A ‘Tom and Jerry’ True Believer Is Searching Every Country in the World for Other Fans

Is Tom and Jerry popular in Yemen? Is Tom and Jerry popular in Sierra Leone? One brave fan is about to find out.

Thanks to the title characters’ aversion to speaking, it’s no surprise that the classic comic and animation duo Tom and Jerry have no trouble breaking the language barrier and finding audiences outside the United States. In fact, the Tom and Jerry cartoons have been an international comedy phenomenon since the 1960s, and countless cultures have connected with the comically violent cat-and-mouse antics of William Hanna and Joseph Barbera’s flagship duo in the decades since.

Unfortunately, while the many internet Tom and Jerry historians have a general timeline of the cartoon’s release in major nations like the United Kingdom, Germany and Japan, there is not enough publicly available data that can definitively show just how much each of the world’s 195 recognized countries truly love Tom and Jerry. But, as one user on Twitter recently discovered, a Tom and Jerry superfan is thankfully conducting the franchise’s first-ever worldwide, all-inclusive fandom census:

Sadly, Reddit banned Tom and Jerry’s top emissary, user EducationalSell1926 after the above thread went viral, most likely because the user broke the site’s rules about making the same post in roughly 200 different subreddits. As such, we have no way of reaching out to the MGM missionary to find out exactly what inspired them to start this worldwide quest to gauge interest in the sprawling animation franchise in countries that aren’t used to international opinion polling. And, given their evasiveness, we don’t even know which country EducationalSell1926 calls home, nor can we find out how much EducationalSell1926’s countrymen love Tom and Jerry themselves.

Of course, the easy way to find this missing entertainment explorer is to make a post in every country’s subreddit asking them if they know EducationalSell1926, but that will probably just get us banned from the site as well. We’ll keep our fingers crossed that falling into Reddit’s moderation mousetrap isn’t the end of EducationalSell1926’s search, and that they’ll eventually release a YouTube documentary about Tom and Jerry fans in the farthest corners in the world. That would be the cat’s whiskers.