Pay Day (1944)
Private Snafu blows his payday on drink, gambling, and souvenirs at three different postings, watching the comfortable postwar life a training poster promises him shrink step by step down to roller skates and a cardboard box.
Pay Day is a 1944 Private Snafu short, part of the WWII instructional series Warner Bros. directors made for the US Army with several scripts credited in part to Dr. Seuss. Friz Freleng directed this cautionary tale about squandered wages, staged across three duty stations and punctuated with sly nods to the silent hit The Sheik.
Background
Pay Day is a 1944 entry in the Private Snafu series, animated training films Warner Bros. directors made for the US Army, with Mel Blanc voicing Snafu. Friz Freleng directed this episode, set in a Middle Eastern bazaar where Snafu receives his pay. A character called Technical Fairy 1st Class shows him a poster of the comfortable postwar life a disciplined soldier could afford — house, car, wife, baby, dog — while a devil figure lures him toward a souvenir shop instead.
What to watch for
As Snafu squanders his money on drink, trinkets, and gambling, the poster behind him keeps redrawing itself downward: the streamlined car degrades first into a Model T, then a horse and carriage, then a bicycle, and finally a pair of roller skates, with the house and other comforts shrinking to match at each stage. The gag works as pure visual arithmetic, translating a lecture about wartime savings into a single escalating image rather than spoken instruction. Like the rest of the series, the short is built around Snafu’s own stupidity, in keeping with scripts credited in part to Dr. Seuss.
