Going Home
About Going Home
Private Snafu comes home on leave. His ship passes the Statue of Liberty, and in Podunk he tells civilians what the 999th has been doing with the British. He describes a secret base to a policeman, Japanese tanks to a filling-station attendant, and a flying bazooka to a woman at a newsreel. A radio bulletin then says the whole 999th has been wiped out because of leaks. Snafu curses the man who talked and wishes a tram would run him over. A tram comes through the living room and does.
Cast & crew
More about Going Home
Chuck Jones directed this Private Snafu short. Leon Schlesinger produced it, and Mel Blanc voices Snafu. It was finished by May or June 1944 and was never released. Carl W. Stalling wrote the music.
Themes
Background
Millions of the men watching Army training films by mid-1944 had already been in combat. The short was finished for that audience and then held back.
Making
Theodor Geisel and Phil Eastman had set up Private Snafu for the Army in 1943, with Warner Bros. making most of the shorts. This one never went out.
Music
Carl W. Stalling wrote the music.
Preservation
The short was not released in 1944. A copy is on Wikimedia Commons as Going Home.ogv.
Notes
- The theater newsreel says a Japanese island was wiped out by an American secret weapon and that Hideki Tojo does not know what hit him.
- At a bar Snafu talks about the next move, and the information is shown going onto a mimeograph and later an electric billboard.
- One theory for the shelf is that the flying bazooka sat too close to the atomic-bomb project.
- Other theories are a bush scene judged too sexual, a panty flash in the jitterbug, a joke about a whole division being wiped out, and a home front that leaks secrets with no spy in the picture.
- By summer 1944 the series was shifting from raw recruits to combat veterans, and this short still plays Snafu as a fool.
- Snafu writers usually went uncredited. Some animation historians assign this script to Dr. Seuss.
Scenes
- Snafu’s ship passes the Statue of Liberty into New York Harbor.
- He sketches the flying bazooka for a woman sitting next to him at the newsreel.
- A tram runs through the living room and over him after he wishes that fate on the man who talked.
Also available
- Wikimedia Commons (Going Home.ogv)
Quotes
Shot his mouth off.
