Purr-Chance to Dream

"Purr-Chance to Dream" is a 1967 Tom and Jerry cartoon short directed by Ben Washam, a longtime animator under Chuck Jones dating back to the 1940s, and produced by Jones. It was the last theatrical Tom and Jerry short released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the last of the Chuck Jones shorts in Tom and Jerry series, the last Tom and Jerry cartoon released during the Golden Age of American animation, and the second-to-last animated short related by MGM in the Golden Age (The Bear That Wasn't, released at the end of 1967, would be the final one), and The Karate Guard (released in 2005) was the next Tom and Jerry cartoon from Warner Bros. It is also the last Tom and Jerry cartoon with Carl Brandt as the music composer.

The title is a play-on-words of "perchance to dream" a famous quotation from William Shakespeare's play Hamlet, though the plot of this cartoon bears no resemblance to the play. Like several Chuck Jones-produced Tom and Jerry shorts, this one arguably tends to focus more on poses and personality than on storyline and plot.

Plot
Tom wakes up after a nightmare of being turned into a nail-shape and pounded into the ground by a giant bulldog. When he sees Jerry catching a bone, he grabs him but Jerry wallops him on the head with it and runs off, stopping at a giant dog house. When Tom approaches it, he is reminded of his dream and runs off in horror.

Instead, a small bulldog (first seen in The Cat's Me-Ouch!) comes out. When Tom grabs Jerry, the bulldog grabs his tail and rapidly eats away at Tom's fur, spinning in a blur, and pounding his head to the ground. Jerry pats the bulldog as a reward, in which the bulldog licks Jerry in the face, causing him to laugh.

Tom has several attempts at catching Jerry, even stuffing an oversized bone with dynamite, spraying himself with dog repellent, and lastly playing fetch with the dog by throwing a stick into a safe, and hurling the safe into a deep pit.

However, every time, the minuscule pup manages to eat away at Tom, and in the final attempt, the pup manages to chew away at Tom until he is literally pieces of hair. It turns out that all this was a dream. Tom takes some medicine and playing music before going back to sleep and calmly dreaming of being pounded once again into the ground.

Crew

 * Animation: Dick Thompson, Ken Harris, Don Towsley, Tom Ray, Philip Roman
 * Graphics: Don Foster
 * Layout: Don Morgan, Robert Givens
 * Assistant Layout: Corny Cole
 * Backgrounds: Philip DeGuard
 * Design Consultant: Maurice Noble
 * Effects Animation: Harry Love
 * Production Manager: Earl Jonas
 * Story: Irving Spector
 * Story Sketch: Jack Kinney
 * Music: Carl Brandt, Ed Bogas
 * Production Supervised by: Les Goldman
 * Produced by: Chuck Jones
 * Directed by: Ben Washam