YMMV / Blue Cat Blues

• Accidental Aesop:
  • Your love life will not grind to a halt just because your first love cannot work things out with you. It's not worth throwing your life away over your first romantic rejection. There are other fish in the sea.
  • Watch out for Gold Diggers. Ditch the parasites as soon as you find out no matter how pretty or charismatic they are, they’re only after your money, or someone more wealthy than you. It's not worth it.
  • Don't give everything or sacrifice your well being in order to get a partner, especially when she/he is not paying attention to you. This is more evident when Tom signs a contract giving up two limbs and 20 years of slavery to get money in order to (unsuccessfully) outbid Butch.
    • At the very least, Know When to Fold 'Em and always keep the receipts for the expensive stuff you bought. Tom could have escaped his predicament — or at the very least, would have made it a whole lot less ruinous for himself — if only he was able to return the rejected presents.
  • Don't ever push away those who care about you by obsessing over someone who doesn't. The beginning of the episode's flashback makes it clear that, despite everything, the titular Tom and Jerry are close friends, but as soon as the white cat enters the picture, Tom begins throwing away everything else in his life just to have a chance at winning her heart. By the end of the episode, he's left with less than nothing, and even Jerry sadly acknowledges that there's nothing that even he can do to cheer his old pal up.
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Jerry’s girlfriend Toots. While most people believe that she dumped Jerry for another mouse because she was a Gold Digger like Tom’s girlfriend; since we didn’t even know that Jerry had a girlfriend until after we learned about Jerry’s failure to help Tom, it’s possible that Jerry’s desperate effort to get Tom to see the truth about Tom’s girlfriend caused Toots to believe that Jerry was neglecting her in favor of trying to save Tom, and such feelings of neglect caused her to turn to another mouse.
  • Jerry's reaction to Toots marrying another mouse? Had he, like Tom, learned about his rival before their marriage, would he have tried the same things Tom did, or would he still go to the tracks without trying to win Toots back?
• Bizarro Episode: Heavy on plot and light on slapstick, with a voice-over narration by Jerry and a Downer Ending, it's an oddball in the franchise.
• Broken Base: This short is very polarising among fans. You either consider it one of the best shorts because of its emotional storytelling, reflective nature, and genuinely heartwrenching moments; or one of the worst shorts because of how out-of-place it feels.
• Common Knowledge: The already-depressing "Blue Cat Blues" is often cited as the final original Hanna-Barbera short and thus the finale of the series as a whole, given how the short ends with Tom and Jerry being Driven to Suicide by train. In actuality, there were several more original shorts produced afterwards, and the actual final Tom & Jerry short by Hanna Barbera's unit is "Tot Watchers," which ends with another Downer Ending with the titular duo being arrested, albeit Played for Laughs. (And anyway, it's not like death actually sticks in this series; an earlier short had Tom being executed by guillotine.)
• Fanon Discontinuity: Many fans like to pretend this short never happened due to the extremely depressing tone and Downer Ending, which are seen as very out-of-place in a Slapstick Gag Series like Tom and Jerry. It’s made easier by the fact that the short is barely seen on television and not available in Max.
• Fridge Horror: Tom getting Driven to Suicide because he fell for a Gold Digger female cat and drove himself into poverty in a failed effort to win her is terrible, but it only gets worse if you stop to think about the ridiculously rich Butch and what might happen if he ever lost his money or spent it all on his wife. She’d probably dump him for some other sucker who was rich, and would Butch follow in Tom’s footsteps?
• Nightmare Fuel: Once that train approaches our duo... well, we'd better not talk about it. And not in a cartoonish way, either. No wonder this has rarely ever aired on television.
• Signature Scene: The final shot of the short, where Tom and Jerry are sitting on the railroad tracks utterly heartbroken and depressed, waiting for the train to end their misery. It's gotten to the point that most viewers are more familiar with that closing image than the rest of the depressing short.
• Tear Jerker: All of it. Tom and Jerry Did Not Get the Girl, in long sequences for the former, and are shown to be very down in the dumps about it. And once they sit on the train track depressed, the train comes not long after.
  • Jerry's fruitless efforts trying to save Tom from pursuing that Gold Digger. Despite their never-ending feud together, the opening premise described the two of them as friends. But all of this led to both of their demises at the ending.
• Values Dissonance: In the ending, as the train rumbles towards the duo, comical music starts playing and the usual MGM outro plays like normal, suggesting that this was supposed to be for comedy. Granted, Suicide as Comedy gags were common back then, but most modern-day viewers find the joke more sad and disturbing than anything; especially with the vastly increased awareness of mental health issues and suicide prevention since.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: A large reason this short is so shocking to many is that it's a dark short featuring infidelity, Gold Diggers, and suicide. The short was intended for general audiences, not kids, but years of the franchise being pandered to kids has left modern viewers seeing it as exclusively for children.

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