YMMV / Private Snafu

• Anvilicious: Considering that this was for an occupation where a mistake could easily mean certain death, this is a given.
  • The enemy is always listening. Always.
  • The enemy can easily piece together your strategy from loose bits of information.
  • Malaria can kill you with incredible ease.
  • Don't waste food.
  • Your gas mask is uncomfortable, but it can save your life.
  • You can't fight if you skip out on training.
  • Information travels quickly.
  • Take care of your weapons and gear.
  • Tell nobody - not even your loved ones - of what you are doing or where you are going.
  • Rumors and misinformation can destroy as surely as any weapon.
  • Everyone is doing their part for the war effort.
  • Comfort breeds complacency.
  • Even the smallest clue can betray an enemy army's movements.
  • Never underestimate your enemy.
  • Chemical weapons have a distinctive smell one has to look out for.
  • Keep. Your. Mouth. Shut.
• Better on DVD: The Thunderbean Private SNAFU DVD set features every cartoon in the series, meticulously restored to Looney Tunes Golden Collection levels. No less a cartoon buff than Leonard Maltin has exalted it.
• Bizarro Episode:
  • The handful of UPA and MGM made Snafu shorts not only have a noticeable style difference from Warner Bros' animation, but tend to play the educational aspect of the shorts more earnestly, with Snafu's antics only taking up a small amount of screen time. That's because they weren't part of the Private Snafu series proper (which was handled entirely by Warner Bros.), but part of the Few Quick Facts series, which was much more straightforward by design. Snafu's appearances therein constitute more cameos than a protagonist role.
  • By contrast, the last two shorts, coming right at the tail end of the war (and presumably with all the important training subjects having already been addressed), became more or less military-themed Looney Tunes installments: one with Snafu and a Japanese officer fighting over a small island, and the other one placing Snafu on an uncharacteristic commando mission into the heart of Tokyo. Any messages they send, like "if your opponent has better brute force, use the environment" are not as obvious as before, and Snafu sometimes is the positive role model regarding them. Both also depict Snafu as oddly more competent than usual, actually coming out of both situations the victor.
• Harsher in Hindsight: In "Rumors," one of the rumors flying around is how the Army's shells are all duds. That is not true, but the US Navy had problems with their torpedoes malfunctioning for years with senior command refusing to accept their sailors' complaints about them. The short is also disturbingly prophetic of the amount of damage that misinformation has caused on social media in recent years.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: In "Fighting Tools", the first shot of the cartoon is of a newspaper. The viewer is supposed to focus on the picture headline of a Garand rifle and the exclamation that US Soldiers were the best equipped — so long as they kept their weapons in good working order. However, in the lower right-hand corner of the paper, buried amid real headlines, is a small headline that reads "Adolph Hitler Commits Suicide." The cartoon came out in 1943, and the suicide wouldn't happen until 1945 (a similar gag would be found in the civilian cartoon "Tortoise Wins by a Hare").
• Nightmare Fuel: The climax of "Rumors", where all the misinformation is manifested as ghostly monsters.
  "The Russians have surrendered!"
  "The British are quitting!"
  "The Chinese gave up!"
  "It's all over. We lost the war."
• Values Dissonance: These being WWII-era cartoons meant specifically for strapping young male soldiers, political incorrectness runs rampant, mostly with caricatures of the Japanese and how women are mostly portrayed as sex objects.
• Values Resonance: Many of the Snafu cartoons portray the Germans and the Japanese as worthier opponents, compared to the civilian shorts, which have them as bumbling fools. In Fighting Tools a German soldier openly mocks Snafu's poor care of his weapons and winds up the victor since his equipment works. Because Private Snafu was aimed at a military audience, this was intended to hammer home to U.S. soldiers that the enemy was a real, very credible threat and not to be taken lightly or underestimated.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: While the Looney Tunes shorts get a pass on this for being rerun on Saturday mornings^note though that's debatable, considering that more people know about how classic Looney Tunes cartoons have been edited for Saturday morning TV and how many of the shorts don't even air nowadays due to having content that, these days, would be considered horribly offensive, the "Private Snafu" cartoons were never even intended for the civilian public, let alone children.