A Horse's What?

Answer this quick! How many times did Carl Stalling put that five-note “You’re a horse’s rear end” music in a cartoon? (I say “rear end” because this is a family blog. The kiddies, you know).

I don’t know the answer but it was used in the opening of all the Snafu cartoons that Warners made for the “Army-Navy Screen Magazine” during the war. In fact, it was visualised in a couple of them.

It made an appearance in the trailer for the Snafu series directed by Chuck Jones. The cartoon concludes as you see below, with the animation of the horse “turned around” on the screen. Narrator Frank Graham concludes the cartoon with “This is Snafu.”

I won’t guess who animated the horse.

Bob Clampett went further in Fighting Tools (1943). A Nazi hand grenade blows up Snafu’s jeep, taking his clothes with him. As Mel Blanc, as the Nazi, sings a rhyming limerick, the horse’s you-know-what music plays and the butt end of a horse fades into the picture.



Again, I’ll avoid guessing at the animator here, though Rod Scribner does some fine work on this cartoon.