Let me explain something too about the distribution of motion pictures. They had a thing in the motion picture, at that time, called "block-booking". And that meant, if you bought a Warner Bros. feature or an MGM feature, anything like that, you have to take whatever short subjects they gave you. You don't have a choice. And the result with that was, in some places, like at MGM, the top people over there got interested in short subjects. So when Tom & Jerry were made, they realized they had a good thing, but they wouldn't like Bill and Joe do anything but that. And so they did hundreds of Tom & Jerry's. At our place, they didn't give a damn. I mean, nobody ever cared about the cartoons anyway. But, all they knew is they had something, it was this thing, you reached in the bag, pull one out and threw it on the screen. So they had one of the "Pathe" travelogues, newsreels and so on. So, they would supply them and whoever it was [..] and so they get a good feature and they wouldn't care, they didn't try to get one that went with the feature, they say "what's there?". They pull one out and throw it in and in, that was the bag. Well, in a way that was bad. But in a way, it was wonderful for us because nobody gave a damn what we did and onus making funny pictures fell upon us. Well, we had nobody leaning over our shoulders. As long as the picture was acceptable, than that was all there was to it.
Chuck Jones on “block-booking” and the process of short subject distribution, and the freedom at WB cartoon studio
