Tom and Jerry/YMMV

Alternate Character Interpretation:
- Are Tom and Jerry true enemies or Vitriolic Best Buds? In fact, several shorts imply that Tom and Jerry are actually friends who enjoy their game of chase. This is heavily supported in The Movie.
- Is Tom the Villain Protagonist, Jerry, or both?
- Is Nibbles/Tuffy a sweet and innocent mouse who doesn’t known any better or a Psycho with a childish facade?
Archive Panic: The original MGM series lasted for the better part of 20 years, and that's not counting the Deitch and Jones shorts, TV shows, and movies, if you're really a completist.
Broken Base:
- Fans debate over whether the best cartoon is when Jerry wins over Tom, vice versa, or even Tom and Jerry both winning.
- Some fans are fine with Tom and Jerry occasionally being portrayed as friends. However, others detest the idea and much rather prefer them to be enemies or Vitriolic Best Buds.
- The Chuck Jones era is pretty polarizing among fans. It's either considered to be as good as the Hanna-Barbera era, inferior, but still good in its own rights, So Okay It's Average, or a disgrace to the franchise.
Contested Sequel: Or series in this case. The Chuck Jones era (1963-1967), while generally considered to be an improvement over the Gene Deitch era (1961-1962), is still seen as inferior to the Hanna-Barbera era (1940-1958).
Crowning Music of Awesome: "Solid Serenade" and "Saturday Evening Puss".
Designated Hero: Jerry skirts this line in many cartoons.
Designated Villain: By the same token, we're almost never meant to be rooting for Tom, even if he didn't actually do anything to provoke Jerry (or if Jerry doesn't even have the right to be provoked, like in the short when he screws with Tom's opera recital because it was disturbing his sleep; nevermind that Jerry's the idiot who decided to set up shop in a concert hall. Other 'genius' places he's decided to set up shop include inside a piano and inside a pool table.).
Dork Age: The Gene Deitch shorts.
- Some consider the last two to three years of the Hanna-Barbera run, from 1955 to 1958, to be one. When Fred Quimby quit as producer in 1954, Hanna and Barbera had to do double duty of both producing and directing, resulting in cartoons that don't have nearly the violent energy they used to have. Alongside this, the series suffered significantly from being produced in the new, widescreen Cinemascope format, as not all theaters could actually play Cinemascope films. The one-two punch, alongside the rapidly developing field of television turned out to be the final straw for the MGM cartoon department, which closed in 1957, with its final cartoons coming out mid-1958.
Downer Ending: Opinions may include Jerry losing to Tom, or one of them dying.
Family-Unfriendly Aesop: Stealing food is good. Punishing those tasked to stop you is good.
- It's arguably meant to act as Truth in Television. Jerry is a mouse and thus takes whatever food is available to survive, making him more of a Loveable Rogue. Though granted there are shorts where he steals a bit more than his own means.

Human: Besides, a mouse doesn't eat very much...
*Jerry glances at a huge pile of stolen food hidden in his mousehole*

Ho Yay: There's some of this as well, considering the fact that both Tom and Jerry are males. Jerry even kissed Tom more than once, just to annoy him.
Iron Woobie/Jerkass Woobie: Tom.
Memetic Mutation: "We've GOT to have money."
- Also from the movie: The Villain Song "What Do We Care" is apparently so much an Ear Worm that it's spawned numerous Fan Vids starring cartoon villains.
- "Doooon't youuuu believe it!"
  - That meme was actually started by a radio show debunking WWII propaganda.
- Mwahahahaaa, in me power!
- "Sigh...I love you. When I wiz you, I am, how you say, a hip cat.
  - "Boy, are you corny. How many times have you been told that?"
- An Aside Glance of Tom's from the cartoon "Bad Day at Cat Rock" became a 4Chan fad.
Motive Decay: Tom originally wanted to eat Jerry. Now he just mostly harasses him.
Nightmare Fuel: So many...
- "Don't you believe it!", many Gene Deitch-directed Tom and Jerry shorts.
- And in The Movie, there's the shot of Dr. Applecheeks walking toward the ice cream cart with a stalker-riffic look on his face.
- There's also the "Heavenly Puss" short where Tom gets sent to hell, even after getting Jerry's forgiveness. I bet that scared a few kids rather than amusing them. Of course, it was all a dream, but even so.
- And then there's "Blue Cat Blues", which has a Downer Ending of a depressed Tom and Jerry sitting on the train tracks with the train just about to come. Holy crap.
- There's also one where Tom's about to eat Quacker, then Jerry throws a brick at Tom, and Tom breaks apart.
- In "Year of the Mouse", Jerry and a mouse friend basically Gaslighting Tom. The poor cat's just trying to nap, but keeps waking up to find signs that he might be trying to kill himself as he sleeps.
- A Quackers episode ends with Jerry and Quackers thinking they've defeated Tom. End of episode, right? Not so fast; Tom steps inside their safehouse and closes the door, laughing evilly. Common enough sight in the middle of these cartoons, but in this case, that's where the episode ends...
- "Pecos Pest" features Jerry's Uncle Pecos chasing Tom with an ax, because he needs "Yer' wisker for mah' git-ar string!". It sounds funny until you see that Pecos is The Determinator when it comes to getting that string, and consider the consequences had he wanted anything else.
- And how could this list be complete without Tom actually getting guillotined at the end of "The Two Mouseketeers"?
Rooting for the Empire: Tom, for many reasons, depending on who is talking:
- Ron the Death Eater: Jerry is a Complete Monster! Tommy never ever did anything wrong! Tom was only following his instincts, how dare Jerry object to being eaten!
- Draco in Leather Pants: Jerry is a cute lovable mouse! It doesn't matter if he ruins Tom's life again, again, and again! It doesn't matter if he steals food and other things from the houses owners! That dirty tomcat deserves all the abuse he gets!
- This actually made it's way in universe to some extent. Allegedly Hanna Barbara got several letters from fans rather irked by the heavy punishment Tom suffered in many early short. As a result many more later shorts actually let Tom get the last laugh (most of which were karmic victories due to Jerry starting the feud).
The Scrappy: Tom has had a lot of owners over the years, some were mean, some were abusive, and some should be in jail for cruelty to animals, and the worst among that last one, whom fans truly hated, was Clint Clobber. Poor Tom has suffered greatly at the hands of this monster, including being beaten with a frying pan, burned with a grill, and being tied to an elephant in a way that resulted in poor Tom being crushed between the elephant and a rock. Not to mention that a lot of the things he punishes Tom for are mostly (or totally) Jerry's fault. And he tended to smile sadistically every time Tom was hurt! It was hardly a surprise that Clint only appeared in three cartoons.
Seasonal Rot: Some consider this to have happened in the late Hanna-Barbara era from late 1955-1958, as the series had veered into a Lighter and Softer tone as well as the use of lower budget animation.
- However, the Gene Deitch era is considered to be the true turning point, as the formula of Tom and Jerry chasing each other became one-sided, with Jerry out winning Tom in the majority of the shorts, the use of heavily Limited Animation and disturbingly weird sound effects, the series adopting an unnecessarily Darker and Edgier tone, Tom’s new abusive owner and Jerry’s malicious tendencies being amped Up to Eleven.
- Thankfully, this all got reversed when Chuck Jones took over production of the series. Even so, the Chuck Jones shorts have their detractors.
Squick: the abovementioned Heavenly Puss (the implied causes of death of the cats in line for the train - most particularly the kittens in a burlap sack).
- Though at the very least, the St. Peter stand in shakes his head and mutters "Some people..." when he sees the kittens.
Unintentionally Sympathetic: Tom
Values Dissonance: Many shorts that still appear on DVDs and television, such as "The Milky Waif" and "Yankee Doodle Mouse", had blackface gags edited out, leaving the resulting cartoon very choppy. In the case of "The Milky Waif", we suddenly jump from Nibbles squirting milk in Tom's face to Tom suddenly being hit in the face with a frying pan. Also occurs in "The Mouse Came to Dinner" where they edit out Mammy's intro... which means Tom is coming out of a potted plant at the start for no reason whatsoever. It's rare to find unedited versions.