To my knowledge, wasn't Ted Turner and Turner Broadcasting the reason why shorts like Mouse Cleaning weren't gonna be released on home video?
I can't imagine that to be the case. Ted Turner owned the MGM cartoon library back in the 90s – when
Mouse Cleaning and
Casanova Cat were released on the complete Tom and Jerry LaserDisc sets in the United States.
The bad reputation these two shorts have obtained has come in later years... and, like a lot of stuff that goes viral on the internet these days, not necessarily for rational reasons. It's true, of course, that there are many other
Tom and Jerry shorts with blackface gags and questionable content. But these two have caught attention much more than others.
In part, that has to be because the blackface scenes
last much longer, and are on more prominent display, than in other shorts. In
Mouse Cleaning, the gag where Mammy Two Shoes mistakes Tom for a black man is the whole ending of the film.
In Casanova Cat, Jerry dances with a blackface makeup for a good half minute or longer. The scenes in both of these films must be very easy targets to point to for anyone wanting to attack old cartoons for racism, because they are so prominently there.
Whatever the exact reasons, these two films have been an uncomfortable topic for Warner Bros. in the States for a long time. They were censored from the third and final
Tom and Jerry Spotlight Collection set already ten years ago, even after Warner Bros. had promised that series would include ALL the films, and sent out replacement discs for any films that were edited in previous Spotlight volumes. They made no such replacement discs for these two shorts.
When the
Tom and Jerry Golden Collection came along in 2011, it was supposed to fix this problem by aiming squarely for the collectors.
Mouse Cleaning and
Casanova Cat were restored
because Warner intended them to be on the Golden Collection Volume 2 set (yes, Jason, nothing strange about that part). But at the last minute, Warner chickened out and omitted the two shorts from the contents list which was released to the public in February 2013, five months before the set was slated to come out. The backlash and intense rage from fans all over the internet was so extreme that Warner Home Video decided to postpone the set indefinitely instead of releasing it without the two films.
There's another element to Warner's sudden backtracking on releasing these two films which people seldom mention. Usually, Warner's tradition with cartoon sets like these has been to release one volume a year of any given series. That was the case with the
Looney Tunes Golden Collection, the
Popeye sets (except they split the second year's release into two smaller sets), the
Looney Tunes Platinum Collection, and so on. However... even though the first volume of the
Tom and Jerry Golden Collection came out in the fall of 2011, the second volume was not offically announced until a year and a half later, in spring 2013.
Honestly, I have to think that Warner originally planned to release
Tom and Jerry Golden Collection Vol. 2 in the fall of 2012... but then they ended up waiting another six months with announcing it because somone in upper management suddenly had second thoughts about the two "problematic" films. In theory, Warner would also need additional time to restore two more cartoons (
Puppy Tale and
Posse Cat) which they could have as backups in case the two "difficult" films weren't approved for release. And of course, they weren't.
We can see a similar pattern with the
Spotlight Collection DVD series in the previous decade: Volume 1 comes out in 2004, Volume 2 in 2005, and Volume 3 two whole years later in 2007. Even here, it's easy to imagine suits at Warner debating back-and-forth for months on end what to do about
Mouse Cleaning and
Casanova Cat, before finally announcing the third set.
The bottom line is: the treatment of these two
Tom and Jerry films has clearly been an ongoing, internal debate at Warner Brothers for the last 10 to 15 years. And sadly, the debate doesn't seem to be over yet.