Characters: "Mammy Two Shoes"

Mammy Two Shoes is a recurring character in MGM's Tom and Jerry cartoons. She is a heavy-set middle-aged black woman who often has to deal with the mayhem generated by the lead characters.

As a partially-seen character, she was famous for never showing her head (although it is briefly visible in Saturday Evening Puss, Mouse Cleaning and Part Time Pal). Mammy's appearances have often been edited out, dubbed, or re-animated as a slim white woman in later television showings, since her character is a mammy archetype now often regarded as racist. It was later revealed that her character was greatly inspired by Oscar-winning black actress and singer Hattie McDaniel, best known for playing "Mammy" in MGM and David O. Selznick's 1939 film Gone with the Wind.

A character very similar to Mammy Two Shoes had earlier been portrayed in the 1935 Disney Silly Symphonies short Three Orphan Kittens.

Mammy first appeared in Puss Gets the Boot, the first Tom and Jerry cartoon (except Tom was called "Jasper"). The character went on to make many appearances through 1952's Push-Button Kitty. From 1954's Pet Peeve, the owner of the house became a young, white, middle-class couple, and starting with 1955's The Flying Sorceress, the audience was able to see the heads of the owner(s).

Mammy was originally voiced by well-known black character actress Lillian Randolph. In the 1960s, the MGM animation studio, by then under the supervision of Chuck Jones, created censored versions of the Tom & Jerry cartoons featuring Mammy for television. These versions used rotoscoping techniques to replace Mammy on-screen with a thin white woman, and the voice on the soundtracks was replaced by an Irish-accented voice performed by white actress June Foray.

The original versions of the cartoons were reinstated when Turner Broadcasting acquired ownership of the Tom & Jerry property. In 1992, the cartoons featuring Mammy were edited to replace Lillian Randolph's voice with that of Thea Vidale, whose dialogue was redone to remove the Mammy character's use of potentially offensive dialect. These versions of the cartoons are aired to this day on Turner's Cartoon Network-related cable channels, and have turned up on DVD as well. However, some European TV showings of these cartoons retain Randolph's original voice.