Wonderfully offbeat film!

It was OK. I don't see why everyone loves it so much. It wasn't very smart or deep or well-directed.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

When Thomas the Cat fails to prevent Jerry tormenting Mammy Two Shoes he finds himself replaced by a younger, ginger cat named Lightning who soon kicks Jerry out of the house. Lightning soon frames Tom for his raid on the fridge and Tom is out too. If things are to return to the status quo then Tom and Jerry will have to team up to defeat the new cat... and with the help of a magnet and a flat iron they do just that!This starts off as a fairly standard Tom and Jerry cartoon but once Lightning is on the scene things get more interesting; I loved how he was shown as a crackling bolt of electricity every time he ran. Tom and Jerry don't team up very often so it makes a refreshing change to see them not fighting each other for the whole show. I expected the gag with the magnet and the iron to be a brief one shot gag but it was rather fun to see them keep it up right until the end... even to the point of having Tom break his foot on it as he kicked Lightning out of the house! Overall this was a fun short; just make sure you watch the original version starring the voice of Lillian Randolph not the more recent censored version.

When Tom is unable to stop Jerry from pestering a frightened Mammy Two Shoes, a new, faster, more efficient mouser is brought into the house: Lightning, a red-furred devil of a cat, so quick that he actually looks like a bolt of lightning!Although, on the surface, Lightning appears to be the perfect cat, he is actually as untrustworthy and mischievous as Thomas, helping himself to the contents of the fridge as soon as Mammy's back is turned. However, being a rather smart cat, he frames poor old Tom, who is booted out of the house (closely followed by Jerry).Miffed at being bested by the new arrival, Tom and Jerry team up to get revenge and earn their places back in the house.A rather derivative adventure (and one that suffers from some awful re-dubbing by the PC police on my copy), Old Rockin' Chair Tom is full of the usual gratuitous violence one expects from the guys, but really doesn't offer anything particularly new to fans. There are a couple of reasonably funny gags involving the use of a magnet, but don't expect this one to stick in the memory for long.

"Lightning" was funny! "Lightning" is a new, younger cat Mammy Two Shoes employs to get rid of "that mouse" (Jerry) because Tom is not getting the job done. "You is getting' too old for mouse-catchin,' she says.By the way, the PC morons who correct Mammy's grammar worked overtime in this cartoon, changing every one of her sentences. I guess that's better than having her voice dubbed in by these Gestapo-like Liberals who, according to another reviewer here, have done that. I watch these T&J cartoons on disc, which has the actual audio but changes the words on the subtitles and has in the insufferable Whoopi Goldberg give a disclaimer on every discAnyway, this is a funny cartoon, thanks to "Lightning," who looks like a cat wearing a Devil's Halloween suit, and Mammy's reaction to him and what's happening. It's always nice, too, to see Tom and Jerry actually on the same side. They team up here to get rid of "Lightning." Boy, there are tons of violent scenes in this cartoon, more than normal which is saying a lot.

Jerry is tormenting Mammy-Two-Shoes (dubbed to sound less 'offensive' in the version that I watched and I suspect they have rewritten some of her dialogue too) but Tom is too slow and too lazy to catch him. Annoyed with this, she introduces a new orange cat called Lightning and kicks Tom out of the house, along with Jerry, for good.But Lightning turns out to be a glutton and T&J reckon it's time they teamed up and hatch a plan to give Lightning what he deserves (IE a painful walloping and framing him). Some good gags and visual humor along with a more original plot make this a better than average T&J short.