The Five Commandments
By Michael Rhode, (U.S. Navy Bureau of Medicine) and Michael Sappol, PhD (National Library of Medicine)
DATE: 1945
LENGTH: 5–6 min each
PRODUCER/PUBLISHER: Hugh Harman Productions for the U.S. Navy
CATEGORY: Educational & Instructional, Animation, Sound, Black & White
Disclaimer: These films depict ethnic, gender and racial stereotypes that were once commonplace in American society. We present them here as historical artifacts, valuable documents of the cultural practices of their time. Viewer discretion advised.
Inspired by the U.S. Army’s popular “Private Snafu” animated cartoon series, late in World War II the Navy hired Hugh Harman (1908–82) to do a similar series, focused on health. Harman’s Commandments for Health may have consisted of ten short black-and-white cartoons (mirroring the Ten Commandments), but was never widely shown or distributed. Today it is extremely rare. The National Library of Medicine holds five titles; only two others are known to exist.
Harman began animating in the 1920s with Walt Disney, and moved to Warner Brothers in the 1930s. For the Navy’s McGillicuddy series he hired top talent Mel Blanc (the voice of Bugs Bunny) to voice both the dimwitted Private McGillicuddy and the off-screen intelligent-regular-guy narrator. Composer Carl Stallings, another Warner Brothers stalwart, did the music. Unlike the Snafu series, the animation is jerky and backgrounds are static, sure signs that the cartoons were made quickly and cheaply. (Animation in the 1940s was labor-intensive: the more drawings the smoother the action.).
The stories all have tropical South Pacific island settings and each film follows the same formula: the main character, the hapless U.S. Marine private McGillicuddy (a Snafu clone), violates a health commandment, endangering himself (and sometimes his fellow soldiers), shortcomings that the narrator takes a bit of schadenfreude pleasure in pointing out.
In Drinking Water, Mac ignores the third commandment: “Thou shall not drink water from any source other than that designated.” Instead, unwisely using up his water and nearly baked to death under a scorching sun (drawn as a caricature of the Japanese wartime Prime Minister Hideki Tojo), the parched Mac jumps into a stream contaminated with a gorilla, “dead Japs,” and a native village’s latrine. (McGillicuddy cartoons contain a dose of anti-Japanese propaganda that goes over the edge into racism.) In the end Mac has to make so many urgent trips to the “head” (a toilet) that his feet dig a trench.
Personal Cleanliness also has a third commandment—another sign that the cartoons were rushed through production—“Thou shall keep thy personal habits clean.” Mac, predictably, refuses to bathe. His socks walk off by themselves, his skin itches, and slant-eyed athlete’s-foot “germs” attack his toes with saws and jackhammers. The film concludes with another set of racial stereotypes: natives who appear to be cannibals and speak in minstrel-show dialect pick him up and dump him into a kettle, but (spoiler alert) only to give him a bath.
Cleaning Mess Gear’s fifth commandment is “Thou shalt faithfully wash thy mess gear…for verily if thou become negligent in this habit thy guts shall be like knots in a wet rope.” Once again, Mac doesn’t comply. He licks his plate clean instead of sterilizing it in scalding water. Later, an x-ray view shows his intestines literally tied in knots. In the next scene, sadistic doctors subject him to a stomach pump, a huge dose of castor oil, and a 50-gallon enema.
In Use Your Head the seventh commandment is “Thou shalt not use any spots except chosen ones for the deposition of your excrement.” But Mac makes own private toilet, attracting a swarm of Japanese-featured flies that gives the whole camp dysentery. When a Japanese radio announcer thanks Mac by name, the Marines use a steam shovel to dump him and his latrine into a pit.
The McGillicuddy cartoons, designed for a male audience of sailors and marines, are mildly risqué and even descend into toilet humor (which was forbidden by censors in contemporary civilian films). Like many films of the era, shopworn racial and social stereotypes abound: Japanese figures (both insect and human) are equipped with buck-teeth and thick glasses; South Sea islanders have exaggerated African features and are depicted as cannibals; doctors are sadists; and so forth.
| Michael Rhode is Archivist in the U.S. Navy Bureau of Medicine’s Office of Medical History and was for many years Chief Archivist of the National Museum of Health and Medicine. He is the editor of Harvey Pekar: Conversations and an editor of the International Journal of Comic Art. He is an author of the book Walter Reed Army Medical Center Centennial: A Pictorial History 1909–2009 and the exhibit catalogues Battlefield Surgery 101: From the Civil War to Vietnam and American Angels of Mercy: Dr. Anita Newcomb McGee’s Pictorial Record of the Russo-Japanese War, 1904. |
| Michael Sappol lives in Stockholm, Sweden and is a visiting researcher at the University of Uppsala. For many years he was a historian, exhibition curator and scholar-in-residence in the History of Medicine Division at NLM. Sappol’s work focuses on the history of anatomy, death, and the visual culture of medicine and science in film, illustration and exhibition. He is the author of A Traffic of Dead Bodies (2002) and Dream Anatomy (2006), editor of A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Age of Empire (2010) and Hidden Treasure (2012), and emeritus curator of Medical Movies [on the Web]. His new book is Body Modern: Fritz Kahn, Scientific Illustration and the Homonucular Subject (University of Minnesota Press, 2017). |
Bibliography
Richard Graham, Government Issue: Comics for the People, 1940s-2000s (New York: Harry Abrams, 2011).
Michael Rhode, “ ‘She may look clean, but…’: Cartoons played an important role in the military’s health-education efforts during World War II,” Hogan’s Alley 8 (Fall 2000) https://www.academia.edu/2910796/She_may_look_clean_but…_Cartoons_played_an_important_role_in_the_militarys_health-education_efforts_during_World_War_II.
Cord A. Scott, Comics and Conflict: Patriotism and Propaganda from WWII through Operation Iraqi Freedom (U.S. Naval Institute, 2014).
Charles Solomon, Enchanted Drawings: The History of Animation (New York: Random House, 1994).
Thomas H. Sternberg, M.D., Ernest B. Howard, M.D., Leonard A. Dewey, M.D., & Paul Padget, M.D., Preventive Medicine in World War II, Vol. 5: Communicable Diseases; Chapter 10: Venereal Diseases http://history.amedd.army.mil/booksdocs/wwii/communicablediseasesV5/chapter10.htm.
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