[Most Recent Entries] [Calendar View]
Monday, October 7th, 2024
| Time | Event |
| 6:44a | Private Snafu: The World War II Propaganda Cartoons Created by Dr. Seuss, Frank Capra & Mel Blanc
Private Snafu was the U.S. Army’s worst soldier. He was sloppy, lazy and prone to shooting off his mouth to Nazi agents. And he was hugely popular with his fellow GIs. Private Snafu was, of course, an animated cartoon character designed for the military recruits. He was an adorable dolt who sounded like Bugs Bunny and looked a bit like Elmer Fudd. And in every episode, he taught soldiers what not to do, from blabbing about troop movements to not taking malaria medication. The idea for the series reportedly came from Frank Capra — the Oscar-winning director of It’s a Wonderful Life and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and, during WWII, the chairman of the U.S. Army Air Force First Motion Picture Unit. He wanted to create a cartoon series for new recruits, many of whom were young, unworldly and in some cases illiterate. Capra gave Disney first shot at developing the idea but Warner Bros’ Leon Schlesinger, a man who was as famous for his hard-driving business acumen as he was for wearing excessive cologne, offered a bid that was 2/3rds below that of Disney. The talent behind this series was impressive, featuring a veritable who’s who of non-Disney animating talent, including Chuck Jones, Bob Clampett, and Friz Freleng. Snafu was voiced by Mel Blanc, who famously did Bunny Bugs, Daffy Duck and later Marvin the Martian. And one of the main writers was none other than Theodor “Dr. Seuss” Geisel. As you can see in the first Snafu short Coming!! (1943), directed by Chuck Jones (see above), the movie displays a salty sensibility intended for an army camp rather than a Sunday matinee. The movie opens with a deadpan voiceover explaining that, in informal military parlance, SNAFU means “Situation Normal All…All Fouled Up,” hinting that the usual translation of the acronym includes a popular Anglo-Saxon word. Later, it shows Private Snafu daydreaming about a burlesque show – complete with a shapely exotic dancer doffing her duds – as he obliviously wrecks a plane.
Though there were no writing credits for each individual episode, just listen to the voiceover for Gripes (1943), directed by Friz Freleng. Dr. Seuss’s trademark singsong cadence is unmistakable including lines like:
Gas! (1944), directed by Chuck Jones, features a cameo from Bugs Bunny.
And finally, Going Home, directed by Chuck Jones, was slated to come out in 1944 but the War Department kiboshed it. The rationale was never explained but some think that the film’s reference to a massive, top-secret weapon that was to be deployed over Japan was just a little too close to the Manhattan Project. You can watch a long list of Private Snafu episodes here. Related Content: Donald Duck’s Bad Nazi Dream and Four Other Disney Propaganda Cartoons from World War II Dr. Seuss’ World War II Propaganda Films: Your Job in Germany (1945) and Our Job in Japan (1946) Education for Death: The Making of the Nazi–Walt Disney’s 1943 Film Shows How Fascists Are Made Dr. Seuss Draws Anti-Japanese Cartoons During WWII, Then Atones with Horton Hears a Who! Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. |
| 9:00a | David Lynch Releases on YouTube Interview Project: 121 Stories of Real America Recorded on a 20,000-Mile Road Trip
Take a sufficiently long road trip across America, and you’re bound to encounter something or someone Lynchian. Whether or not that idea lay behind Interview Project, the undertaking had the endorsement of David Lynch himself. Not coincidentally, it was conceived by his son Austin, who along with filmmaker Jason S. (known for the documentary David Lynch: The Art Life), drove 20,000 miles through the U.S. in search of what it’s tempting to call the real America, a nation populated by colorful, sometimes desperate, often unconventionally eloquent characters, 121 of whom Interview Project finds passing the day in bars, working at stores, or just sitting on the roadside.
Profiling David Lynch in the nineties, David Foster Wallace observed that “a good 65 percent of the people in metropolitan bus terminals between the hours of midnight and 6 A.M. tend to qualify as Lynchian figures — grotesque, enfeebled, flamboyantly unappealing, freighted with a woe out of all proportion to evident circumstances.” Interview Project sticks to small-town or rural settings — Camp Hill, Pennsylvania; Pigeon Forge, Tennessee; Tuba City, Arizona — but still encounters people who may at first glance strike viewers as disturbing, menacing, saddening, forbidding, or some combination thereof. But they all have compelling stories to tell, and can do so within five minutes.
Being the subject of an Interview Project video requires a degree of forthright openness that those who’ve spent their lives in the U.S. may not recognize as characteristically American. Though often beset by a host of crises, ailments, and grievances (imposed from without or within), they don’t hesitate to assert themselves and their worldviews. Though there’s obvious curiosity value in all these eccentric convictions, regional twangs, and sometimes harrowing misfortunes, what emerges above all from these interviews is an impressive resilience. Young or old, coherent or otherwise, with or without a place to live, these people all come off as survivors.
When Interview Project first went online in 2009, it wasn’t viewable on Youtube. Now, for its fifteenth anniversary, all of its videos have been uploaded to that platform, and in high definition at that. Seen in this new context, Interview Project looks like an antecedent to certain Youtube channels that have risen to popularity in the decade and a half since: Soft White Underbelly, for instance, which devotes itself to interviewees at the extreme margins of society. Extremity isn’t the signal characteristic of Interview Project’s subjects, depart dramatically though their experiences may from the modern middle-class template. One could pity how short their lives fall of the “American Dream” — or one could consider the possibility that they’re all living that dream in their own way. Related Content: A Brief History of the Great American Road Trip Real Interviews with People Who Lived in the 1800s What Makes a David Lynch Film Lynchian: A Video Essay David Lynch Explains Why Depression Is the Enemy of Creativity — and Why Meditation Is the Solution David Lynch Teaches You to Cook His Quinoa Recipe in a Strange, Surrealist Video Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. |
| << Previous Day |
2024/10/07 [Calendar] |
Next Day >> |