The Old-West outing for Hanna-Barbara's famed cartoon cat-and-mouse buddies is a very retro-looking and feeling feature. It constitutes an OK time passer for the kids and avoids any problematic cowboys vs. Native Americans imagery, to offer instead a so-so plot takeoff on creaky frontier mellerdrammer cliches.
Young Bentley Benson visits home on the Benson Ranch from the big city. A tenderfoot who hopes to take his kin back to town, he must be schooled in the cattle-run lifestyle by his sister and (apparently Hispanic) uncle. Bentley's pet cat is Tom, who, though initially recruited as a mouse-hunter, strikes up an eventual partnership with the resident ranch-house mouse family, led of course by Jerry.
The Benson ranch is coveted by land baron August Critchley, actually an outlaw, but now a suave Evil Businessman type (complete with a British accent). Part of Critchley's scheme to gain the property involves scaring all prairie dogs in the area onto the Benson homestead, then offering his own cats as the solution. This puts Tom in the position of falsely pretending to be a savage rodent killer, which is fodder for some J-level mischief (a golden opportunity for a Clint Eastwood, High Noon or Shane parody is here, but alas, not touched). Occasional songs are inoffensively pleasant.
As with classic MGM-cartoon shorts with Tom and Jerry, the titular heroes never speak. Director Darrel Van Citters uses computer-assisted animation is less the exacting, hand-drawn style of golden-age Tom and Jerry and more the simplified, stylized look associated with the 1950s Gerald McBoing-Boing and its followers.
One of the voiceover actresses does a June Foray-soundalike character, which is cute. A script reference that may be a joke on onetime US presidential candidate Lloyd Bentsen is likely to go over kiddie viewers' heads (perhaps even parents' heads). Nothing in the unrated material here—those bits included—would earn anything above an MPAA G-level rating. A strong optional purchase for J library shelves.
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