My Kid Is SO Over Tom & Jerry

So my kids were watching Tom and Jerry this morning when my daughter Brontë finally stood up to announce:

“Well, the mouse won AGAIN. Like ALWAYS.”

And stomped off in disgust.

“But if the cat won, that would be the end of the show,” I tell her.

“Yeah, so the mouse is gonna SAVE THE DAY because he’s always the BIG WINNER,” she said with impressive sarcasm for a five-year-old.

Jerry demonstrates his Napoleonic complex

I’m not sure whether she’s more upset by already knowing how a show will turn out, watching what’s clearly an anti-cat propaganda cartoon when she’s a fan of kitties, or her Nietzschean disgust for mindlessly favoring the underdog.

But I’m favoring the latter, because she IS my kid…

And I can remember also being disgusted by how the Roadrunner always won. I mean, here you have Wile E. Coyote, who is undeniably brilliant, inventing elaborate schemes to catch the roadrunner that involve sending away for specialized technical equipment and setting it up.

He’s an outside-the-box thinker who problem-solves from multiple angles. You have to admit that he’s VERY advanced, for a coyote.

Then… there’s the Roadrunner.

(After observing how the rules of our natural universe don’t apply to the bird)

Who runs straight into landscapes that are obviously painted-on signs. He eats “birdseed” that’s blatantly rigged up to dynamite.

 

And he gets away with it. Every. Time.

Not because he outwits the Coyote or had worked up an ounce of forethought or defensive strategy.

No, he just confidently blunders forth, smugly aware that the very rules of Space and Time will bend to accommodate his idiocy.

It always seemed so colossally unfair.

Just once, I wanted to see the Wile E. get that roadrunner. Poor guy must’ve been starving to death.