No Dice, Snafu

Thanks to a little devil-esque character, Private Snafu doesn’t save any money for post-war necessities, like a suburban home, with wife and child in Pay Day, a finely crafted cartoon from the Friz Freleng unit at Warner Bros.

Every time Technical Fairy First Class shows up with a bank teller’s window so Snafu can make a deposit, some beckoning smoke tempts him away, and he spends money on souvenirs, a night in a whore house and, finally, gambling.

The smoke forms a hand with a pair of dice. Technical Fairy tries to push and pull Snafu away from the crap game. Snafu does a little dance-walk (Gerry Chiniquy?) and we see Snafu’s butt.



Now come the visual puns. Snafu rolls box cars (two sixes), then rolls a pair of ones (snake eyes).



Carl Stalling puts a drum roll on the soundtrack as Snafu shakes the dice. Just before Snafu bets it all and gets set to roll the dice, Stalling inserts that five-note “You’re a Horse’s Ass” tune.

The story (by Mike Maltese and Tedd Pierce?) is really clever. Each time Snafu wastes his money, there’s a cut to a drawing of his post-war dream where things disappear as he loses money to buy them. The animation is good, too. The Snafu cartoons have no credits.

There’s no dialogue until the end of the cartoon when a mouse living in a hole in what had been Snafu’s home answers a phone. Mel Blanc ends the cartoon by borrowing from the song “Annie Doesn’t Live Here Any More” by Johnny Burke, Joe Young and Harold Spina.

This short appeared in the Sept. 1944 edition of the Army-Navy Screen Magazine.