I was really enjoying watching some of the Private Snafu cartoons a little earlier today, so I thought it would be fun to put one up from our master file.

Booby Traps (1944) is the 9th of the series, released on January 10, 1944 as part of the Army/Navy Screen Magazine, issue 19. It’s one of two in the series directed by Bob Clampett, and one of my favorites.

The sort of soft messaging the series was designed to highlight isn’t so soft here: this wild cartoon crams ideas into short form as well as any cartoon from the golden age. Rod Scribner and Robert McKimson animated quite a few scenes in the film, as is usually the case in Clampett films from this period.

Snafu’s childlike skipping through a war zone at the beginning of the cartoon sets the tone for the rest of the film. I really love what a dolt he is in this particular cartoon; I’m sure it went over great with the largely military audience that wished they could approach life with such reckless abandon. Over the course of the next handful of minutes, Snafu tries to milk a camel with a bomb attached, and enters a brothel, ignoring the many (fake) women there in favor of a piano at the back of the building. The ‘Exploding Piano Gag’ was familiar to me when first seeing this film, and out course the gag is used many years later in Ballot Box Bunny (1950). Funny enough, a version of that gag actually goes back a lot of years earlier, to Van Beuren’s The Fatal Note (1933) the first Little King cartoon.

The golden age of animation is of course a master class in gag timing and short comedy writing in addition to character animation. The exuberance of these films is on full display in this entry, and they must have cheered up many a tired soldier and supporting staff. One can only hope for another period in animation history that has an approach that shows a love for the medium.

So, here’s Booby Traps from the master positive held at The United States National Archives, with clean up from Thunderbean about 11 years back.

Have a good week and look forward to more good news this next week!