The arrival this week of “The Art of Tom & Jerry: Volume One” LaserDisc set has made life a wee bit more fun. I just need to get ahold of Volume Two to make me the happiest man on the planet. Last year when Warner Bros. started releasing Tom and Jerry on dvd I got “wet my pants” excited. But that excitement turned to bitter resentment when I found out that the cartoons released on the dvds were edited versions of the originals. Apparently in our evil politically correct times we can’t have any racially motivated jokes in cartoons that hail from the 40’s and 50’s. Gone are black face jokes, Chinese references and the like. Even Mammy’s voice has been redubbed to make her sound less ethnic. The super cool thing about “The Art of Tom & Jerry” LaserDisc sets is that they were released in the early 90’s before we became a nation of “I don’t want to offend.” It’s Tom & Jerry in all their original Hanna-Barbera splendor. It remains to be seen whether the “Tom & Jerry Spotlight Collection” that hits dvd in October will have the censored version or the originals. The press materials claim that the set will contain “40 restored and remastered shorts.” Hopefully “restored” will mean what it’s supposed to.