FRENEMIES!

-Surya Harikrishnan

You must be wondering what the You title of this article - FRENEMIES means. It is nothing but friends + enemies. Two individuals who love each other but at the same time also hate each other! To put it simply, they love to hate each other and hate to love each other but just cannot stay without one another.

This might remind you of a very famous cartoon show with two of the most famous and iconic cartoon characters the world has ever known. If you have watched this series during your childhood, then your childhood was definitely awesome!

I continue to watch episodes of TOM & JERRY to this day and there is never a moment when I feel bored or tired of watching the same episodes over and over again!

Tom and Jerry is a series of theatrical animated cartoon films created by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera for Metro-Goldwyn- Mayer, centering on a rivalry between a cat and a mouse whose chases involved comic violence. Hanna and Barbera ultimately wrote, produced and directed 114 Tom and Jerry shorts at MGM cartoon studios in Hollywood from 1940 to 1957. The original series is notable for having won seven Academy Awards, tying with Walt Disney's Silly Symphonies as the theatrical animated series with the most Oscars. A longtime television staple, Tom and Jerry has a worldwide audience and has been recognized as one of the most famous and longest lived rivalries in American cinema. In 2000, Time magazine named Tom and Jerry one of the greatest television shows of all time.

Tom and Jerry have also been adapted in various short films, Ad films, comic books and video games and across various platforms such as online games, facebook games, play station games, Nintendo console games like the Gameboy, DS, Wii and also the XBOX.

Other famous characters on the show include Spike and Tyke, Nibbles, Butch and Toodles and last but not the least, Mammy-two- shoes. Spike and Tyke are a father-son duo. They are bulldogs. Though Spike is extremely strong and powerful he is very dim-witted and unintelligent.

Nibbles is a small grey mouse and is Jerry's nephew and plays vital roles in many episodes. Butch is a black cat who also wants to eat Jerry. He is the most frequent adversary of Tom. However, for most of the episodes he appears in, he's usually seen rivaling Tom over Toodles, a beautiful white female cat. Mammy Two Shoes is a heavy-set middle-aged black woman who often has to deal with the mayhem generated by the lead characters. She is often seen as the owner of Tom. Her face was never shown

Though Tom and Jerry have entertained millions of children and adults for decades now, certain sections of society including some parents have accused the show of promoting and espousing disturbing degrees of violence and aggression amongst the younger audience including babies, children and teenagers!!