It all started with Tom. Before Doge. Before Grumpy Cat. Before the internet, there was Tom. Debuting in 1940, Tom the Cat became the blueprint for cartoon pain, slapstick resilience, and generational chaos. He took the L’s that trained your humor. No catchphrase. No mercy. Just pure visual comedy, universal across language and time. In 2024, NVIDIA and Stanford fed 81 classic Tom & Jerry episodes into an AI model to teach machines how to animate chaos. Tom’s suffering literally trained artificial intelligence. $TOM is a tribute to the origin of viral cat memes and our childhood.