A cartoon cat's worst eighty years, now on your feet, plus the one time he actually died trying.
Press the button on the tongue and the shoe just grabs you. One second, no laces, done. Reebok calls it Pump technology, it's from 1989, and that's really all the history you need: it's the fastest a sneaker has ever locked onto a foot, which is a very funny thing to put on a cat who has never once been fast enough.
This pair is cosplaying as Tom: grey faux fur, a black nose for a toe cap, a red Pump button standing in where his tongue would be, a green splash at the heel like the smear he leaves punching through a wall. The heel tab is a full comic panel, TOM & JERRY in red and yellow, in case the fur wasn't already a big enough hint.
A shoe that locks on in one second, made for a cat who's needed eighty years and still isn't done trying.
Here's the part almost nobody brings up, and it's the one that actually gets me: Tom dies. Not a bonk on the head, not a spring loaded rake to the face, an honest death, a piano landing square on him mid chase in a 1949 short called Heavenly Puss. He floats up toward the gates of Heaven and the gatekeeper stops him at the door. Not because of who he is. Because of what he's spent his whole life doing to Jerry. His one way in is getting the mouse himself, the one creature on earth with every reason to let him rot, to sign a letter of forgiveness inside one hour, or a devil drags him down instead. He tries bribery first, cheese, because of course he does. Jerry tears it up. For one hour, a Saturday morning cartoon quietly asks whether a lifetime of chasing someone can be forgiven in sixty minutes, by the one person who'd have every right to say no.
Jerry signs it.
You don't catch any of that as a kid. You catch the piano and the chase and maybe the cheese. The rest of it finds you decades later, on a rewatch, from much further into your own life than you were the first time, and a cartoon you'd filed under simple turns out to have been asking a real question the whole time. That's the part of getting older nobody warns you about: the things you loved first don't get smaller with time. They get deeper, because you finally have enough years in you to see what was in there all along.
This shoe is doing a small version of the same trick. It looked like a costume the day it launched. Now lived in, fur gone soft, colors a shade quieter than the box photo, which is the only real way anything earns the word favorite. Worn in, not worn out. Same as the cartoon. Same as anybody who's grown into loving a thing more than they did the day they got it.
Size: 9
A cartoon cat's worst eighty years, now on your feet, plus the one time he actually died trying.
Press the button on the tongue and the shoe just grabs you. One second, no laces, done. Reebok calls it Pump technology, it's from 1989, and that's really all the history you need: it's the fastest a sneaker has ever locked onto a foot, which is a very funny thing to put on a cat who has never once been fast enough.
This pair is cosplaying as Tom: grey faux fur, a black nose for a toe cap, a red Pump button standing in where his tongue would be, a green splash at the heel like the smear he leaves punching through a wall. The heel tab is a full comic panel, TOM & JERRY in red and yellow, in case the fur wasn't already a big enough hint.
A shoe that locks on in one second, made for a cat who's needed eighty years and still isn't done trying.
Here's the part almost nobody brings up, and it's the one that actually gets me: Tom dies. Not a bonk on the head, not a spring loaded rake to the face, an honest death, a piano landing square on him mid chase in a 1949 short called Heavenly Puss. He floats up toward the gates of Heaven and the gatekeeper stops him at the door. Not because of who he is. Because of what he's spent his whole life doing to Jerry. His one way in is getting the mouse himself, the one creature on earth with every reason to let him rot, to sign a letter of forgiveness inside one hour, or a devil drags him down instead. He tries bribery first, cheese, because of course he does. Jerry tears it up. For one hour, a Saturday morning cartoon quietly asks whether a lifetime of chasing someone can be forgiven in sixty minutes, by the one person who'd have every right to say no.
Jerry signs it.
You don't catch any of that as a kid. You catch the piano and the chase and maybe the cheese. The rest of it finds you decades later, on a rewatch, from much further into your own life than you were the first time, and a cartoon you'd filed under simple turns out to have been asking a real question the whole time. That's the part of getting older nobody warns you about: the things you loved first don't get smaller with time. They get deeper, because you finally have enough years in you to see what was in there all along.
This shoe is doing a small version of the same trick. It looked like a costume the day it launched. Now lived in, fur gone soft, colors a shade quieter than the box photo, which is the only real way anything earns the word favorite. Worn in, not worn out. Same as the cartoon. Same as anybody who's grown into loving a thing more than they did the day they got it.
Size: 9
