Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at
https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=chjf20
Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television
ISSN: 0143-9685 (Print) 1465-3451 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/chjf20
Technical fairy first class? Is this any way to Run an
Army?: Private Snafu and World War Ii
Michael Birdwell
To cite this article: Michael Birdwell (2005) Technical fairy first class? Is this any way to Run an
Army?: Private Snafu and World War Ii, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 25:2,
203-212, DOI: 10.1080/01439680500137953
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/01439680500137953
Published online: 22 Jan 2007.
Submit your article to this journal
Article views: 309
View related articles
Citing articles: 2 View citing articles
Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television
Vol. 25, No. 2 June 2005, pp. 203–212
TECHNICAL FAIRY FIRST CLASS?
IS THIS ANY WAY TO RUN AN ARMY?:
PRIVATE SNAFU AND WORLD WAR II
Michael Birdwell
After the United States declared war on the Axis Powers in December 1941, the US
Armed Services faced a series of strategic problems from service and supply to the
difficulties inherent in fighting a two-front war. Thousands of eager young men joined
the military out of a heightened sense of patriotic duty after the bombing of Pearl
Harbor, and thousands more dutifully responded to the draft, but the rapid swelling of
the ranks of the American armed forces created its own distinctive set of problems.
Many career military men spoiled for a fight and did not want the responsibility of
training green recruits. Enlistees and conscripts had to be transformed into soldiers,
and taught how to act as a unit. Army bases across the nation faced an awesome task
and needed help in that undertaking. At the urging of General George C. Marshall,
the military looked to Hollywood for help. A number of film directors, producers,
and writers were solicited to join the army and use their unique talents to promote
the war effort, among them Major Jack Warner, Lieutenant Colonel Darryl Zanuck,
Captain John Ford, Captain John Huston and Major Frank Capra. Eventually 7000
Hollywood employees wore their country’s uniform, working in capacities from
propaganda to combat.1
Though training films played an invaluable role in teaching
young men how to save their own necks, those films often proved tedious. As a result,
Private Snafu, the cartoon antithesis of Bill Mauldin’s seasoned dog faces Willie and
Joe, made a substantial contribution to the war effort.2
Snafu died—again, and again
and again—so that many GIs might live. No Christ figure in the usual sense, Snafu
represented a potential threat inherent in the average GI, if he were not vigilant and
did not play by the rules. Through the use of humor and the outrageous situations
Correspondence: Michael E. Birdwell, Department of History, P.O. Box 5064, Tennessee
Technological University, Cookeville, TN 38505, USA. E-mail: birdie@tntech.edu
ISSN 0143-9685 (print)/ISSN 1465-3451 (online)/05/02000203–10 ß 2005 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/01439680500137953
afforded by animation, the misadventures of Private Snafu made a lasting impression
on the average soldier.
At the war’s outset, a special service was established—the Office of War
Information (OWI) under journalist Elmer Davis with its own film branch, the Bureau
of Motion Pictures (BMP) under friends and fellow journalists Lowell Mellett and
Nelson Poynter.3
Initially, the War Department intended for training films and
propaganda to be produced by the Signal Corps’s Army Pictorial Service which had a
huge trove of audio-visual material collected throughout the 1930s.4
General George
C. Marshall placed Darryl Zanuck in charge of producing training films to be used in
conjunction with military field operations. In February 1942, Zanuck ordered Major
Frank Capra to make a series of documentaries explaining what the war was all about
and what was at stake. In that capacity, Capra assembled the famous Why We Fight
series, and some considered so relevant that they were exhibited for civilians as well.5
Few films targeted at soldiers, however, were ever seen by civilians, including the
Private Snafu cartoons.6
The creation of training films called for close cooperation between the military,
Washington and Hollywood. Instructional films were to be simple, didactic, and
straightforward with as little Hollywood glitz as possible. Because their purpose was
usually specific, the average training film lacked the punch of the Why We Fight series.
Films in that series purposely played on the audience’s emotions, dramatically
contrasting the totalitarian ideology of the Axis Powers against American democratic
values. Because of their limited scope and production values, however, training films
were about as subtle as a sledgehammer to the chest and as entertaining as watching
paint dry. These ‘nuts-and-bolts’ films included such scintillating titles as The Operation
of the Quartermaster Mobile Laundry, Pots to Planes, and Let’s Share and Play Square.7
In spite of the fact that these films were made on a bare bones budget with no
frills, and the number of feet of celluloid used to shoot the training films was fixed,8
criticism of the films came from a number of quarters. Career soldiers often regarded
them as laughable or inaccurate; recruits found them boring.9
As Stefan Kanfer noted,
‘Unfortunately official training films made by some of Hollywood’s top directors and
actors . . . failed to impress the troops . . . Those who stayed awake greeted the movies
with catcalls and Bronx cheers.’10
Worse yet, Senator Harry S. Truman of Missouri
lambasted the training films as a grand boondoggle cooked up by the money-hungry
moguls in Hollywood. Truman launched a senate investigation of the training films
and the companies responsible for their production.11
Darryl Zanuck, who had
testified before another Senate investigation of Hollywood in 1941, again sat in front
of a group of unfriendly senators in Washington.12
Zanuck, whose rank of Colonel
was criticized by the committee, staunchly defended the training film program and his
own patriotism.13
Washington watchdogs questioned the use of Hollywood studios to
produce wartime propaganda, when the Signal Corps had its own film facilities in
Astoria, New York, Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, and Wright Field, Ohio. The army
finally weighed in on the debate, defended Colonel Zanuck and his cadre, saying that
Hollywood made a better product cheaper.14
The hearings resulted in formal
contracts between Hollywood and the US military, while adding another layer of
bureaucracy that slowed down production.15
Once allowed to do their work, filmmakers did their best to make the mindnumbingly
boring exciting. Musical scores played beneath images of soldiers dutifully
204 H I S T O R I C A L J O U R N A L O F F I L M , R A D I O A N D T E L E V I S I O N
swabbing cosmoline out of the barrels of new weapons. Clever voiceovers injected
bits of humor into stentorian narration that explained such things as K.P. or Guard
Duty. Yet, such attempts to breathe life into the training films initially met stern
resistance. Lieutenant William Exton, Jr, spoke for many in the Signal Corps,
saying that such Hollywood additions were, ‘a gross abuse of the principle of a
training film. A training film should be regarded as a textbook. . . There is no
obligation on the part of a textbook to be amusing or ingratiating.’ Thus, the Signal
Corps demanded dry pedantic films destined to cure insomnia.16
In the midst of the flap over what the purpose of training films were to be and
how they were to be executed, Colonel Zanuck and company looked for better ways
of getting the needed message across. If soldiers could learn and also enjoy what was
being taught, the films would be more successful. In 1943, Frank Capra proposed the
Army–Navy Screen Magazine a live-action counterpart to Stars and Stripes or Yank
magazine, a 20-minute variety piece that would be produced twice a month. The
series combined training, newsreels, propaganda, and entertainment, using the best
talents available to write, edit, and produce them,17
for by 1943 more and more
soldiers who wore the olive drab found training an unwelcome impediment standing
between them and fighting. The maddening bureaucracy of the military and its
seemingly Byzantine machinations, which Paul Fussell so delicately called ‘Chicken
Shit,’ annoyed citizen soldiers. To make training relevant and timely while preparing
soldiers for battle created an ever-frustrating problem.18
The Signal Corps’s film division moved its operations to the old Fox studio in
Hollywood, locally referred to as ‘Fort Fox,’ and set to work on Capra’s next series of
films Know Your Enemy, while churning out more nuts-and-bolts films, and the new
Army–Navy Screen Magazine. The magazine, essentially an infotainment variety show,
was produced exclusively for American men in uniform. Because of its special nature,
and the fact that the magazine’s installments were not to be shown in public theatres,
Zanuck and Capra were able to keep them away from the Motion Picture industry’s
censorship arm, the Production Code Administration (PCA). Liberated from the
prying, prudish eyes of Joseph Breen’s PCA, the Army–Navy Screen Magazine could
speak frankly to its robust audience that was ‘primarily male, primarily Christian,
predominantly white, and significantly disgruntled.’19
Film had been little used in the
classroom prior to World War II and the filmmakers and the military were charting
new territory, learning as they went along. Now the use of film and video in
classrooms is common.20
Somewhere in the midst of all of this, veteran animator Chuck Jones noted, ‘By
some miracle the army got one thing right very early in the war. Some genius—it may
have been Frank Capra . . . had the inspiration to try something different: animation.’21
Animation had been introduced into some live action training, especially regarding
maps. Animated maps graphically depicted cartographic terms, and helped recruits
visualize terrain, troop movements, and reconnaissance. Animation had also been used
in the film Enemy Bacteria to explain the transmission of disease and the need for good
personal hygiene.22
In 1943, Frank Capra approached animators at Warner Bros., asking them to help
liven up training films. He posed a straightforward question: ‘Could the animators at
the Termite Terrace create cartoons with situations and lessons that would be more
successful than the traditional hour-long training film?’23
Leon Schlesinger, producer
P R I V A T E S N A F U A N D W O R L D W A R I I 205
of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, put together a team of some of his best
animators and writers to tackle the challenge.24
There were five units assembled, and
each produced cartoons with a distinctive style and feel. Leading those five teams
were Fred ‘Tex’ Avery, Isidore ‘Friz’ Freleng, Frank Tashlin, Bob Clampett, and
Chuck Jones. Vocalizations for the character created by Avery were provided by Mel
Blanc and the music was scored by Warner Bros. resident genius composer Carl
Stalling.25
The man placed in charge of the output of the five units and the general
scenarist was Theodor Geisel, already better known by his nom de plume Dr. Seuss.26
Knowing that the general public would never see the cartoons allowed the animators
to experiment and shatter taboos.27
Reveling in the freedom afforded since the PCA could not censor his cartoons,
Geisel used the Army, its bureaucracy, and its language for inspiration. With the help
of Tex Avery, Bob Clampett and Chuck Jones, model sheets of the relatively new
character Elmer Fudd were altered to create the biggest gold brick and worst soldier
in the Army—Private Snafu. The name was taken from an army acronym that every
soldier immediately identified: ‘Situation Normal, All Fucked Up.’ Later, Snafu
introduced audiences to his brother Fubar, another acronym meaning: ‘Fucked Up
Beyond All Recognition.’28
Between 1943 and 1945 Warner Bros. produced and
distributed 26 installments in the Private Snafu saga. Several more were completed or
underway when the war ended, some of which were completed except for
photography, and were never released.29
As Thomas Schatz observed, ‘the Private
Snafu cartoons gave Hollywood animators the opportunity to experiment with
political, sexual, and topical humor,’ allowing them to chart new territory and play a
role in the eventual destruction of the production code.30
Conceived and executed under severe financial restraints, the Private Snafu films
were shot in black and white and churned out at the cost of roughly $2,500 per
cartoon. In some cases, cells from cartoons were re-used in later episodes regardless
of who animated the original. Private Snafu proved true to his name. If something
could be done incorrectly, he was the man for the job. Snafu daydreamed; shot his
own comrades; spouted secrets to the enemy; and consistently fell in lust with the
wrong woman.31
The best cartoons—Gripes, Spies, The Goldbrick, Booby Traps, Rumors,
and Gas—benefit from their Seussiness in both use of language and imagery. While
often lacking the subtlety or cleverness of regular Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies,
Snafu cartoons lacked the luxury of the 7-minute format.
First introduced in Coming Snafu (1943) the all male audience was given a glimpse
of what to expect from their animated zero. The narrator says that men like him exist
in all the branches of service and that Snafu is ‘a real deep thinker.’ The camera then
follows Snafu behind the wheel of a tractor, hauling a plane to a hangar but oblivious
to what is going on around him. He sings as he drives:
There’s a burlesque theatre
Where the boys like Joan
And she is the Queenie of the burlesque show
And the band plays a polka while she strips
Take it off
Take it off
And she strips and she strips
206 H I S T O R I C A L J O U R N A L O F F I L M , R A D I O A N D T E L E V I S I O N
Down in front
Down in front
Soon it’s all you can hear
And she’s always a lady . . .
Snafu clearly has an orgasm as he imagines the stripper and in the process he has
destroyed the plane by the time he gets to the hangar.32
In Booby Traps (1944), Snafu enters a seraglio in the African desert filled with
alluring female mannequins of ill fame and worse intentions. One scantily clad
woman, as the title implies, has breasts that are rigged to explode. The fact that the
women are not real does not deter the horny Snafu. He gropes, drools, and swoons
over them. True to his name, Snafu is inept when it comes to removing the bra from
one of the mannequins, adding to the humor and anxiety of his audience. Trying to
woo the unmoving vixens, Snafu tries to play a piano rigged to explode when the right
key is struck, but he cannot even do that right. Mixing sexuality, ineptitude, lack of
attention to detail, and clever narration in Dr. Seuss’s inimitable style, Booby Traps was
a favorite of American troops.33
In Spies, Snafu tells the audience: ‘I just learned a secret. It’s a honey; it’s a pip.
But the enemy is listening, so I’ll never let it slip.’ As he heads into town on leave, he
tells everyone he meets some delicate piece of information. Unbeknownst to the
oblivious blockhead, spies are everywhere, in baby carriages, phone booths, and
Mussolini, Goring, and Tojo eavesdrop on him at a newsstand. Snafu proceeds to get
gloriously drunk in a bar with two Seussish Mooses who turn to talk to each other;
their antlers make a swastika. The inebriated soldier chats up a gorgeous dame in the
bar who types his secret on a tiny typewriter beneath the table, handing it to a pigeon
on her hat that takes it to Hitler. Snafu winds up in bed with the spy, talking into her
ample bosom, which has two radio transmitters in her D-cups. Hitler hears their
shouts: Calling all Wolf Packs, Calling all Wolf Packs. Snafu’s ship is destroyed and he
goes to hell where he meets Hitler and wonders who let the secrets slip. Hitler laughs
and says, ‘Why you, my little wiener schnitzel.’34
Suffering from terminal laziness, Snafu fancies himself a great warrior in Fighting
Tools. He lies, daydreaming in his pup tent, singing of his heroism:’ Oh, I’ll be the
war’s greatest hero. With these guns I have nothing to fear-o. Oh, I’m the world’s best
fighting machine-o. Them Natzies will learn what I mean-o. With my wonderful guns,
we’ll murder them bums and bury them in the latrine-o.’ Meanwhile, a huge German
with a potato-masher grenade stalks the goldbricking Snafu. Upon hearing him, Snafu
pulls his rifle from the mud, sticks it in the German’s bottom, saying: ‘Stick ‘em up or
I’ll blow your brains out.’ The German turns around, yells ‘Kamerade!’ until he
notices that Snafu’s weapon is in a terrible state of repair. He tells Snafu, ‘Your rifle, it
appears down-right gooey. If you think I’m afraid of it, you’re quite screwy.’ He bares
his chest, daring Snafu to shoot. Snafu pulls the trigger and a stream of mud oozes out
accompanied by the sounds of an extended fart. By cartoon’s end, Snafu’s weapons
have been rendered useless by his own indifference and he is naked in a German POW
camp.35
Snafu’s leisure time is often found unofficially on the army’s time to the military’s
detriment. He wants to sleep during combat and get laid when on leave. When on
leave, he searches for those things destined to cause trouble: gambling, alcohol, and
P R I V A T E S N A F U A N D W O R L D W A R I I 207
women and blabbing everything he knows with no sense of responsibility to his unit or
his nation.36
Snafu boasts of heroism but revels in cowardice. Orders, he argues, apply
to everyone except him. He eats more than his share in Chow Hound and wastes food
meant for other GIs. Snafu often says ‘Hell,’ ‘Damn,’ and other mild profanities.
Filled with barracks humor and catering to prurient interests, Private Snafu cartoons
were often scatological; in Rumors, Snafu could be seen sitting on the toilet noisily
taking a dump. In Gas, Snafu tardy for gas drill, reaches into his bag and pulls out a bra
instead of a gas mask. In a number of Snafu cartoons, especially Censored, Pay Day, and
A Lecture on Camouflage, full frontal images of naked women pop up in the background.
In The Goldbrick, Snafu lies comfortably in bed and his snores blow the skirt on the
Pin-up above his bed revealing her panties. Baring and scratching his hindquarters
while smiling at the audience on several occasions, Snafu shamelessly slept in the
nude—making his derriere the butt of jokes and the target for determined mosquitoes
in Target Snafu.37
While braving the cold in a Quonset hut in The Home Front (1945)
Snafu exclaims, ‘It’s so cold here, it’d freeze the nuts off a Jeep!’38
In The Infantry Blues
and other cartoons, Snafu blows up the wrong targets and finds himself blown to
smithereens as well. The not-so-subtle point is that every GI is a potential Snafu, and
if soldiers are not vigilant and team players, they will destroy the Republic.
One of the interesting things about the Snafu series is the fact that Mel Blanc
purposely used the voice of Bugs Bunny for Snafu. The result proved jarring for
audiences in wartime, for Bugs had been appropriated by the US Army and US Army
Air Corps as a symbol of America’s tenacity and can-do spirit. With Snafu, Blanc
turned audiences expectations on their head. They heard the familiar voice but it
belonged to an unfamiliar character. Snafu speaks with the same wise-cracking,
Brooklyn accent of Bugs but with none of the ‘rabbit’s alert intelligence or madcap
ingenuity.’39
Adding to the cognitive disconnect was the fact that animators, especially
Chuck Jones, would throw Bugs Bunny into the cartoon for a cameo providing a
dramatic contrast between the two characters with the same voice and essentially same
attitude.40
Significantly, the values the audience adored in Bugs Bunny, it rejected in
Snafu—individuality, smart-aleck remarks, and disrespect for authority.
To aid in keeping the prodigal Snafu in line, Geisel introduced a grizzled parody of
Disney’s Jiminy Cricket, the Technical Fairy First Class. Naked except for a pair of
baggy jockey shorts and droopy socks, with a cigar protruding from his unshaven mug,
the Technical Fairy First Class sounds like a frog in a blender. Acting as Snafu’s
embattled conscience, Technical Fairy First Class tries vainly to stop trouble before it
begins. Unfortunately, Snafu’s ability to blunder outshines any talent the Technical
Fairy has to prevent disaster. First introduced in the second Snafu cartoon, the
Technical Fairy First Class poofed onto screens in Gripes. Snafu, busily peeling a
mountain of potatoes, turns to the camera and says:
I joined this here army
To join in the fun
Of stabbing a Jap
And hunting the hun
And look at the job they handed to me:
KP
208 H I S T O R I C A L J O U R N A L O F F I L M , R A D I O A N D T E L E V I S I O N
KP
and KP
If I ran this army, boy I’m telling you
I’d make a few changes, that’s just what I’d do.41
Out of this dejected reverie the Technical Fairy First Class emerges, granting Snafu’s
wish to be rid of KP. ‘I got a good notion/To give you a chance pal, here’s a
promotion,’ announces the Technical Fairy First Class, and with a wave of his swagger
stick, adds stripes to Snafu’s arm, declaring, ‘You’re Master-Sarge-Super-Sargehoop-it-te-doo.
YOU’RE boss of the works, Now take over Snafu.’42
Turning the
whole army into slackers, Snafu gives the soldiers more time off, more pay, and two
girls each, and lets the men wear zoot suits, allowing the Germans invade the camp
because discipline has totally broken down.
Private Snafu and his Technical Fairy conscience were never intended for public
consumption outside the military. The cartoons, now available to scholars and cartoon
aficionados, offer an interesting glimpse into the propaganda produced by the US
military during World War II. Snafu represented a character the non-career soldiers
could relate to: someone speaking their language, understanding their situation, and
voicing their concerns. Although the films are humorous, they are also deadly serious.
Sometimes humor is the best device for dealing with unpleasant facts. They offered an
antidote to the tedious training films soldiers had foisted upon them, and they inform
about the values and expectations of the US during World War II. And for that reason,
if for no other, they are worthy of further scrutiny.
Private Snafu cartoons
Coming Snafu (June 1943) Chuck Jones
Gripes (July 1943) Friz Freleng
Spies (August 1943) Chuck Jones
The Goldbrick (September 1943) Frank Tashlin
The Infantry Blues (September 1943) Chuck Jones
Fighting Tools (October 1943) Bob Clampett
The Home Front (November 1943) Frank Tashlin
Rumors (December 1943) Friz Freleng
Booby Traps (January 1944) Bob Clampett
Snafuperman (March 1944) Friz Freleng
Private Snafu Vs. Malaria Mike (March 1944)
A Lecture on Camouflage (April 1944) Chuck Jones
Gas (May 1944) Chuck Jones
The Chow Hound (June 1944) Frank Tashlin
Censored (July 1944) Frank Tashlin
Outpost (August 1944) Chuck Jones
Pay Day (September 1944) Friz Freleng
Target Snafu (October 1944) Friz Freleng
The Three Brothers September 1944) Friz Freleng
In the Aleutians (February 1945) Chuck Jones
P R I V A T E S N A F U A N D W O R L D W A R I I 209
It’s Murder She Says (May 1945) Chuck Jones
Hot Spot (July 1945) Friz Freleng
Operation Snafu (October 1945) Friz Freleng
No Buddy Atoll (October 1945) Chuck Jones
Coming Home (November 1945) Chuck Jones
Secrets of the Caribbean (November 1945) Chuck Jones
Notes
1 Thomas Doherty, Projections of War: Hollywood, American culture and World War II
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 60. Many stars gave up acting for
combat, including James Stewart, David Niven, Van Johnson, Robert Cummings,
Henry Fonda, and many more. The Selective Service announced that motion picture
production was vital to the war effort, and that people working in the industry
could seek exemptions from the draft. The Screen Actors Guild responded by
saying that Hollywood did not want special treatment.
2 Bill Mauldin, a cartoonist for Stars and Stripes, identified with the average GI and his
characters are enduring legacy from World War II. They have recently been
republished by WW Norton in a new edition of his book Up Front.
3 The OWI and BMP often competed with each other, unnecessarily duplicated
materials, and conducted their own internecine battles throughout the war. For
more about the OWI and BMP, see Clayton Koppes and Gregory Black, Hollywood
Goes to War: how politics, profits and propaganda shaped World War II movies (Berkeley,
1987), pp. 47–112.
4 Frank Capra, The Name Above the Title: an autobiography (New York: Macmillan,
1971), p. 332. Capra clearly did not like his counterparts in the Signal Corps
and hated army bureaucracy; in fact, he considered some of them outright stupid.
He delighted in the fact that the Signal Corps had amassed a huge library of Nazi and
Japanese propaganda films but had not exploited them to full advantage.
5 The films were: Prelude to War, The Nazis Strike, Divide and Conquer, Battle of Britain,
Battle of Russia, Battle of China, and War Comes to America.
6 Among the training films seen by the general public were Safeguarding Military Secrets
(1942) and Wings Up, which featured Clark Gable as he made his transition from
screen hero to soldier.
7 Doherty, Projections of War, pp. 63, 67.
8 Richard Lingeman, Don’t You Know There’s A War On?: the American homefront
1941–1945 (New York: Putnam, 1970), pp. 183–185.
9 Judith and Neal Morgan, Dr. Seuss and Mr. Geisel (New York: Random House, 1995),
p. 109.
10 Stefan Kanfer, Serious Business: the art and commerce of animation in America from Betty
Boop to Toy Story (New York: Scribner, 1997), p. 137.
11 Doherty, Projections of War, pp. 63–64. For a detailed discussion of the Truman
Committee, see David McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1992), pp. 256–291 and George F. Custen, Twentieth Century’s Fox: Darryl F. Zanuck
and the culture of Hollywood (New York: Basic Books, 1997), pp. 261–265. Truman’s
investigation struck many as disingenuous and spiteful.
12 Senators Bennett Champ Clark of Missouri and Gerald P. Nye of Nebraska oversaw
an investigation of Hollywood in August 1941, which had accused filmmakers
210 H I S T O R I C A L J O U R N A L O F F I L M , R A D I O A N D T E L E V I S I O N
of premature anti-fascist propaganda. The hearings were disrupted by Pearl
Harbor and the self-same Washington that pointed a disparaging finger at
Hollywood turned and asked for its help. Truman’s call for new hearings seemed
uncalled for and ill conceived. For more on the Clark-Nye hearings, see Michael
Birdwell, Celluloid Soldiers: Warner Bros. campaign against Nazism (New York, 1998),
p. 154–171.
13 Senators accused Zanuck of favoring his own studio 20th Century-Fox over other
studios which was tantamount to war profiteering and treason. Zanuck retired from
active duty in 1943 due to perceptions of conflict of interest, for Zanuck remained
head of 20th Century-Fox while overseeing the military’s film unit.
14 Doherty, Projections of War, p. 64.
15 McCullough, Truman, pp. 289–291; Custen, Twentieth Century’s Fox, pp. 263–265.
16 That policy changed over the course of the war as the Signal Corps came to realize
that drama and emotion helped get the point across. One film that proved especially
memorable was John Ford’s Sex Hygiene short which featured a love story between a
GI and a girl of questionable virtue. Ford enhanced the film with images of men and
women infested with chancre sores, hideously deformed genitalia, and other ravages
of sexually transmitted diseases.
17 Capra, Name Above the Title, pp. 339–340; Eric Smoodin, Animating Culture: Hollywood
cartoons from the sound era (New Brunswick, 1993), p. 71.
18 Paul Fussell, Wartime (New York: Oxford, 1989), p. 79–95; Frank Mathias,
GI Jive (Lexington, 1982), pp. 2–31.
19 Smoodin, Animating Culture, p. 79.
20 Lingeman, Don’t You Know There’s a War on, p. 197.
21 Quoted in Kanfer, Serious Business, p. 137.
22 Animators found themselves drafted into service, undergoing ‘perfunctory basic
training and then sent to Hal Roach Studio in Hollywood,’ a place they referred
to as ‘Fort Roach’. Animators who worked there referred to themselves as the
‘Foreskin Fusiliers’. See Kanfer, p. 137.
23 Because of limitations of filmstock available, animators worked under even more
strenuous conditions than usual. Traditionally, cartoons ran seven minutes. The
Signal Corps wanted the cartoons for the Army–Navy Magazine to come in at
3 minutes in length.
24 Army Chicken Shit affected the Termite Terrace as well. When Schlesinger got the
contract to produce the Private Snafu films, his animators, writers, inkers,
in-betweeners, and anyone who worked on them had to be fingerprinted,
pass background checks, and wear identification badges when on the lot. See
Karl F. Cohen, Forbidden Animation: censored cartoons and blacklisted animators in America
(Jefferson, North Carolina, 1997), p. 40.
25 Jerry Beck and Will Friedwald, Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies: a complete illustrated
guide to the Warner Bros. cartoons (New York, 1989), p. 379.
26 Judith and Neil Morgan, Dr. Seuss, p. 109. Geisel and Chuck Jones became
lifelong friends as a result of their association on the Snafu films and Jones later
adapted the classic How the Grinch Stole Christmas for television. Geisel was already
known to the public as Dr. Seuss through his political cartoons in PM magazine,
which have the same zaniness as his later children’s books. See Richard H. Minear,
Dr. Seuss Goes to War: the World War II editorial cartoons of Theodor Seuss Geisel
(New York, 1999).
P R I V A T E S N A F U A N D W O R L D W A R I I 211
27 The general public learned about Private Snafu in a book assembled by the Editors
of Look magazine in 1945. See From Movie Lot to Beachhead: the motion picture goes to
war and prepares for the future (Garden City, New York, 1945), pp. 41, 56–57.
28 Chuck Jones, Chuck Reducks: drawings from the fun side of life (New York, 1996),
p. 263; Mel Blanc and Philip Bashe, That’s Not All Folks: my life in the golden age of
cartoons and radio (New York, 1988), p. 192.
29 Kanfer, Serious Business, p. 138; Beck and Friedwald, Serious Business, p. 379.
30 Thomas Schatz, Boom and Bust: American cinema in the 1940s, Vol. 6 in the History of
the American Cinema series (Berkeley, 1997), p. 223.
31 Blanc and Bashe, That’s Not All Folk’s, p. 194.
32 The Complete Uncensored Private Snafu: cartoons from World War II (Chatsworth,
California: Bosko Video, Image Entertainment, Inc., 1990), hereafter The Complete
Uncensored Private Snafu. Snafu’s body goes from rigid and erect to soft and pliable as
he climaxes visualizing the stripper’s bare body.
33 The Complete Uncensored Snafu.
34 Ibid. The crew at Fort Fox awarded Geisel and Jones with its own version of the
Academy Award for best cartoon for Spies—a statue of Snafu. See Judith and
Neil Morgan, p. 110.
35 Ibid.
36 Snafu has disastrous run-ins with women in Spies, Censored, Pay Day, and
Operation Snafu. Gambling reduces Snafu to poverty in Pay Day and In the
Aleutians. Over-consumption of alcohol abounds in the films.
37 Ass jokes abound in the Snafu cartoons. His rump gets him in trouble in The
Goldbrick, Censored, Malaria Mike, The Chow Hound, and several other cartoons.
38 The Complete Uncensored Private Snafu; Smoodin, Animating Culture, p. 92; Blanc and
Bashe, p. 194.
39 Doherty, Projections of War, p. 67; Smoodin, Animating Culture, p. 85.
40 Bugs Bunny makes a fascinating appearance in Gas, for example.
41 The Complete Uncensored Private Snafu.
42 Ibid.
Michael E. Birdwell is Associate Professor of History at Tennessee Technological
University. He has published widely on animation history and is working on a series of essays
on Warner Bros. Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons. He is the Business and Industry
section editor for the upcoming Encyclopedia of Appalachia. His is the curator and archivist of
Sergeant Alvin C. York’s papers and is working on a biography of York’s life.
212 H I S T O R I C A L J O U R N A L O F F I L M , R A D I O A N D T E L E V I S I O N