Army & Navy Screen Magazine
Price 5.99 - 19.75 USD
The screen magazine was a biweekly news and information film that was shown before the featured film in all military motion picture theaters during WWII. Most of the shows consisted of five minute segments featuring human interest stories about the home front, updates from the defense industry, news about major combat events of the war and sometimes a variety show featuring some of the top entertainers of the day. The most popular feature of the screen magazine was the Private Snafu segments, written by Theodore "Dr. Seuss" Geisel and animated by Warner Brothers. Snafu was lazy, sutbborn, unpatriotic and insisted on doing everything wrong. In the end, Snafu learned the hard way, but not before supplying his audience with five minutes of laughter and a painlessly administered object lesson. The depictions of Japanese and Germans are quite racist by today"s standards, but were par-for-the-course in wartime United States. By the end of the war, the Army-Navy Screen Magazine reached a weekly audience of over 4 million men and women. Although the magazine was an instrument of official policy, its honest, no-nonsense approach won the respect and affection of G.I. audiences everywhere.