This question just popped into my head.
Do you think they gave Snarf his name because of the success of Smurfs? Snarf - Smurf - kinda similar. Smurfs were small and comedic, Snarf was small and comedic. Smurfs were musical (la, la, la, la, la, la), Snarf was musical (he liked to hum or whatever).
I don’t know why that question just popped into my head.
As best as I can recall, a dictionary that I read defined “snarf” as eating greedily. I don’t remember exactly, but that was the general idea I remember from the definition. 
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/snarf
Verb
snarf (third-person singular simple present snarfs, present participle snarfing, simple past and past participle snarfed)
[ol]
li To eat or consume greedily.[/li][ul]
[li]He snarfed a whole bag of chips in a couple of minutes![/li][/ul]
[ul]
[li]1999: Marya Hornbacker, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia, page 239 Freed from the usual inhibitions, we get home and I snarf down pasta salad right out of the Tupperware container…[/li][li]2000: Nancy Woodruff, Someone Else’s Child, page 40 “I’m not going to sit there while you two watch me snarf a whole pie by myself.”[/li][li]2003: Allen D. Berrien, Powerboat Care and Repair: How to Keep Your Outboard, Sterndrive, Or Gas-Inboard Boat Alive and Well, page 41 The old 40-horse models used to snarf up more fuel than today’s 90-horse models.[/li][/ul]
li To take something by dubious means, but without the connotations of stealing; to take something without regard to etiquette.[/li][ul]
[li]I snarfed a bunch of freebies from the vendor’s booth when he wasn’t looking.[/li][/ul]
[ul]
[li]1995: Tom Shanley, Don Anderson, ISA System Architecture, page 296 Either write-through or write-back policy caches may snarf the data that the bus master is writing to memory.[/li][li]1996: Harold Abelson, Gerald Jay Sussman, Julie Sussman, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, page 399 …in addition, the embedding enables the designer to snarf features from the underlying language …[/li][li]2001: Brad A. Myers, Choon Hong Peck, Jeffrey Nicols, Dave Kong, and Robert Miller, Interacting at a Distance Using Semantic Snarfing, in Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Ubiquitous Computing, pages 305-314. Other future applications of the semantic snarfing idea might include classrooms, where students might snarf interesting pieces of content from the instructor’s presentation; …[/li][/ul]
li To expel fluid or food through the mouth or nostrils accidentally, usually while attempting to stifle laughter with one’s mouth full.[/li][ul]
[li]It was so funny, I snarfed my milk onto my keyboard.[/li][/ul]
[li](transitive, computing) To slurp (computing slang sense); to load in entirety; to copy as a whole.[/li][ul]
[li]I snarfed the whole database into my program.[/li][/ul]
[/ol]
[/LEFT]
That’s very interesting and reminds me of the scene in the lost intro where Snarf is snarfing down some berries in a tree branch. 