Frank (comics)

Pri­vate SNAFU Cen­sored 1944 US Army Train­ing Car­toon, Mel Blanc, Frank Tash­lin

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• pub­lished: 18 Mar 2014
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more at http://​quickfound.​net/​links/​military_​news_​and_​links.html Pri­vate Snafu learns he should watch what he writes in let­ters to home. "Orig­i­nal­ly cre­at­ed by Theodore Geisel (Dr. Seuss) and Phil East­man, most of the car­toons were pro­duced by Warn­er Broth­ers An­i­ma­tion Stu­dios - em­ploy­ing their an­i­ma­tors, voice ac­tors (pri­mar­i­ly Mel Blanc) and Carl Stalling's music." Pub­lic do­main film from the US Na­tion­al Archives slight­ly cropped to re­move un­even edges, with the as­pect ratio cor­rect­ed, and mild video noise re­duc­tion ap­plied. The sound­track was also pro­cessed with vol­ume nor­mal­iza­tion, noise re­duc­tion, clip­ping re­duc­tion, and/or equal­iza­tion (the re­sult­ing sound, though not per­fect, is far less noisy than the orig­i­nal). more Pri­vate Snafu: Booby Traps: https://​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?​v=-PbDa-NlX9A The Home Front http://​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?​v=vGmIhhMi8cg Spies http://​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?​v=WJn_​aB4FjpI Sna­fu­per­man http://​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?​v=Op6-V5x8XHQ Fight­ing Tools: https://​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?​v=kRyUAUl2q5M Ru­mors: https://​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?​v=rEdboFx1mK8 http://​creativecommons.​org/​licenses/​by-sa/​3.0/ http://​en.​wikipedia.​org/​wiki/​Private_​Snafu Pri­vate Snafu is the title char­ac­ter of a se­ries of black-and-white Amer­i­can in­struc­tion­al car­toon shorts pro­duced be­tween 1943 and 1945 dur­ing World War II. The char­ac­ter was cre­at­ed by di­rec­tor Frank Capra, chair­man of the U.S. Army Air Force First Mo­tion Pic­ture Unit, and most were writ­ten by Theodor "Dr. Seuss" Geisel, Philip D. East­man, and Munro Leaf. Al­though the Unit­ed States Army gave Walt Dis­ney the first crack at cre­at­ing the car­toons, Leon Schlesinger of the Warn­er Bros. an­i­ma­tion stu­dio un­der­bid Dis­ney by two-thirds and won the con­tract. Dis­ney had also de­mand­ed ex­clu­sive own­er­ship of the char­ac­ter, and mer­chan­dis­ing rights. Nel (2007) shows the goal was to help en­list­ed men with weak lit­er­a­cy skills learn through an­i­mat­ed car­toons (and also sup­ple­men­tary comic books). They fea­tured sim­ple lan­guage, racy il­lus­tra­tions, no pro­fan­i­ty, and sub­tle mor­al­iz­ing. Pri­vate Snafu did ev­ery­thing wrong, so that his neg­a­tive ex­am­ple taught basic lessons about se­cre­cy, dis­ease pre­ven­tion, and prop­er mil­i­tary pro­to­cols. Pri­vate Snafu car­toons were a mil­i­tary se­cret—for the armed forces only. Sur­veys to as­cer­tain the sol­diers' film fa­vorites showed that the Snafu car­toons usu­al­ly rated high­est or sec­ond high­est. Each car­toon was pro­duced in six weeks, com­pared to the six months usu­al­ly taken for short car­toons of the same kind... Most of the Pri­vate Snafu shorts are ed­u­ca­tion­al, and al­though the War De­part­ment had to ap­prove the sto­ry­boards, the Warn­er di­rec­tors were al­lowed great lat­i­tude in order to keep the car­toons en­ter­tain­ing... The Snafu shorts are no­table be­cause they were pro­duced dur­ing the Gold­en Age of Warn­er Bros. an­i­ma­tion. Di­rec­tors such as Chuck Jones, Friz Fre­leng, Bob Clam­pett, and Frank Tash­lin worked on them, and their char­ac­ter­is­tic styles are in top form. P. D. East­man was a writ­er and sto­ry­board artist for the Snafu shorts. Voice char­ac­ter­i­za­tions were pro­vid­ed by the cel­e­brat­ed Mel Blanc (Pri­vate Snafu's voice was sim­i­lar to Blanc's Bugs Bunny char­ac­ter­i­za­tion, and Bugs him­self ac­tu­al­ly made cameos in the Snafu episodes Gas and Three Broth­ers). To­ward the end of the war, other stu­dios began pro­duc­ing Snafu shorts as well (the Army ac­cused Schlesinger of padding his bills), though some of these never made it to cel­lu­loid be­fore the war ended. The Snafu films are also part­ly re­spon­si­ble for keep­ing the an­i­ma­tion stu­dios open dur­ing the war—by pro­duc­ing such train­ing films, the stu­dios were de­clared an es­sen­tial in­dus­try. After the war, the Snafu car­toons went large­ly for­got­ten. Prints even­tu­al­ly wound up in the hands of col­lec­tors, and these form the basis for The Com­plete, Un­cen­sored Pri­vate Snafu, a VHS and DVD col­lec­tion from Bosko Video...