Between 1943 and 1945, the United States War Department produced a series of 27 cartoons for the initiation and education of servicemen. The star of these creations was one Private Snafu , a borderline screw-up who learns the errors of his ways on a variety of subjects, personal and technical. Officially, SNAFU is an acronym for Situation Normal-All Fouled Up. (Or, for grown-ups, “fucked up.” There is a “wink-wink-nudge-nudge joke about this, as you’ll see, in Episode One).
Since these cartoons were made to appeal to servicemen (and didn’t have to undergo the scrutiny of the Hays Office) their content contains rough language, and a variety of voluptuous pin-up type women (a lot less shocking to contemporary viewers than to contemporaneous ones). Of course, the caricatures of the enemy, especially of the Japanese, were not restricted to for-military-eyes-only cartoons, but were a staple of many mainstream cartoons made during the war.
The series was conceived by Frank Capra and produced by the Loony Toon Warner Bros. animation unit. Films were directed by WB stars Chuck Jones, Friz Freleng, Bob Clampett, and Frank Tashlin, And if Snafu sounds a little Bugs Bunny, It’s because they have the vocal chords of Mel Blanc in common. Add to this the off-the-wall writing contributions of Theodore Geisel (a.k.a. “Dr. Seuss”), and, well, take a look: