Wartime Cartoon: Difference between revisions
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{{trope}}
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The term '''wartime cartoon''' refers primarily to cartoons made or released during World War II, during [[The Golden Age of Animation]], and having some specific reference to the war effort. Many wartimes are explicit propaganda, while others make humorous jabs at conditions on the home front such as gasoline rationing. While some wartimes have remained popular as period pieces, [[Values Dissonance|many of these are now considered controversial]] due to the caricatural depictions of Germans and (especially) Japanese (see [[Those Wacky Nazis]] and [[Yellow Peril]]).
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* Avery's ''[[Red Hot Riding Hood]]'' and variants had servicemen as a primary market — in ''Swing Shift Cinderella'' the fairy godmother uses her magic wand to turn a pumpkin into an estate wagon, the Wolf grabs the wand and turns a bathtub into an open roadster and speeds off, and she chases after him, [[Rule of Three|turning a garbage can into a Jeep]]. Oh, and the reason the fairy godmother's magic wears off at midnight? [[Title Drop|Cinderella's shift at Lockheed starts at that hour]].
* [[Tex Avery]] was fond of using meat rationing as a theme in otherwise non-war-related cartoons — ''Jerky Turkey'', ''Big Heel-Watha'', and ''What's Buzzin', Buzzard?''
* Tex also took a jab at the draft in the 1944 MGM cartoon "Batty Baseball". One early scene shows most of the baseball players are
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* ''Daffy The Commando'' had him bamboozling a pair of Nazi soldiers, and culminated in Daffy hitting Hitler over the head with a mallet, upon which Der Fuhrer gave an indignant shout of "SCHULTZ!"
* Characters that fall down or take a long slide often will use the phrase "Was that/Is this trip really necessary?", a common slogan used to encourage the war effort by not using gas. Daffy uses it when he's dropped down a trap door in ''[[The Great Piggy Bank Robbery]]''. In ''Baseball Bugs'', after calmly tagging out a runner who had been running the bases, Bugs holds up a sign with the same message. Another cartoon ended with Bugs Bunny escaping on a train but suddenly realizing that "None of us civilians should be doing any unnecessary traveling these days" before jumping off and walking towards the sunset.
** Another instance of this happened in "Nasty Quacks," when Daffy packs up and leaves a man's house, then comes back to tell him that the government doesn't want anyone to do any non-essential
* The Bugs Bunny cartoon ''Super-Rabbit'' (a parody of the Fleischer ''[[Superman]]'' cartoons) ends with Bugs going into a phonebooth and changing into "a '''real''' superman" — a Marine. He then promptly marches off to war. The actual [[Semper Fi|United States Marines]] were so flattered by this that they actually made Bugs a Marine. He was eventually promoted to Master Sergeant.
* Friz Freleng's ''Herr Meets Hare'', in which Bugs leads [[Those Wacky Nazis|Herman Goering]] through a [[Humiliation Conga]]. Notable for being the first time Bugs is depicted tunneling underground as a mode of transportation, and the first time he says [[Wrong Turn At Albuquerque|"I knew I should have taken a left turn at Albuquerque"]] and was the inspiration for the Brunhilde opera sequence that would later be seen in Chuck Jones's magnum opus (among many), ''[[What's Opera, Doc?]]''
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* [[Frank Tashlin]]'s ''Brother Brat'', centered around Porky Pig babysitting a surly, violent infant while his mother is at work in a defense plant and opens with a stirring vignette saluting women working such roles. Tashlin's cinematic style is shown to great effect. Has aired on television a few times (mostly on the Ted Turner-owned networks like TBS and [[Cartoon Network]]), with the ending of baby Percy imitating [[Winston Churchill]] removed (probably because the censors balked at the image of a baby holding a cigar, yet the mother asking Porky if he wanted the Japs to get blown off the face of the Earth [[Getting Crap Past the Radar|was not edited at all]]).
* ''The Fighting 69th 1/2'', released in early 1941, featured a battle between red ants and black ants that was an allegory of [[World War One]].
* There were also several rather controversial shorts produced that you'll
** The banned 1943 short ''[[Coal Black and De Sebben Dwarfs]]'' gets a special double-mention. Not only do the racist stereotypes make showing it unlikely, but there's plenty of other wartime gags included. A group of killers named "Murder Inc." advertise that they will rub out anybody for $1.00, midgets are [[Stealth Pun|half-price]], and Japs are free. When the evil queen is introduced, we see she's a hoarder of sugar, coffee, and tires (all of which were rationed during World War II), the prince's fancy roadster has wheels cobbled from old shoes in lieu of tires, and the heroic dwarfs are in the Army.
* Interestingly, the only cartoon that actually featured [[Bugs Bunny]] directly in the Army didn't debut until after WWII — 1952's ''Forward March Hare'' wherein Bugs mistakenly gets a conscription letter meant for his neighbor.
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== Modern-day homages and parodies
* [[The Simpsons|Itchy & Scratchy]] did a wartime cartoon where they [[Enemy Mine|team up]] (briefly) to kill Hitler. After chopping Hitler's head off, Itchy does the same to Scratchy.
* An "X-Presidents" cartoon on ''[[Saturday Night Live]]'' parodied these, as the titular former president superheroes tried to get [[SpongeBob SquarePants]] to make a cartoon supporting the war in Iraq. Spongebob wasn't interested, and things turned ugly.
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* [[Casey and Andy]] has [http://galactanet.com/comic/view.php?strip=532 this].
== Other Examples
* North Korean animation [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujtp-70zQME follows this Trope], only in the modern day and the enemy is the United States. Propaganda surely knows no country.
* The Armenian-made ''[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_zSwwofx4E Kill Dim]'' cartoons are a modern example pertaining to the Nagorno-Karabakh War (caution: they're likely to offend you if you're from Azerbaijan).
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