John Foster and George Rufle | Pots and Pans / 1932 [animated cartoon]

the swinging diner

by Douglas Messerli

 

John Foster and George Rufle (directors) Pots and Pans / 1932 [animated cartoon]

 

Pots and Pans begins with an image of Tom and Jerry’s busy little railcar diner, wherein, once again, everything is performed in perfect synchronization (the job of Gene Rodemich) with the musical soundtrack, the musical notes, in this case, literally floating out of out the windows.

    This short cartoon, revealing its affinity more than all the other Tom and Jerry films I’ve seen to its roots in “rubber hose” line drawings, begins with an infant crawling up the step into the diner before scaling the high seat in search of a bucket of milk, which Tom quickly provides him treating the spouts of a large cannister like they were the tits of a milk cow.

     A moment later Jerry fries up eggs, produced directly for the birdy in a cuckoo clock, for an irate customer.

     Nearby sit two men, one a clearly effeminate dandy, the other a burly worker with a face of stubble. The effeminate man, in a low, gruff voice demands the brute pass the salt, while the tough-looking figure chastises him for his rude insistence in a sissy falsetto, already bringing into question what 21st century filmmakers would explore concerning whether or not there is such a thing as a truly “gay” voice.

      Jerry, meanwhile, pounds out a large mass of dough in time to the rhythm before shaping it into a roll, poking a pole through one end to the other and cutting the long penile-shaped mass, again the beat of the music, into doughnuts. A large man who looks suspiciously like Wimpy of the Popeye cartoons sits drinking a cup of coffee; when the cooks aren’t looking, he opens up his coat within which sit a baker’s dozen of boys who quickly grab up the fresh doughnuts.

      A quartet of angry customers pound the table demanding soup. Tom throws out soup bowls, pours liquid into each, and shoves them down the counter, followed by dancing spoons, as the quartet, after slurping up a few spoonsful, break out into a tuneful ditty which Tom accompanies by magically turning the cash register into a piano, the pots, pans, and the frying sausages dancing along as even the stools on which the men sit transform themselves into various sized horns.

 

   So filled with the joy of music is the little dining car that it picks itself up from its nearby urban setting and leaps onto the railroad tracks. A sleek monster of a train however speeds toward the rocking and rolling diner car resulting inevitably in a huge collision, the train demolished while the dining car and its happy occupants survive.

      This work reflects the musical interests of most of the Tom and Jerry cartoons, but pared down as it is to the real essence of the series, it’s one of the very best.

 

Los Angeles, November 1, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2025).