This 1940 short is the first entry in what would become the Tom and Jerry series, though the cat and mouse were not yet called by those names. It was based on Aesop's Fable 'The Cat and the Mice'.

Joseph Barbera joined the Rudolf Ising animation unit at MGM in 1937, and MGM co-owner Louis B. Mayer wanted the studio to develop new cartoon characters after the earlier series based on 'The Captain and the Kids' comic strip failed to succeed.

Barbera teamed with William Hanna to pitch the concept of two equal characters constantly in conflict; they initially considered a fox and a dog before settling on a cat and a mouse.

Producer Fred Quimby, head of MGM's short film department, was not personally interested in the cat-and-mouse idea but still gave Hanna and Barbera the green light to make one cartoon short.

In this first short the cat is named Jasper and the mouse is unnamed on screen, though an official MGM magazine referred to him as 'Pee-Wee'.

The names Tom and Jerry were chosen through a studio contest to rename the characters, won by animator John Carr, who suggested the names after the popular Christmastime 'Tom and Jerry' cocktail, itself derived from two characters in an 1821 stage play adapted from Pierce Egan's book 'Life in London'. Carr received a $50 first-place prize.

After the short's release, MGM management initially advised Hanna and Barbera not to produce any more cat-and-mouse cartoons, so they worked on other shorts like 'Gallopin' Gals' and 'Officer Pooch' instead.

A Texas businesswoman named Bessa Short wrote a letter to MGM asking if more cat and mouse shorts would be made, which helped convince the studio to commission an ongoing series.

Despite studio executives being unimpressed, audiences loved the film and it received an Academy Award nomination for Best Short Subject: Cartoons in 1941, though it lost to another MGM short, 'The Milky Way'.

Because only producers were credited on MGM shorts at the time, the Oscar nomination credits list Rudolf Ising alone, omitting directors William Hanna and Joseph Barbera.