Hey, whadda ya say we watch a cartoon? The Private Snafu shorts were made between 1943 and 1945, mainly to be shown to our fighting men overseas. Some were a bit educational and some were intended to drill some message into the soldiers' heads…but all were intended to be primarily entertaining. To that end, the War Department allowed the filmmakers to be a little more adult in their humor. Bob Clampett, one of the directors who worked on them, said that they became a repository for many of the jokes they dared not put into the cartoons they were making to be shown in American movie theaters.
Frank Capra had the original idea for the series and Theodor "Dr. Seuss" Geisel was their main writer. There is some dispute as to how much of Geisel's work made it to the screen and how much was supplemented by gag writers at the Leon Schlesinger cartoon studio, aka Warner Brothers. Schlesinger got the contract — which was originally expected to go to Disney — by underbidding Walt, then he turned the project over to his staff of directors: Clampett, Chuck Jones, Friz Freleng and Frank Tashlin. Mel Blanc supplied the voice of the hapless Private Snafu, who sounded very much like Bugs Bunny.
This one is entitled Booby Traps and it was directed by Clampett and released in January of 1944. The narrator you'll hear is a man named Robert C. Bruce, who usually narrated travelogues for a living, and who was used by the Schlesinger/WB studio whenever they did a travelogue parody, which was often for a while there. The cartoon will teach you a lesson that we all learned well from later Warner Brothers cartoons; that you should never, ever play "Those Endearing Young Charms" because the last note of the first line is always hooked up to explosives. That joke certainly did not come from Dr. Seuss.
