In 1939 William Hanna and Joseph Barbera started a partnership that would last for more than six decades until Hanna's death in 2001. The duo's first cartoon together was "Puss Gets the Boot" (1940), featuring an unnamed mouse's attempts to outwit a housecat named Jasper. Though released without fanfare, the short was financially and critically successful, earning an Academy Award nomination for Best Short Subject (Cartoons) of 1940. On the strength of the Oscar nomination and public demand, Hanna and Barbera set themselves to producing a long-running series of cat-and-mouse cartoons, soon christening the characters "Tom & Jerry". "Puss Gets the Boot" did not win the 1940 Academy Award for Best Cartoon, but another MGM cartoon, Rudolf Ising's "The Milky Way" did, making "MGM cartoon studio" the first studio to wrestle the Cartoon Academy Award away from Walt Disney.