CENSORED

Year Published: 1943

Creator: U.S. Army Signal Corps

Format: 16mm

Description: "Censored" is one of 26 Private SNAFU (Situation Normal, All F*cked Up) cartoons made by the U.S. Army Signal Corps to educate and boost the morale of the troops. The SNAFU character was created by Theodore Geisel (Dr. Seuss) and Phil Eastman, and most were animated by Warner Brothers Animation Studios. They were voiced by actors including Mel Blanc and scored by Carl Stalling. This cartoon "Censored", depicts the lengths to which Private SNAFU will go to sneak an uncensored letter in the mail — with terrifying results. Fortunately it all turns out to be a dream, but SNAFU is so shaken that he censors his own mail. The film was obviously inspired by the mass censorship of personal letters by the Army during the war, to reduce the chance that enemy spies would be able to gain intelligence by intercepting them. Much of the military correspondence during the war took place via V-mail, short for Victory Mail. This was a hybrid mail process used as the primary and secure method to correspond with soldiers stationed abroad. To reduce the cost of transferring an original letter through the military postal system, a V-mail letter would be censored, copied to film, and printed back to paper upon arrival at its destination. The V-mail process is based on the earlier British Airgraph process During World War II, both the Allies and Axis instituted postal censorship of civil and military mail. The largest organizations were those of the United States, though the United Kingdom employed about 10,000 censor staff while Ireland, a small neutral country, only employed about 160 censors. Both blacklists and whitelists were employed to observe suspicious mail or listed those whose mail was exempt from censorship. In the United States censorship was under the control of the Office of Censorship whose staff count rose to 14,462 by February 1943.

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