This Day in Pop Culture for February 10

1940: Tom & Jerry are Introduced

One of Hollywood’s first dynamic duo debuted on this day in 1940. Puss Gets the Boot was the first Tom and Jerry cartoon short created by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera for MGM. There were 114 original shorts of the cat and mouse cartoon created between 1940 and 1957 and many feel that they were the best.

MGM released 13 more in 1961 that were produced by Rembrandt Films and Chuck Jones tried his hand with the pair for 34 rather strange shorts released from 1963 to 1967. In the 1970’s, the cat and mouse arrived on TV with a milder, limited animation, Saturday morning series. This time, the pair no longer fought, and the cartoons were no longer funny.

It wasn’t until 1992 with the feature-length 1992 movie (Tom and Jerry: The Movie) that the two began to act like themselves again. The pair starred together in The Tom and Jerry Show in 2014 for Cartoon Network and reunited again in 2021 for a big screen live action/animated movie that starred Chloe Grace Moretz, Michael Pena, Ken Jeong and Rob Delaney. (Image: Warner Bros.)

1942: The First Literal Gold Record

The first literal gold record award was given to Glenn Miller from RCA Victor Bluebird for selling 1.2 million copies of “Chattanooga Choo Choo” on this day. W. Wallace Early, the manager of record sales had this to say:

“We’re mighty proud of that Chattanooga Choo Choo, and the man that made the record, Glenn Miller. You see it’s been a long time – 15 years in fact – since any record has sold a million copies. And Chattanooga Choo Choo certainly put on steam and breezed right through that million mark by over 200,000 pressings. And we decided that Glenn should get a trophy. The best one we could think of is a gold record of Chattanooga.”

In 1958, the Recording Industry Association of America introduced a gold record award program for any record which received one million dollars in retail sales.

2011: Rebecca Loved Fridays

The story goes like this: In late 2010, young Rebecca Black’s mother hired ARK Music Factory for $4000 to produce her daughter’s music video for “Friday”. The song was written by ARK and was released on You Tube on this day in 2011. The song went viral – but not in a good way.

The video was famous for receiving over 167 million views and 3,190,000 “dislikes” during its first four months. Even so, the single for “Friday” was released on March 14. She performed the song on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and talked about how it wasn’t received well. But the song made it to the #57 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 chart anyway despite being considered by many as one of the worst songs ever played on the air.

Many years later, Black got the last laugh. In February of 2023, she released her debut studio album, Let Her Burn to fairly good reviews.