text: Tom and Jerry are transporting goods via airplane to Africa. But being white men, they're worried they won't be safe, so they put on blackface to fit in. Once they're wearing it, they adopt black dialect and fully inhabit their new characters. They crash into the ocean and use the wing of the plane as a raft. Before reaching land, they suffer the advances of an over-affectionate octopus and more serious danger from sharks, a swordfish and a whale. Once on land, they're frightened by fantastic creatures, and duck into a cave. Inside it's even worse when they encounter living skeletons in blackface. And upon exiting the cave, things are even worse than that when they are discovered by cannibals.<br /><br />"Plane Dumb" is an especially sloppy effort from Van Beuren Studios. One example: a lion, unknown to Tom and Jerry, enters the cave before they do. But the animators must have forgotten about it, because the lion never appears again. Another example is the ending that's not an ending: it's just an arbitrary stop.<br /><br />According to a YouTube poster, the cartoon "was originally intended to feature the voices AND caricatures of a popular 'Negro' comedy team known as Miller & Lyles. But Aubrey Lyles died of tuberculosis before the recording session was completed, and co-directors John Foster & George Rufle were forced to rework the animation into a 'Tom & Jerry' story."<br /><br />They shouldn't have bothered. The crude animation and poorly-executed gags make the film a loser from beginning to end.