YOU know the story already. Cat chases mouse. Mouse outwits cat. Cat suffers painful humiliation - maybe he walks on to a garden rake which snaps up and smacks him on the face, or perhaps something drops on him from a great height and he's hammered into the ground like a clothes peg. Undeterred, cat picks himself up, dusts himself off, and starts to chase the mouse again. And again and again and again.

It's a cycle that started back in 1940 and now, 60 years on, it's about to be renewed. On the first day of the new year Tom the cat and Jerry the mouse will renew hostilities in Mansion Cat, the first new Tom and Jerry cartoon for 30 years, according to its broadcaster, Cartoon Network. It's the centrepiece of a whole day devoted to the duelling duo who remain the outstanding achievement of animation team Bill Hanna and Joseph Barbera.

Mansion Cat is the work of Karl Toerge, a Detroit-born, Californian-based writer and director who was given the opportunity of reviving the characters for a one-off, seven-minute cartoon. Speak to Toerge and it's soon clear why Warner Brothers asked him to take up the reins. Toerge (you pronounce it Torg, if you're asking) really loves cartoons. I mean, really loves them. He can rhapsodise about such half-forgotten fare as Captain Kangaroo or give you a spot-on vocal impersonation of Jerry's nephew in the Tom and Jerry short The Three Mouseketeers (''Bonjour Monsieur Pussy-cat''). Sometimes he even sounds like a cartoon. ''I've just

had lunch with Mr B,'' he tells me when I phone.

Mr B is Joe Barbera who, even at the age of 87, was keen to offer a helping hand in the making of the new cartoon. ''You realise why Hanna and Barbera was what it was,'' Toerge says of the experience of working with Mr B. ''Joe's got an amazing mind. He was born to do what he does. He's 87 year' old and he

doesn't draw as much as he used to - big deal - but he's still a story man.''

Given the huge swatch of substandard animated fare served up on Saturday morning television under the Hanna-Barbera banner over the past three decades, such gushing praise may seem hard to fathom. Yet, back in the 1940s and 1950s the duo's work on Tom and Jerry garnered seven Oscars. Back then, though, Hanna and Barbera would produce 50 minutes of full animation a year. When they moved into television in the sixties the pair were producing 60 minutes a week. In those stats resides the qualitative difference between Tom and Jerry and Yogi Bear.

Tom and Jerry were creations of the Hollywood studio system. Back in the thirties and forties nearly every studio had its own animation department. The most notable were Warner Brothers, where Chuck Jones could be found working on Bugs Bunny and Road

Runner, and MGM, where Hanna and Barbera teamed up under the aegis of Fred Quimby.

The cat and mouse made their first appearance in Puss Gets

the Boot in 1940, though they

were not fully formed. The mouse didn't have a name, while the cat

- a rather more mangy, evil-

looking moggy - was called Jasper. Quimby didn't feel the characters had much mileage but an Oscar nomination soon changed his mind. Hanna and Barbera spent

the next 15 years honing the characters to perfection.

What really fired up the pair, however, was a spot of friendly

in-house rivalry. Tex Avery joined the studio in the early forties. It's all too easy to bandy about the word genius, but in animation terms Avery was certainly in

the vicinity. His cartoons had a hellzapopping vitality and a willingness to play with the form.

The way he animated a hair in the gate of the projector or had his characters move so fast they run off the edge of the film and need to grab the film sprockets to stay on the screen had a touch of Brecht about it.

Hanna and Barbera were never that radical. But some of Avery's energy certainly found its way into their work. ''Tex had a crazy way of pacing things and it started to wipe off on Bill and Joe,'' animator Michael Lahl later recalled. ''Then it became a race. Each picture that would come out, from one unit or the other, was faster. Pretty soon you got to the point where the only guys who could understand it were the guys who worked on it.''

This was the recipe for Tom and Jerry's finest years. A full-on mixture of pacing and aggressive gags polished to a comic sheen. In 1943 this combination racked up an Oscar for Yankee Doodle Mouse, and another six followed in the next decade. Such was the appeal of Tom and Jerry in the post-war years that Jerry was even considered a suitable dance partner for Gene Kelly in Anchors Aweigh, while the pair joined Esther Williams in an underwater ballet sequence mixing live action and animation in Dangerous When Wet.

But the advent of television in

the fifties saw the studios cut-

ting costs. MGM closed their animation unit in 1957 and Hanna

Barbera decamped to the sweat-shop that was television. MGM tried to revive the characters in

the early sixties, though the results pleased no-one.

Animator Gene Deitch later claimed the studio ''wanted to cash in on the popularity of the characters as cheaply as possible'' - and it showed. In 1963 they tried again. When Warner Brothers closed their animation unit MGM offered Chuck Jones the opportunity to turn his hand to Tom and Jerry. Again the results were unappetising and in 1967 MGM stopped production.

Of course, Cartoon Network is a little disingenuous when it claims Mansion Cat is the first Tom and Jerry cartoon since Jones's attempt at the character. Hanna and Barbera have periodically revived the pair on the small screen, though the demands of television meant they were travesties of their former selves. The cartoon's violence - their raison d'etre - was radically toned down and Tom and Jerry even became friends in such thankfully forgotten series as the Tom & Jerry/Grape Ape Show.

At least Karl Toerge can claim

to have given us a glimpse of the true Tom and Jerry. In Mansion

Cat Tom is left in charge of Joe

Barbera's house - cue lots of

visual in-jokes - but soon destroys it in his vain quest to catch the mouse. In the process he's sucked into a video recorder, sucked up

by a vacuum cleaner, and puffed

out by a dishwasher.

In an age when another mouse, Itchy, habitually inflicts the most appalling violence upon Scratchy, another cat, in The Simpsons,

all this inevitably feels a little

tame. Still, it's a game try by Toerge, although even he admits

it's not quite up to par with the

golden-age cartoons.

''I'm glad we were able to pull it off as well as we did,'' he says. ''Don't get me wrong. I don't think it's half as good as an original Tom and Jerry cartoon, but I think for a first stab it's fine. I'm happy with it. I'd like to do more.''

The appeal of Mansion Cat is simply that it continues the ritual. Cat chases mouse, mouse outwits cat. It seems that after six decades the pair remain locked into compulsive behaviour patterns. It raises the question as

to what is the animus of these

cartoon animals. What, as it were, animates them?

''Mr B said that Tom is not mean,'' says Toerge approvingly. ''He can't help himself. It's an inner drive he has.'' We can put it down to feline nature, then. Well, up to a point. Feline nature would surely demand a particular resolution

and it seems Toerge did toy with

the idea some of us have secretly longed for.

''I thought it would be great if Tom would eat the mouse and that would be their last show,'' he admits. ''But Mr B told me that he never stopped feeling bad about the cartoon The Three Mouseketeers in which Tom is sent to the guillotine. He got a lot of letters about killing the cat.

''We never wanted to kill the cat. The one time we did it I always regretted it,' he told me. Right there I thought 'OK I'm not going to kill the mouse'.''

Perhaps that's just right. In many ways Itchy and Scratchy - an obvious parody of Tom and Jerry - simply make apparent the inherent sado-masochistic relationship of the cat and mouse. Indeed, in

classic cartoons such as Old Rockin' Chair Tom and Dog Trouble the duo teamed up to see off

the threat of an intruder to their

home. They preferred the status quo. For the truth is they need

each other. There's still a lot of chasing to be done yet.