Wot a Night (1931)
Cab drivers Tom and Jerry pick up two identical passengers on a stormy night and deliver them to a castle, where they become trapped among singing skeletons and ghostly apparitions, only to discover by the end that they've become skeletons themselves.
Wot a Night introduced Van Beuren’s Tom and Jerry, a human cab-driver duo entirely unrelated to MGM’s later cat-and-mouse pair of the same name, a naming collision that eventually led a later distributor to rebrand the two as “Dick and Larry” for home-movie reissues.
Background
Wot a Night was directed by John Foster and George Stallings for Amadee J. Van Beuren’s studio, distributed by RKO, and released August 1, 1931, the first entry in Van Beuren’s Tom and Jerry series. Before settling on the human cab-driver duo, Van Beuren had considered a cat-and-dog pairing originally named “Waffles and Don.” In the finished film, Tom and Jerry are taxi drivers who pick up two identical, bearded passengers at a rain-soaked train station and drive them to a castle, only to follow the pair inside after they skip out on the fare.
What to watch for
Once inside, the two drivers find themselves trapped among singing skeletons and ghostly apparitions, surreal horror imagery rendered with the loose, anything-goes animation typical of Van Beuren’s early-1930s output, before the final twist reveals that Tom and Jerry themselves have been turned into skeletons. The name “Tom and Jerry” here predates, and is entirely unrelated to, MGM’s later cat-and-mouse duo; the overlap eventually caused enough confusion that Official Films, which acquired the library for home-movie distribution in the mid-1940s, rebranded the pair “Dick and Larry,” a rare case of established characters being renamed because of a rival’s unconnected hit.
