Tom and Jerry are always violent..everyone knows that. However, this kind of violence I found disturbing. I am fine with 2 anthropomorphized animals hitting each other with mallets and anvils..but to watch a human strangle Tom after he was being tortured by Jerry? no. That's too much. The Gene Deitch (spelling) shorts are all terrible. They have humans being cruel to Tom non stop..usually after Jerry does something terrible to him to start. The old H B shorts had them switch who was the aggressor and they both got licks in. The Deitch ones are 100% one sided in that Jerry is always the aggressor and Tom never gets his own licks in because that 'owner' of his would always grab him the second he catches up to Jerry and starts to mercilessly beat him. The worst part was when Tom pleads for his owner not to hurt him and he, without a seconds thought, beats him. It's really awkward to watch..to bad my son can't get enough of Tom and Jerry and I have to be in the same room as this and the other Deitch shorts on a daily basis.

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I will give some credit, High Steaks is not the worst of the Gene Dietch Tom and Jerry cartoon. It is not as sadistic as Switchin' Kitten or Sorry Safari or as creepy as Dicky Moe and Landing Stripling. However, that is saying very little, even for Tom and Jerry High Steaks is very painful to watch and epitomises everything that makes the Gene Dietch cartoons so horrible to watch.
The animation is incredibly shoddy for starters. The facial expressions are forced, the colours are flat, the backgrounds are static and the editing is all-over-the place. The music is abysmal as well, there are no memorable, beautiful or energetic motifs, instead it is annoying, repetitive and creepy.
The cartoon is further disadvantaged by some truly stomach-churning sound effects, dull pacing, a predictable story and some sickening violence, so much so I felt compelled to turn the television off. When it comes to the characters, I really sympathised with Tom, Jerry is underused and really annoying and when it comes to talking about the support characters on Tom and Jerry the owner gets my vote as my most hated, I absolutely despised him with all my heart, it actually went beyond supposing to hate him.
Overall, while not the worst, this is a painful cartoon and to be avoided. 2/10 Bethany Cox

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This episode has haunted me to this day-Poor Tom! Like some other comments, Jerry is pure evil in this and other episodes-Buddies Thicker than Water would've been way better if Jerry didn't scare Tom back outside- Some parts are really unbearable to watch-Tom being 'grilled', Tom being filled up by that pop bottle (what the heck? He didn't do ANYTHING!) and Jerry purposely getting Tom's tail stuck in the grill when he's grilling (?? what did HE do? He was just minding his own business basically throughout this whole episode!) and he ends up nearly drowning in the pool. That mean owner grabs him by the neck (can someone call animal cruelty? An animal nearly drowning and then being CHOKED?) and being tied up. In the end, Tom deserved that steak after all he'd been through, not Jerry. If was a H-B cartoon, then it would probably be way better.

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The whole Gene Deitch series.. some of the comments that have made about them, like they were made in a third world country..
In truth, they WERE farmed out. Metro closed its animation studio in 1957, whereupon Hanna Barbera took about a year to retool their team to produce their legendary fodder for American television, including Huckleberry Hound and Yogi Bear.
By 1960, Metro belatedly realized that they had made a telling financial blunder (even though the last handful of shorts by H-B for Metro were, to a one, pitiful) and contracted with Deitch to produce exactly one 'season' of Tom and Jerry cartoons at a fraction of the budget they had earlier enjoyed.
In a move that presaged all the later cartoon outsourcing to Korea, Deitch farmed all the work out to a low budget studio in Czechoslovakia. The Czech people were known for their production of innovative and iconoclastic cartoons - and let us be clear, Deitch was an artistic genius. You can tell from his work from the post-War period forward (largely collected in a coffee table book by Fantagraphics years later). But this stuff.. this stuff.. disastrous.
Other commenters here have gone over the malevolent violence of the 'owner' character in this series, and the bargain basement schlocky music, and the ghastly, soulless drawings that truly took character animation back a full 30 years. However, there is one moment in 'High Steaks' which has confused me for a long, long time.
In a sequence where Tom goes fleeing out of the yard (the grill might be burning on his tail or something), Jerry follows him as far as a street corner, then stops. Then a telephone is heard to ring.
This is the WTF moment of the whole cartoon. It has no context. I am more or less convinced that a phone rang during the recording session for the rinky-dink music, and it was just left in there. It's sort of like when Ringo Starr, drunk and stumbling, knocked over some gear during a recording session for the 'Yellow Submarine' soundtrack, and the sound was left in for all eternity.
It's been said - and not without accuracy - that the Chuck Jones T&J's of 1964-66/7 were no great shakes, that they looked brilliant on screen but had none of the soul of the HB originals. Chuck Jones himself was on record agreeing with this assertion. Personally I do disagree but only for the few shorts in which Jones, Michael Maltese, and composer Eugene Poddany collaborated - the results are classic Jones and wonderful to behold. But even the lamest entries in the series Jones produced show cohesiveness, attention to quality and detail, and the ability to build a story out of a series of chase gags.
With little if any exception, the Deitch T&Js show none of these qualities. The only thing WORSE than these, are the T&Js that H-B themselves produced for TV years later in which - for the sake of Standards & Practices - Tom and Jerry are toothless, dimensionless friends in which Jerry sports a disastrous red bow-tie for no reason. Years later, this was lampooned in 'The Simpsons' in the episode where Itchy and Scratchy succumb to PC pressure and 'share, and share, and share and share and share.'

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The first time I saw this short I started to hate Gene Deitch shorts. They are not good or funny at all. The drawings is bad, the music is unpleasant and creepy, the animation just sucks, and especially the sound effects is weird and somewhat nightmarish.The movements is clumsy and jerky. This episode take place in a garden. Tom's owner, that fat guy has a barbecue. That's the hole plot. Jerry the mouse is to evil and annoying in those Gene Deitch shorts so I always side with Tom. Tom's owner- the fat guy is probably the thing I hate most with those shorts. He is so awful and cold so you can't like him. I wonder why Gene Deitch did Tom's owner and Jerry so evil in his shorts. The scene I probably most hated in this episode was when Jerry fasten Tom's tail on the grill and Tom jump into the water and nearly drowns. And what does the fat guy do? He bring up Tom from the swimming pool and beat that poor cat. And what does Jerry do? He watch the beating and smile. Try and stay away from those shorts. Stick with the classics from the 40,s and 50,s.

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I saw this one and Sorry Safari when I was a kid and they've stuck in my head. I just plain hated it then and hate it now. It isn't just that the animation is bad and the sound effects like something out of a nightmare; these cartoons have a sadistic streak a mile wide. When I watch these entries in the Tom and Jerry series I can't help but dislike Mr. Deitch, not just for the shoddy production values but for even thinking these things up in the first place. Jerry is just plain evil here and in the others, and Tom exists to be tortured. In the Deitch year Tom and Jerry really was about like the Itchy and Scratchy cartoons on The Simpsons. The only one of the lot that's any good at all is the Tom and Jerry Cartoon Kit.

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I really hate this cartoon because Tom's sadistic and cruel owner always does abusive things to Tom and Jerry is actually the one who pushes Tom to get into trouble, the scene at the end with Tom's tail caught in the grill and nearly drowning in the pool is really hard to watch and really cruel. I can't believe they made such sadistic cartoons back then. In the old 1940's and 1950's cartoons Tom and Jerry always did violent things to each other but these Gene Deitch cartoons were beyond disturbing with the animal violence. The other episodes with Tom's abusive owner were just as sadistic as this one. The one when Tom's owner goes fishing was pretty sadistic too, actually all of the episodes with Tom's owner was.

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Tom and Jerry are in the garden fighting while Clint Clobber is trying to cook steak on his barbecue.
As a kid, I would watch Tom and Jerry on the BBC (just before the 6 o'clock news, I seem to remember), but I don't recall having seen any of the cartoons directed by Gene Deitch; most likely whoever did the buying for the Beeb back in the '70s didn't deem them worthy of broadcasting.
High Steaks is truly awful from start to finish, with the usual craptabulous Deitch animation (in one scene Tom falls into a swimming pool but only the top half of his body is visible, despite the water being crystal clear), the usual awful music and sound effects, and the usual dreadful gags.
1/10. The worst one yet!

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