Tom and Jerry: Cowboy Up!
- ️Sat Nov 05 2022
Tom and Jerry: Cowboy Up! is Tom and Jerry's 14th Direct-to-Video movie, released in 2022. It is the first direct-to-video movie done in the animation format of The Tom and Jerry Show (2014).
Tom and Jerry are in the Wild West where they help save a ranch from the hands of a greedy villain. The rivals team up to help a cowgirl and her brother save their homestead from a greedy land-grabber.
Tropes in the film:
- Adaptational Heroism: Tom is at his most heroic here. Upon making friends with Jerry, he does genuinely seem to care for and look out for his new "brothers".
- All There in the Manual: The Benson family ranch is apparently named UUB, pronounced as "double UB" rather than "WB".
- Alliterative Family: Betty, Bumpy, Bentley, and Boyd Benson. This is how Critchley's forged deed is exposed, misspelling Boyd's name as "Lloyd".
- Bait-and-Switch:
- The regular ranch cat seems to be chasing Jerry to eat him in a normal cat vs. mouse scenario at the film's beginning, but when she catches him, it turns out they are just playing together and she even gives him a friendly lick.
- Tom spends his first few minutes on screen time being his normal Butt-Monkey mouse chaser before forming a truce with the mice, who understand that it's not Tom's fault his mouse-fearing owner wants them gone, with the mice explaining how Betty likes having them around and helping Tom set up some Engineered Heroics.
- Clem's mousers may seem like over-hyped bunglers, but soon prove to be Not So Harmless Villains, and the lazy-looking Lightning in particular is just as fast as Clem initially claimed.
- A burly prairie dog dramatically approaches a can of food and tries to drill it open with his teeth...only for his teeth to then break, while the can remains intact.
- The jackalope "Scooby-Doo" Hoax gets a couple of minutes worth of set-up, but Clem exposes it almost immediately once the heroes actually implement it to scare away the villains.
- Big Bad: August Critchley, a greedy land grabber wanted for bank robbery and forgery who is after the Benson family's ranch.
- Bull Seeing Red: Addressed by Jerry's nephews, who point out that bulls are actually indifferent to colors and it's the motion of the cloth that riles them up. Jerry using the usual red cape against the bull is merely for convenience.
- Commonality Connection: As Jerry's nephews point out, he and Tom are the pets of siblings, and thus in a way, they should technically also consider each other to be siblings.
- Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: Lightning is introduced as slow and dopey, but when he is called to action, he suddenly limbers up and demonstrates that he does in fact have Super-Speed as his name implies.
- Engineered Heroics: Once Jerry and Tom start getting along, they arrange a deal where Jerry and his nephews will pretend to get caught in order to help Tom make his owner Bentley happy.
- Fire-Forged Friends: Very early on, Jerry saves Tom from a bull and the two agree to work together for the rest of the movie.
- Furry Confusion: Besides the cat and mouse duo, there are both Talking Animals and non-Talking Animals in this movie. For instance, Butch and his alley-cat gang don't talk, but every one of the prairie dogs do.
- Human-Focused Adaptation: Downplayed: the central plot and Character Development is mostly about a cowgirl and her brother reuniting to spend time in their ranch, which is threatened to be taken over by a greedy land-grabber. The cat and mouse are depicted as their pets, who help them save their ranch, but also get far more screentime than the humans.
- Hyper-Competent Sidekick:
- This version of Jerry is the ranchers' biggest asset. It is wily and tough enough to use a cow like a bulldozer to force a bunch of other cows back into their broken pen and then keep them from leaving again with an intimidating glare.
- Critchley's horse, Diablo, has a good understanding of his complex plan and counts and draws with his hooves during planning sessions. He also acts as Critchley's appointment secretary.
- I Owe You My Life: After Jerry saves Tom’s life early on, he decides to help the mouse save the ranch.
- Karmic Jackpot: A villainous version occurs when Clem finally finds the missing deed that has vexed him for so long while looking through a recipe drawer as he prepares to make make a nice dinner for his cat henchmen.
- Line-of-Sight Name: Clem picks the alias Sunflower Muleytoad after various plants and animals he sees in the barnyard when Bentley asks his name.
- Minion with an F in Evil: Subverted with Clem. Though his boss sees him as one compared to his horse Diablo and his Establishing Character Moment is epically failing to capture Duke, Clem proved to be more competent than he appears, to the point where he would've won for his boss if it wasn't for Critchley's Villain Ball, while it's implied that Clem gets away with abetting him, aside from continuing to get made a fool of the prairie dogs.
- Mouse World: The prairie dogs apparently have an underground civilization, which Jerry and his nephews stumble upon after being evicted from the ranch.
- Near-Villain Victory: Critchley successfully evicts the Benson family from their ranch, but Jerry finds his wanted poster and reveals it to the marshal, who places him under arrest.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero!: Tom and Jerry are successful in chasing off Clem and his hench-cats from the ranch, but in doing so, start a fire which destroys it and the deed, which is what Clem was trying to do to begin with. Fortunately, things take an upturn when gold is discovered in the ruins under the ranch, along with the reward money from Critchley's arrest.
- Self-Disposing Villain: Critchley ultimately causes his own defeat by throwing away his wanted poster instead of destroying it, leading for Jerry to find it and expose his crimes, even slipping up about his forgery of the Bensons' family deed.
- Theme Twin Naming: Jerry's triplet nephews' names are Tuffy, Duffy, and Scruffy, which the latter two are Color-Coded Characters of the former.
- Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?:
- City Mouse Bentley is terrified of rodents, which his sister and uncle are housing, and they are forced to relocate Jerry and the triplets after Clem captures them at his request. Thankfully, he gets over it at the end of the movie.
- Clem has a similar dislike specifically towards prairie dogs, which he and Bentley acknowledge.