I Don't Care What You Say

Here we have an eight-frame cycle of a camel chewing on, well, I’m not quite sure. Note the spacing of the drawings. There seems to be barely any movement at one point.



This is the cycle slowed down, which gives you an idea of how the mouth moved.



Yeah, I know. Not the post interesting of posts, unless you are into timing of poses and in-betweens. The director is Friz Freleng, and the cartoon is Hot Spot, a 1945 Snafu short. The gag is an example of how everyone borrowed from Tex Avery. In fact, the short is like an Avery travelogue in places.

In this scene, the narrator (the Devil, played by Hal Peary, complete with Gildersleeve laugh), informs us “Here, the native beast of burden, the camel, is the only one who doesn’t mind the heat.” After chewing a bit, the camel (Mel Blanc) turns to the viewing audience and says “I don’t care what you say, I’m hot,” and resumes chewing.



Say, that gag is familiar, isn’t it? Let’s think back to Avery’s Wacky Wildlife (1940), where a camel is strolling across the desert. Narrator Bob Bruce informs us the camel “plods over scorching desert sands, in terrific heat, never once desiring a cool, refreshing drink of water. The camel (Mel Blanc) turns to the viewing audience and says “I don’t care what you say, I’m thirsty,” and resumes strolling.



Say, that gag is STILL familiar. That’s because Avery used a variation of it earlier in the year in Cross Country Detours. In this one, a polar bear is shown on a chunk of ice. “Mother Nature has provided him with layer upon layer of fat, plus a thick coat of heavy fur, to keep him good and warm,” says the narrator. The camera moves in and the bear (Mel Blanc) tells us “I don’t care what you say, I’m cold.”



Is it any wonder that Avery came up with the idea of footage of real animals with superimposed cartoon mouths that made wisecracks. The idea ended up at Jerry Fairbanks Productions, which made the Speaking of Animals series for Paramount. If the “I don’t care what you say” routine was one of the gags in those shorts, I don’t know, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

What about the end gag of Hot Spot, you ask? Thanks for reminding me. The short has emphasized how hot it is in Iran, hotter 'n Hades as they used to say. The short finishes with the Devil discovering the camel is now in his office in Hell. The camel turns to him and casually remarks, “I don’t care what you say, I’m cool.” It resumes chewing to end the cartoon.



None of the artists who worked on this are given screen credit.

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.

Snafu Will Snore But It Isn't a Bore (For the Male Audience)

A sex gag starts off The Goldbrick (1944). Private Snafu is snoring.



The camera pulls back to show the effect of the snoring on a pin-up.



Like many of the Snafus, the dialogue is in a Seuss-like rhyme. We even get a Seuss-like incidental character flying out of an apple tree. (An apple tree? In the South Pacific?)



The cheescake is courtesy of director Frank Tashlin. This appeared in the Army-Navy Screen Magazine in September 1943.

Stretched Spies

There are some fun visuals you can see in the Chuck Jones-directed Snafu short Spies (1943), but here’s one where you have to freeze the frames.

It’s another one of those stretch in-between scenes that Bobe Cannon specialised in. A few spies come out of their hiding places to repeat a line in the rhyming verse (by Dr. Seuss, I suspect), and then disappear.

Carl Stalling tosses Raymond Scott’s “Powerhouse” into the soundtrack, and the familiar “horse’s ass” music ends it all.

Home Front Opening

Pan shot from Home Front, a 1944 Snafu cartoon directed by Frank Tashlin.



The camera stops at the record player for a few song lyrics, then carries on to Private Snafu, who is freezing his butt but steaming about the soft life of the folks back home while he’s fighting a war. Naturally, this “soft life” is a product of Snafu’s imagination, as Technical Fairy First Class shows him on a television set that he materialises.

This not-for-the-home-audience short has a horse spreading its own manure and ends with the fairy kissing Snafu. The idea of a room full of young men who sleep together in the same barracks laughing at male-male kissing is an interesting one.

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.

That Duck!

A Nazi comes across a limp-wristed mouse in the Snafu cartoon Fighting Tools (1943).

The mouse drops to the ground, holding his nose. But wait a minute! What’s coming out of that cannon?

Could that be Daffy Duck? Or is director Bob Clampett just re-using Daffy’s design?

I say the latter, but there are fans who insist that if it looks like a character, it must be the same character (eg. a skunk in an Art Davis must be Pepe Le Pew even though it doesn’t act like him in the slightest).

Since this is a Clampett cartoon, there has to be a pop culture reference. One of the ducklings flies back and says “Rallly they are” like Kate Hepburn before zipping out of the cartoon.

The cartoon ends with Snafu captured naked and becoming a horse’s rear end, with music to match.

Annie Round the World

Chuck Jones very capably uses a variety of limited animation techniques in the Private Snafu short It's Murder She Says... (1945).

Here are four static drawings of malaria-carrying Anopheles Annie that appear in the cartoon. They’re used several times. The first time, lettering zooms into place on each of them. The second and third times, the camera cuts into them closer and closer as Carl Stalling’s music gets more and more dramatic.

As you can see, Jones is using the short to try out stylisation, much like he did in The Point Rationing of Foods (1943).

Just don’t call it “Illustrated Radio.”

Triggered by a Butt

Snafu can’t get his fat butt past the censor’s infra-red ray in the 1944 cartoon Censored.



Frank Tashlin’s a real master of direction in this. There are lighting effects and perspective animation. Oh, and a leggy woman in lingerie. However, back to Snafu. He realises he’s caught and tries to escape.



Snafu is stopped in every direction by a wall of bars which create a cage, taking him back to the censor who tears up his letter.



I haven’t any idea who is responsible for these scenes, but Art Davis, Izzy Ellis and Cal Dalton were in the Tashlin unit, along with George Cannata for a brief time.