Studio: Warner Bros. Cartoons (Leon Schlesinger Productions), for the First Motion Picture Unit, US Army Air Forces
Distributor: US Army (Army-Navy Screen Magazine)
Produced by: Leon Schlesinger (uncredited); supervised by Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss)
Short Synopsis
Private Snafu has a military secret, his ship sails for Africa at 4:30, and the narrator, in Dr. Seuss rhyme, tells him to zip his lip and padlock his brain. He cannot. He tells the audience, phones his mother, lets it slip to a magazine salesman, and finally, drunk on a whole bottle in a bar, tells a blonde who is a Nazi spy, with a swastika under her dress. Every leak is relayed, by a chain of spies with cameras and radios hidden in the most unlikely places, to Hitler himself, who orders the fleet attacked. Snafu's ship is torpedoed, he is blown into the water and then straight to Hell, where he boils in a cauldron demanding to know who leaked the secret, and the Devil, who is Hitler, hands him a mirror.
Why It Matters
- Made for soldiers, not children, the Snafu films could be as crude as they liked, and Spies is the best of them: Seuss's rhymes, Jones's timing and a run of gags about hidden spies (in a horse's mouth, in a girl's cleavage) that the Production Code would never have passed. The descent to Hell is a small masterpiece of brutal comedy.
- The series was commissioned by Frank Capra's First Motion Picture Unit after Schlesinger underbid Disney by two-thirds, and it taught the Warner directors to work fast and dirty for an adult audience, which shows in their post-war cartoons. As works of the US government the Snafu films are in the public domain, and Spies is on display in the International Spy Museum in Washington.
Notes and Trivia
- SNAFU stands for "Situation Normal: All Fouled Up", in the polite version.
- P. D. Eastman and Munro Leaf also wrote for the series; Seuss wrote most of it.
- See also: Daffy the Commando (1943), Der Fuehrer's Face (1943), Scrap Happy Daffy (1943).
