Martin Scorsese celebrates American movies from the silent classics to the Hollywood of the seventies.

In this short subject (which mostly represents a departure from Disney's traditional approach to animation), a stuffy owl teacher lectures his feathered flock on the origins of Western musical instruments. Starting with cavepeople, whose crude implements could only "toot, whistle, plunk and boom," the owl explains how these beginnings led to the development of the four basic types of Western musical instruments: brass, woodwinds, strings, and percussion.

Molly and Terry Donahue, plus their three children, are The Five Donahues. Youngest son Tim meets hat-check girl Vicky and the family act begins to fall apart.

A young mouse arrives at the Parisian headquarters of the King's Mouseketeers with a letter from his father, François Mouse, asking Jerry to teach the lad to be a Mouseketeer. Lessons begin for the French-speaking boy, but although he's charming, he's hopeless and when he gets into a scrape with Tom, Jerry sends the garçon packing. As the boy is leaving Paris, he hears the noise of fighting, and he returns to find Jerry in a fight for his life with Tom. Champagne corks, a paint brush, and a barrel of wine are props in the lad's attack. But has he lost all his clumsiness?

The lady of the house has gone out for a few hours, leaving her baby in the care of a stereotypical 1950s teenager, who immediately begins calling her friends. Tom and Jerry must call a truce to their constant chases as the baby, unsupervised, continually gets loose. When the baby escapes out the front door, Tom and Jerry chase it to a construction site, where they frantically try to keep it from harm.

Johannes, a doctor of physics, travels with his doctoral supervisor to a scientific congress in the Alps. A series of mysterious incidents occur on site. He meets Karin, a mysterious jazz pianist who seems to know more about him than she can know. Suddenly, mysterious deaths begin to pile up and Johannes tries to uncover the secret under the mountain.

Tom is chasing Jerry again. In a panic, the mouse runs into the doghouse of little Tyke, the bulldog. Right next to the sleeping Tyke sleeps Spike, his father. Tom unthinkingly snatches the puppy out of his house. When Spike wakes up and sees this, he delivers a stern warning: Stay away from my boy, or else. Jerry realizes that sticking close to the boy is the best way to repel his feline tormentor, but Tom is not about to let the mouse evade him so easily.