Spies

One of the best Private Snafu shorts. These cartoons were made for use by the U.S. Army during WWII as instructional films for soldiers. The hope was the grunts would learn what to do (and not to do) by watching buffoonish Snafu make mistakes in humorous fashion. Directed by Chuck Jones with a rhyming script from Dr. Seuss himself. Typically fine voice work from Mel Blanc. Nice black & white animation. The subject for this short is, as you can guess by the title, espionage. Specifically that soldiers should be aware that enemy spies are all around and not to be blabbing military secrets in public. To illustrate this, the short starts with Snafu bragging about having a secret that he can't tell. It doesn't take long before Snafu winds up telling the secret to a beautiful Nazi secret agent. This has disastrous consequences for the American fleet, which leads to a hilariously dark ending for Snafu.

For several of the shorts in this series, Theodore Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss) scripted and the speech patterns here reflect his quite familiar cadence. It's great! Private Snafu really screws up royally here, which was the point, as the series was meant to show soldiers what not to do and what the consequences could be. These are not balanced and fair cartoons-there was a war on at the time and Germany and Japan were the ENEMY, so the caricatures are not nice. If you are easily offended, you likely won't like these. The series is great and well worth watching. Recommended.

This was my first look at a "Private Snafu" cartoon. All I know is I first see some nerdy- looking private walking around the Army camp and saying in rhyme, "I just a learned a secret; it's a honey, it's a pip, but the enemy is listening so I won't let it slip."

After that I thought this was going to be very corny and stupid, but it was anything but. Afterward, when I saw Theodore Geisel, a.k.a. "Dr. Seuss" wrote it and Mel Blanc did the voicing, I wasn't surprised it was entertaining.

Spies are everywhere, following Pvt. Snafu, even to the telephone in the town drugstore where our hero goes to call him mom. The German and Japanese stereotypes were typical of the day, so anyone who is offended watching today should not be. The Allies were not exactly fond of Germans and Japanese in 1943!

It wasn't just verses that were clever. If you look close, you see some quick sight gags like two moose heads on the wall crossing antlers making the Nazi insignia. There's also a good message about how liquor loosens up our "zipped" lips. The main message was for everyone watching this in the theaters during a very tense time in the world's history: be careful what you say, that one careless word could leave to many people getting killed.

This was a "From The Vaults" feature on the Looney Tunes Golden Collection Volume Three.

True, "Spies" is a WWII propaganda film, so it portrays the Germans and Japanese - and maybe the Italians; I couldn't quite tell whether or not the cartoon portrayed them - mercilessly. But other than that, it's a real hoot, as that quintessential idiot soldier Private Snafu has a secret and tries to keep it hidden but accidentally spills it, leading to an attack by the Axis Powers.

So as long as we understand what it shows, then we can really enjoy it. I guess that if nothing else, the cartoon does bring up the question of whom we can trust during wartime. But it's worth seeing just to hear the Dr. Seuss rhythm in it. Pretty funny.

This film must be understood in the context for which it was made. While this is a film made by talent from Warner Brothers (with voice work by Mel Blanc and production by the folks at Looney Toons), it was NOT intended for general release--but was meant to be shown to soldiers to illustrate the importance of keeping troop activities secret. You can tell this is the case for several reasons--the cartoon is black and white (when Looney Toons had just recently switched to color), the guy at the newspaper stand is reading a magazine entitled "SEX" and the female Nazi spy has a radio hidden in her boobs. This was certainly NOT intended to be seen by the kids! So, with it's more adult humor designed to appeal to those in combat, the movie did a wonderful job of conveying its central message in a cute way--using great animation and a crazy rhyming style that is very, very catchy. Even today, this film is worth seeing--not just by history teachers but by anyone wanting a good laugh or wanting to see what life was like during the war.