This Day in Pop Culture for February 10

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. The pair no longer fought and the cartoons were no longer funny, but versions of this new show lasted for years. 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 during Christmas 2020 with a new live action/animated movie that starred Chloe Grace Moretz, Michael Pena, Ken Jeong and Rob Delaney. (Image: Warner Bros.)

The First Gold Record Is Awarded

The very first gold record was given to Glenn Miller from RCA Victor Bluebird for “Chattanooga Choo Choo” on this day in 1942. W. Wallace Early, the manager of record sales at that said, “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.