I was reading through an old of mine from Clown College and found an autograph I have from Chuck Jones, the lead animator on Loony Tunes who brings us Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. He was a guest lecturer when I was in clown training back in 1993.

I did a little reading on Chuck and found that "During the World War II years, Jones worked closely with Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, to create the Private Snafu series of Army educational cartoons. Private Snafu comically educated soldiers on topics like spies and laziness in a more risque way than general audiences would have been used to at the time." (wikipedia of course)

Here's one such video... it's pretty good. You'll recognize music, voices, and comic elements that would later become a big part of the Loony Tunes style.

b_b: Thanks for the history! This is amazing. When I was a kid, I had a VHS box set of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck WWII cartoons. They would feature things like Bugs dressing as a female to trick Hitler, Daffy flying a Mustang, and a lot of anti-Japanese humor that we would consider borderline racist now. I think its really cool the way the entire country, including animators, contributed to the War Effort. If you're going to fight a war, go all in I suppose; all the wars since have been fought "elsewhere" by a small group of people in countries that no one has heard of for political reasons no one understands. These are good reminders of how germane to everyone's life the war was. Trey Parker did an Osama Bin Laden episode of South Park that directly referenced the Bugs-Hitler cartoons, and he was criticized for being insensitive to Muslims.

posted 4572 days ago