The Egg and Jerry

The Egg and Jerry is a 1956 one reel animated short, directed and produced by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera with music by Scott Bradley. It is a CinemaScope remake of 1949's Hatch Up Your Troubles, and the first of the Cinemascope remakes of a few cartoons. The only aspects of the cartoon that differ from the original are that it is in a Widescreen format, the ink lines around the characters are thicker, and the backgrounds are more stylised. Also, the egg is white instead of pink, and Tom is missing the white fur stripe between his eyes, typical of the time period. The cartoon's title is a play-on-words of the novel and film The Egg and I.

Plot
It begins with a mother woodpecker leaving her nest for a brief lunch. The egg that she was nesting jumps up in her absence and falls to the ground, rolling into Jerry's mousehole and into his bed. Jerry wakes up to find himself sitting on the egg, which begins to hatch (and causes him to cover his legs in embarrassment and shock). Out comes a baby woodpecker who instantly takes to Jerry as his mother. The adorable, but naturally peckish woodpecker cannot resist pecking away at Jerry's furniture.

Jerry returns the woodpecker to his nest, but the little bird follows Jerry back to his hole. Eventually, Jerry gives up on the woodpecker and orders him out. With nowhere to go, the despondent baby woodpecker wanders around the garden, where he comes across an unsuspecting Tom, who is sitting in a deckchair, drinking and reading a magazine. The woodpecker carelessly pecks slightly at the deckchair's leg. An irritated Tom pours his drink onto the woodpecker, who then proceeds to peck through the entire leg of the deckchair, causing it to fold up with Tom still sitting on it.

Mayhem ensues. Tom begins to chase the bird, who screeches "Mama! Mama! Mama! Mama!" Jerry emerges from his mousehole and decides to intervene, stopping Tom with a rake. However Tom manages to grab hold of the rake, trapping Jerry in the process, who cannot run away. The woodpecker pecks off the end of the rake, allowing Jerry to run off, and sending Tom hurtling backwards into a mailbox. Tom hurls the long remainder of the rake handle at Jerry and the bird, but the bird quickly pecks it down to a stub. In the ensuing chase, Tom swallows the bird. The bird pecks deep inside Tom's stomach, which vibrates violently. Tom drinks from a bucket of water, only for the water to seep out through tiny holes in his body. Jerry knocked Tom's tail and the woodpecker eventually pecks his way out through Tom's teeth, and as Jerry runs off, he runs straight into an axe and is knocked out cold. As Tom attempts to disembowel Jerry, the woodpecker continually pecks at the cat's head. Tom grabs the woodpecker in his hand and corks his beak, rendering the woodpecker useless at attacking him. Tom then ties the woodpecker to a telegraph pole. However, the woodpecker manages to free himself, and noticing that Jerry has very little time to escape, quickly performs a complicated calculation in order to stop Tom and rescue Jerry. He pecks the post and Tom almost gets Jerry, but the falling telegraph pole lands on Tom's head, bouncing repeatedly and hammering him into the ground.

Jerry is thankful for the woodpecker's help. However, the mother woodpecker flies into the scene. The baby woodpecker realizes just who his mother is after all, and gets whisked away by his mother. Jerry realizes that he will miss his avian companion more than he thought he would. Just then, the baby woodpecker flies back to Jerry, gives him a loving kiss and flies away again, as Jerry waves him off happily.

Availability
DVD
 * Tom and Jerry Spotlight Collection Vol. 3, Disc Two
 * Tom and Jerry Classic Collection Vol. 4, Side 2