Snafu's attitude and behavior run a narrow gamut, from silly and careless to irresponsible and incompetent. His films, on the other hand, are none of those things. When they premiered during World War II they served the serious purpose of educating, encouraging, and entertaining the draftees and recruits who saw them. Supervised by Frank Capra and directed by such gifted animators as Chuck Jones and Frank Tashlin, the Snafu cartoons wove information and propaganda into tight, amusing packages. Watching them 70 years later is an enlightening and sometimes surprising experience.
Capra was a superstar filmmaker when the Second World War broke out, with three Academy Awards for Best Director and two for Best Picture - It Happened One Night (1934) and You Can't Take It with You (1938) took both prizes - plus a sizable list of additional Oscar nominations and box-office hits. During the war he chaired the U.S. Army Air Force First Motion Picture Unit, the collection of writers, actors, and other film-industry personnel whose most famous production was Why We Fight, a series of seven documentaries meant to teach soldiers the reasons for the sacrifices they were called on to make. Capra's reputation for agreeable entertainment with a populist touch made him an ideal director to oversee the films, which were shown initially to soldiers and subsequently (in some cases) to the public.
The documentaries in the Why We Fight series contained animated maps and graphics produced by the Walt Disney studio, which was as renowned as Capra by the early 1940s, and Disney contributed further to the wartime propaganda effort with Donald Gets Drafted (1942) and other cartoons. Cleverly made animations appeal to enormous audiences across boundaries of age, geography, background, and education, and Capra realized that they had particular value as teaching aids and morale boosters for soldiers, many of whom were poorly educated and naïve about the world. He approached Disney about making a cartoon series for army use, but Disney's demands were too high, so the project went to Termite Terrace, the Warner Bros. animation studio founded by producer Leon Schlesinger and celebrated for the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons. This explains why Bugs Bunny and Tweetie Pie do quick guest shots in some Private Snafu pictures.
Like every Snafu film, Coming!! Snafu benefits from a terrific talent lineup. It was directed by Chuck Jones, whose countless accomplishments include the creation of the much-loved Road Runner cartoons. The screenplay is by Phil Eastman and the great Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, the author of many universally renowned children's books. The music is by Carl W. Stalling, whose sprightly compositions had been energizing Warner cartoons since 1930. And last but hardly least, Snafu's voice comes from the inimitable Mel Blanc, whose versatile vocal cords enhance more than a thousand Warner animations beginning with Picador Porky in 1937. A more illustrious roster would be impossible to find.
Few acronyms from World War II have survived longer than SNAFU, which - in its milder version - stands for Situation Normal, All Fouled Up, a common lament among soldiers frustrated by the bureaucratic rigmarole and seemingly arbitrary rules that can muddle military life in wartime. Explaining the term at the beginning of Coming!! Snafu, the veteran Warner Bros. narrator Frank Graham pauses for a tantalizing moment before saying "Fouled," giving audiences a chance to wonder if they might hear a stronger F-word. That stronger word doesn't arrive - it was forbidden in legitimate movies until the 1960s - but every soldier in the audience surely had it in mind.
The movie then spells out Private Snafu's personality: "He's the goofiest soldier in the U.S. Army," says a sentence printed on the screen. The voiceover then assures us that he has plenty of good qualities as well: "He's a patriotic, conscientious guy that thinks the army's swell." Still and all, Snafu thinks "a few minor changes" would make the army even better, and he often makes those changes on his own - when he's in the infantry, for instance, he uses an "improved" method of rolling up his gear, which makes his pack into a shapeless jumble. He's also a "deep thinker," the narrator says, and the screen reveals what he's thinking deeply about: a curvaceous stripper in a burlesque show, whose make-believe charms cause Snafu's mind to wander and his work - hauling a plane with a tractor, the closest he comes to flying in the air corps - to end in a total mess.
Aware that real soldiers like watching sexy women as much as Snafu does, the filmmakers devote a relatively long portion of the three-minute movie to the stripper's act, cultivating goodwill with the predominantly young male audience and heightening interest in future Snafu films. Sure enough, a teaser follows for his next four pictures, but not before he ends up squabbling with MPs and landing in the brig for fumbling his duties. A horse gives out a hearty horselaugh, and as the narrator speaks his final line - "This is Snafu!" - we see "The End" printed on the horse's backside. That nicely sums up the hapless private, whose antics commenced inComing!! Snafu and went on amusing and instructing American soldiers until the end of the war.
Director: Chuck Jones
Producer: Leon Schlesinger
Screenplay: Phil Eastman, Dr. Seuss
Film Editing: Treg Brown
Music: Carl W. Stalling
With: Mel Blanc, Frank Graham
BW-3m.
by David Sterritt
