, while the stick-cat jumps down and bounces akin to a pogo stick. The mice defeat the cat, firing water at it to erase it and sucking it into Tom's jar of white ink. As both mice celebrate, Tom wakes up. Just in time, they change a key measurement from the original 10 to the changed 12 on the blueprint before returning to their original positions as an unaware Tom resumes his work.
His trap ("The Better Mouse Trap, Designed and Built by Tom Cat") completed, Tom hides as Jerry grabs a piece of cheese which Tom tied to string. The successive elements of the trap work together; an alarm clock, a saw, scissors, a hammer, a vertical tower, a bell, a banana, windshield wipers, a bucket of sand, a fan, a sailboat, a pool ball, and a washing machine. Lastly, a rifle shoots at a cuckoo clock's weight and a knife tied to the cuckoo begins cutting a rope. Tom aims to capture Jerry by flattening him and storing him inside a suspended safe. Tom eagerly stands next to Jerry and ties blindfold over his eyes and shoves a cigarette into his mouth, but because of the altered measurement, the safe is positioned two feet in front of Jerry and hits Tom instead. Jerry runs away as the safe door opens and Tom walks out shaped as a cube. Angry at having wasted so much time and energy on building the trap, and unaware of the real cause for the trap's malfunction that caused him to get crushed by the safe instead of Jerry, Tom curses over his failure (censored out by trumpet noises) and leans on the safe.
Notes[]
- Clips of this short would be extensively used for Shutter Bugged Cat, particularly the climax.