Snafu

Servicemen and women hunkered down in the Gilbert and Mariana Islands during World War Two enjoyed two things when they got a chance to relax and watch a movie. According to the October 1944 edition of Redbook, one was Bugs Bunny cartoons. The other was animated shorts starring Private Snafu.

Few people outside the military ever saw Snafu during the war. The cartoons were designed to use humour to convey to soldiers how to behave (and thus win the war). Years later, being public domain, they began showing up in home video collections and several years ago, Thunderbean did a very nice job issuing a DVD with restored versions.

Snafu did get a bit of publicity in the civilian press in the war years. Here are two wire service articles about the cartoons. The first appeared in papers starting around December 23, 1943 and the second on August 3, 1944 (feature stories back in those days could be spiked for use even months later). Both stories are referring to the cartoon Spies, directed by Chuck Jones in 1943.

Army Pin Up Boy Popular Private Snafu Liked By Men
By ROBBIN COONS
AP Features Writer
HOLLYWOOD, Dec. 29 (AP)—The screen's pin-up girls have competition now in fan mail from American servicemen. Their rival: a funny little guy named Private Snafu who is a model soldier—a model in everything, almost, that model soldier isn't.
Snafu is a military secret. His starring pictures are of, by, and for the armed forces only. But when the army takes surveys to ascertain the soldiers' film favorites, Private Snafu usually rates highest or second highest.
Snafu's misadventures in army life emanate from the information branch of the office of morale services, located in part of the old Fox studios in Hollywood. Originating in an idea of Lt. Colonel Frank Capra, a former movie director, Snafu is a product of the "lighter moments" of the men who create him men, incidentally, who have gone through the regular prescribed military training.

For a "light moment," however, Snafu represents plenty of hard work. Each Snafu film has been turned out in six weeks, compared to the six months usually taken for a short cartoon. And Snafu does his stuff in four minutes, whereas a commercial short cartoon runs ten.
What's Snafu like? Well, he's a patriotic guy who does everything wrong. He's a fellow who thinks it would be a swell army with a few minor changes. He's a guy who can keep a military secret with a zipper on his lip, if there's somebody handy to keep the zipper zipped.
Leon Schlesinger's cartoon studio animates his films from stories and drawings by Capt. Theodore Seuss Geisel (the "Dr. Suess" [sic] of such children's stories as "To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street" and "The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins;") First Lieut. Otto Englander, formerly of Walt Disney's story department; Lt. Jack Sarkin, former art student; Staff Sgt. David Rose, late of Disney's; Cpl. Philip D. Eastman, and Pfc. Eugene Fleury, both formerly of Schlesinger's and Disney's.

"Snafu" Films Shown To Army To Stop Talk
BY DOROTHY WILLIAMS
United Press Staff Correspondent
WASHINGTON, Aug. 3 (UP)—Hitler and Tojo take notice! Snafu is in the army now. Brass hats call him the goofiest soldier in the U.S. Army, but they've handed him one of the toughest assignments.
Snafu is an animated cartoon soldier and it's his job to impress on U. S. troops the importance of being good soldiers. Snafu does it by being a horrible example through hundreds of feet of movie film.
His name springs from the military slang word, "Snafu," meaning "situation normal, all fouled up."
The pitfalls for the Army private, or any other personnel, for that matter, are depicted in this series of Snafu training films being turned out by the film production section of the special service division of the U. S. Army for showing at posts here and overseas.
Snafu, the bantam-weight private, with the outsized ears and feet, scoffs at Army rules and regulations to bring on resultant cataclysms. How he lives up to his name is shown in the film, "Spies," an illustration of the importance of secrecy.

"I'll never let it slip," Snafu sings in the film, when he learns his sailing time for overseas. "When I learn secrets, I zip my lip."
A Japanese spy, disguised as an ice cream wagon horse, hears Snafu boast as he bounces along the street and into a telephone booth to inform his mother he's bound for overseas. Snafu doesn't realize that a Japanese agent is concealed in the telephone box into which he is speaking.
Next Snafu stops in a bar for refreshments. He does not know that the two moose heads over the bar are really a couple of enemy spies. He drinks and his tongue loosens.
He sits down at a table with a lovely, who records his words on a concealed typewriter she has strapped to her garter.
The siren is revealed as a veritable Mata Hari, who wakes the carrier pigeon, sleeping on her hat, and dispatches the bird to Berlin with a notation of transport sailing. Furthermore, the bar queen is something of a sweater girl who absorbs more of Snafu's secrets in her special transmitters and relays them to Germany.
As a result, Nazi U-boats spot the convoy in which Snafu and his fellow soldiers are moving. From the aft deck Snafu sights the sub and is thrown overboard as the ship gains full speed. Below, in Satan's kingdom, Snafu is shown his own reflection in a mirror.
"This guy blabbed," Satan explains.
Snafu is currently starring in four films.

The bulk of the cartoons were made at Warners and it’s pretty easy to tell. While there are Seussian characters at times (especially in Rumors, which is my favourite; Ted Geisel worked on some of these cartoons), the designs look like something out of the Warners units. Carl Stalling’s music is no different than in your average Daffy Duck cartoon, and the soundtrack is filled with Mel Blanc (with his various dialects), Bob Bruce, Frank Graham and other Warners actors. No doubt all that familiarity—and humour—sold Snafu cartoons with battle-weary audiences.