Monday 11 May 2020

Snafu on (Kitchen) Patrol

The camera pans down a huge mound of potatoes and stops at the bottom, where Private Snufu is griping as he cleans a frying pan.

That’s the opening of Gripes, apparently the second Snafu made at the Warner Bros. studio as part of the “Army/Navy Screen Magazine.”

This was the work of Friz Freleng’s unit (there’s a hidden Friz reference in the letters of an eye-chart), where Manny Perez, Jack Bradbury, Gerry Chiniquy and Dick Bickenbach were among the animators. I don’t know whether Lenard Kester was responsible for potato mountain or the other backgrounds.

A Seuss-like rhyme does open the short
Where K.P. makes Snafu a very poor sport.

2 comments:

  1. The vertical pans weren't used all that often at Warners (Willoughby's cliff plunge in "Of Fox and Hounds" was another example) but the change of direction from the normal left-right pans was always an interesting change of pace.

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    Replies
    1. "Scrap Happy Daffy" has a great one.

      They're even rarer at Hanna-Barbera, which loved left-right action. I can think of them in two Augie cartoons (one was by laid out by Bob Givens) and one in a P&D.

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