Happy Birthday, Dr. Seuss

The good doctor would be 105 today.

I sort of knew about his wartime work, but I'd never heard of Private Snafu until I started browsing through that electronic playground called the Internet Archive. The 26 shorts, made for the servicemen, were created by Dr. Seuss and produced by Warner Brothers, with the brilliance of Mel Blanc, Chuck Jones, Fritz Freling and other luminaries of early animation. This one is called "Home Front," and boosts the soldier's morale by showing him that the folks back home are behind him all the way, no matter what Michael Moore Tokyo Rose might be saying. These were educational films, but in the war years, the line between education and propaganda was necessarily blurred.


There's more here, plus some cool background.