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.
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.
ReplyDelete"Scrap Happy Daffy" has a great one.
DeleteThey'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.