Studio: Warner Bros. Cartoons, for the First Motion Picture Unit, US Army Air Forces
Distributor: US Army (Army-Navy Screen Magazine)
Produced by: Eddie Selzer (uncredited)
Short Synopsis
It is payday in the Middle East and Snafu wanders a bazaar with his money. The Technical Fairy, First Class, runs a stand of his own and shows him a poster of the future his pay could buy if he saved it: a suburban house, a streamlined car, a lovely wife, a baby in a pram, a dog in its kennel on a trim lawn. Snafu is about to invest when a devil lures him into a souvenir shop, and as he spends, the poster changes, the car dwindling to a Model T, a horse and buggy, a bicycle, a pair of roller skates. Payday in the Caribbean: the fairy offers a bankbook reading "no dollars, no sense", and a bar swallows the money. Payday in the Arctic: Snafu buys a totem pole, then loses the rest at craps in a Quonset hut, and the house on the poster crumbles to a flophouse, the stork repossesses the baby, the wife packs and leaves. Snafu, in a cardboard box, finds one last coin and runs off naked to gamble it. In the ruin of his future home a phone rings, and a mouse answers that Snafu does not live there any more.
Why It Matters
- The poster that degrades with every dollar spent is one of the neatest devices in the Snafu series, a war-bond lecture turned into a running visual gag, and Freleng's unit, with Virgil Ross and Gerry Chiniquy, animates the three paydays with theatrical-cartoon polish.
- As a US government work the film is in the public domain. The ending, with the mouse on the telephone, is pure Freleng.
Notes and Trivia
- The manifest filename carries a placeholder date of 1 September 1944; the release was 25 September.
- The Technical Fairy, a Seuss creation, appears in most of the 1944 Snafu films.
- See also: The Chow Hound (Private Snafu, 1944), Booby Traps (Private Snafu, 1944), The Home Front (Private Snafu, 1943).