Tom and Jerry
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46 free Tom and Jerry trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
42 free Tom and Jerry trivia questions with answers. Tom and Jerry have been chasing each other since 1940, when a scruffy cat named Jasper cornered an unnamed mouse in Puss Gets the Boot and MGM's management advised the two young directors not to make any more. A studio contest renamed the pair, seven Academy Awards followed, and the cartoons are still running on channels around the world. This quiz covers the whole story: the Hanna-Barbera golden age and its Oscar winners, who screamed for Tom, why the composer's scores were so hard to play, Spike and Tyke, Butch and Toodles, Nibbles the French-speaking orphan, the rare times Tom actually talks, Jerry's dance with Gene Kelly, the surreal Gene Deitch shorts made behind the Iron Curtain, the Chuck Jones years, the 1992 movie, the 2021 hybrid film and the edits later made for television. Easy questions for kids, hard ones for animation buffs. Everything is family-safe. Every answer was checked against a documented source and the citation sits under each explanation.
30 of 46 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which two animators created Tom and Jerry at MGM in 1940?
William Hanna and Joseph Barbera
William Hanna and Joseph Barbera were both under 30 and bored at a studio with no hit characters when they tried a cat chasing a mouse, an idea that had been done countless times.
Q 02Which 1940 short, where a mouse dangles glassware to blackmail a house cat, was the first Tom and Jerry cartoon?
Puss Gets the Boot
Puss Gets the Boot earned an Oscar nomination, yet its two directors went uncredited and managers told them not to put all their eggs in one basket.
Q 03What was Tom the cat called in his 1940 debut, before the famous name arrived?
Jasper
Jasper became Tom only once MGM ordered a series, which it did after an influential figure in the Texas film trade wrote asking for more of the cat and mouse.
Q 04How were the names Tom and Jerry chosen?
A studio contest won by an animator
A studio contest won by an animator, who collected $50, settled it; the phrase had already named a hot egg-and-rum drink for about a century.
Q 05Tom and Jerry's creators went on to found a TV studio behind which hit show?
The Flintstones
The Flintstones made the pair's new studio a prime-time name; MGM had closed its cartoon unit after finding that reissued old shorts earned almost as much as new ones.
Q 06Tom and Jerry's seven Oscars tie which series, home of Three Little Pigs?
Silly Symphonies
Silly Symphonies rarely reused its characters, so Tom and Jerry's matching seven wins leave them with more Oscars than any other cartoon characters.
Q 07Which 1943 short was the first Tom and Jerry cartoon to win an Oscar?
The Yankee Doodle Mouse
The Yankee Doodle Mouse stages a cellar chase as a war film: Jerry lobs eggs from a carton marked hen-grenades, drives a cheese-grater jeep and signs off with the dispatch 'Send more cats!'
Q 08In The Cat Concerto, Tom performs which piece at a formal concert while Jerry sabotages the piano?
Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2
Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 also drove Warner's Rhapsody Rabbit, made at the same time with strikingly similar gags; Tom's version won the Oscar and the rabbit's was not even nominated.
Q 09An Oscar-winning Tom and Jerry short is set in the Vienna home of which composer, whose playing Jerry cannot resist dancing to?
Johann Strauss
Johann Strauss goes away on a journey, so Tom teaches himself to play the piano in six easy lessons and lures the dancing mouse out of hiding.
Q 10Whose voice supplied most of Tom's screams and yelps in the classic MGM shorts?
William Hanna
William Hanna, the co-director, did the yelling himself, so the cat's trademark, almost human scream came from one of the two men who invented him.
Q 11Tom and Jerry's composer Scott Bradley made life hard for MGM's musicians by weaving in which avant-garde technique?
Twelve-tone serialism
Twelve-tone serialism first crept into 1944's Puttin' on the Dog; he later wrote that he hoped Dr. Schoenberg would forgive him for using his system to produce funny music.
Q 12What is the name of the puppy son of Spike, Tom's bulldog nemesis?
Tyke
Tyke arrived in 1949's Love That Pup, and father and son finally got a series of their own in 1957, only for MGM to shut the cartoon studio after just two entries.
Q 13Spike's gruff speaking voice imitated which American comedian, famous for his large nose?
Jimmy Durante
Q 21In which Iron Curtain city were 13 Tom and Jerry shorts made from 1961 to 1962?
Prague
Prague sat behind the Iron Curtain, so the Czech animators' names were Americanised in the credits to stop audiences linking the cartoons with Communism.
Q 22Gene Deitch admitted he was never a fan of the original cartoons, calling them what?
Needlessly violent
Needlessly violent was his honest view, yet he took the job anyway, on a tight budget and with a crew who had never even seen one of the cartoons.
Q 23Which ex-Warner Bros. director produced 34 Tom and Jerry shorts between 1963 and 1967?
Chuck Jones
Chuck Jones gave Tom thicker eyebrows and a more twisted face, much like the Grinch he also animated; his Hollywood studio made the shorts until MGM stopped in 1967.
Jimmy Durante's gravelly New York delivery was the model from 1949's Love That Pup onwards, the short that turned the bulldog into a doting father forever growling 'That's my boy!'
Q 14Nibbles, the little orphan mouse, speaks which language when he appears as the second Mouseketeer?
French
French it is: he sings Alouette while making a sandwich and, after a tumble into a glass of champagne, jabs Tom with his sword crying 'Touche, pussy cat!'
Q 15Which unusual thing happens in the 1956 short Blue Cat Blues?
Jerry narrates in voiceover
Jerry narrates in voiceover as Tom, jilted for a far richer cat, drowns his sorrows in milk; the short ends with both of them sitting glumly on a railway line.
Q 16Which duckling, a Yogi Bear Show regular, was modelled on the little duck from the Tom and Jerry shorts?
Yakky Doodle
Yakky Doodle was patterned on Quacker, the Tom and Jerry duckling who in one short hatches beside Tom, a cat who only wants to eat him, and decides he has found his mother.
Q 17In The Mouse Comes to Dinner, a smug Tom asks Toots what's cooking and gets which reply?
You are, stupid
'You are, stupid' is the answer, because Jerry has slipped something hot beneath him and a preening Tom needs a moment to notice.
Q 18Jerry danced with which star in the 1945 MGM musical Anchors Aweigh?
Gene Kelly
Gene Kelly plays a sailor who cheers up a lonely mouse king, Jerry, in a land where singing and dancing are against the law; the sequence is known as The King Who Couldn't Dance.
Q 19Which MGM star shared an animated underwater dream with Tom and Jerry in 1953's Dangerous When Wet?
Esther Williams
Esther Williams plays a Channel swimmer who dreams up an underwater ballet with the cat and mouse, in which cartoon sea creatures stand in for the people in her life.
Q 20Who was credited as producer on nearly every classic Tom and Jerry short until 1955?
Fred Quimby
Fred Quimby had little creative input, yet as head of MGM's cartoon studio it was he whom the Academy named as winner of every Tom and Jerry Oscar; he retired in the mid-1950s.
Q 24What is the housekeeper who owns Tom in the early Tom and Jerry shorts commonly known as?
Mammy Two Shoes
Mammy Two Shoes is usually seen only from the waist down; when the shorts later reached television she was often redrawn as someone else or given a new voice.
Q 25Lillian Randolph, the voice of Tom's housekeeper, also played the Baileys' maid in which Christmas classic?
It's a Wonderful Life
It's a Wonderful Life put her face on screen in 1946; in nineteen Tom and Jerry shorts between 1940 and 1952 audiences heard her voice but almost never saw the character's head.
Q 26Which media mogul bought MGM in 1986 and kept the film library, bringing Tom and Jerry to TBS and Cartoon Network?
Ted Turner
Ted Turner had to sell the studio again almost at once to cover his debts, but he kept its film library and in 1992 launched Cartoon Network to show off the cartoons in it.
Q 27Tom & Jerry Kids, starring the pair as youngsters, arrived in September 1990 on which brand-new children's block?
Fox Kids
Fox Kids launched the same day the show began, and its back-up segments starring Droopy and his son Dripple were later spun off as Droopy, Master Detective.
Q 28What did Tom and Jerry do all through their 1992 feature film that they almost never did in the classic shorts?
Speak
Speak, and even sing: the 1992 musical gave the near-silent pair full dialogue, and it went on to a disappointing run at the box office.
Q 29In the 1992 film, Tom and Jerry help a runaway girl named Robyn Starling escape from whom?
Her evil legal guardian
Her evil legal guardian, 'Aunt' Pristine Figg, is after the family fortune and hides a telegram proving that Robyn's father survived an avalanche in Tibet.
Q 30The 2021 live-action/animated Tom and Jerry film was directed by Tim Story and starred which actress?
Chloë Grace Moretz
Chloë Grace Moretz plays a new hotel hire who recruits Tom to evict Jerry before a society wedding; the film proved a surprise hit, grossing more than $100 million worldwide.