The SmarK DVD Rant for Disney Treasures: The Complete Goofy
– Here’s a question: Why doesn’t anyone just make CARTOONS anymore? Thanks to the 80s and the toy-inspired crazes therein, it seems like one of the dead arts is just making 7-or-8 minute shorts for the sake of being funny. These days, everything either has to be a 22-minute sales pitch (Pokemon, Beyblade, Yu-Gi-Oh) or a deep and meaningful bit of animation. Sometimes (a lot of times) I don’t want deep or meaningful, I just want funny. The latest Transformers incarnation forcing “jokes” meant for 10-year olds into the midst of a nonsensical plot is not funny. Goofy happily going to the bunny slopes to demonstrate a beginner’s ski lesson and then falling backwards into a crevasse is funny. Some things will just always be funny, and it’s usually someone else’s suffering. Of course, if Goofy were human, we’d all feel really bad for him years later when he was in traction and sucking on a morphine drip 24 hours a day, but thankfully cartoons spare us such emotional responses by allowing the creators to beat, torture and maim their creations with zeal and no repercussions afterwards. Jeff Hardy had NOTHING on Goofy for taking insane bumps.
The Film:
Goofy himself is a pretty fascinating character as far as Disney cartoons go. From a bit player to a major star in a short span of time in the 30s, Disney suddenly had a big problem with Goofy’s increasing popularity — the voice of Goofy, Pinto Colvig, left Disney after a falling out with Walt, leaving the studio with a hit cartoon and no one to voice it. The elegant solution — Goofy was put into a series of “How To” cartoons, featuring him blundering his way through the most mundane of tasks and wreaking havoc everywhere, accompanied by a droll narrator who did all the talking and made hilarious sardonic remarks at every opportunity. My personal favorites are the opening line of “How To Play Golf”, where the narrator remarks that “Despite popular belief, golf is not a waste of time” and the “Olympic Champion” cartoon, where Goofy goes for a massively difficult pole-vault, and the narrator stops him in mid-air to recite a favorite poem because the mood has inspired him. Goofy’s exploits (generally known as the “Sport Goofy” era) ranged from skiing (in one of the funniest cartoons ever made) to golf to tennis to weightlifting. By the late 40s, he ventured into team sports such as hockey and baseball, and again the results were gut-bustingly funny, the baseball lessons in particular.
By this time, Goofy was existing in a strange parallel universe, where everyone was a Goofy and he would be playing baseball against 9 other Goofys in a stadium full of Goofys. So it came as no real surprise in the 50s when Goofy was transformed again, into a sort of harried Everyman named George G. Geef, who was a normal person who happened to look like a dog, and existed with all sorts of other normal people who happened to look like dogs. These adventures, less physically-funny than thoughtfully-funny, featured Geef struggling with marriage, children, smoking, weight loss, gambling and job stress, and most of them still hold up just as well today. By the late fifties, that formula too was wearing thin, and after a couple of ill-fated and unfunny attempts to revert back to the “How To” days (How to Dance and How To Be A Detective), the Goofy series was retired with a downright hilarious final bow, “Aquamania”, in 1961. The character was revived in the early 90s with the surprise hit “Goofy Movie” and requisite Saturday morning cartoon version, but the true brilliance of The Goof was seen in these 7 minute shorts from the golden age of Disney.
I won’t go into detail on each one, but here’s a listing of the cartoons on each disc, and some notes on standout or note-worthy ones:
Disc One: Goofy and Wilbur, Goofy’s Glider, Baggage Buster, The Art of Skiing, The Art of Self Defense, How to Play Baseball, The Olympic Champ, How to Swim, How to Fish, Victory Vehicles, How to Be a Sailor, How to Play Golf, How to Play Football, Tiger Trouble, African Diary, Californy’er Bust, Hockey Homicide, Knight For a Day, Double Dribble, Foul Hunting, They’re Off, The Big Wash
Disc Two: Tennis Racquet, Goofy Gymnastics, Motor Mania, Hold That Pose, Lion Down, Home Made Home, Cold War, Tomorrow We Diet, Get Rich Quick, Fathers Are People, No Smoking, Father’s Lion, Hello, Aloha, Man’s Best Friend, Two-Gun Goofy, Teachers Are People, Two Weeks Vacation, How to Be a Detective, Father’s Day Off, For Whom the Bulls Toil, Father’s Week End, How to Dance, How to Sleep, Aquamania
– “Goofy and Wilbur” was the first solo Goofy short, and it’s also one of the most funny and charming, as well. The premise is that Goofy takes his faithful grasshopper on a fishing trip, using it as bait in totally unexpected ways. Still sweet and very funny today, 60 years later.
– “The Art of Skiing” was the first in the series of “How To” cartoons, and I believe it’s among the funniest cartoons ever shown in the US. It’s loaded with gags from start to finish, and even Goofy strugging to put his pants on (in Mr. Bean-ish fashion) while wearing skis is a riot.
– “How To Play Baseball” is both hilarious for the jokes, but also for the wry commentary on baseball itself and the almost inside humor for baseball fans.
– “Victory Vehicles” is a dated and preachy oddity among all the hilarity, made for boosting morale at home by showing how the rubber and gasoline rationing during World War II wasn’t so bad, and how people should invent new methods of transportation instead of cars. “Hop On Your Pogo Stick” is actually a fiendishly catchy theme song. War cartoons like this age HORRIBLY, though, as a rule, and this is no exception. You think that people in the US would have put up with rationing during the Vietnam war, for instance?
– “Hockey Homicide” might be the most accurate and faithful recreation of the sport ever put on film. Outside of “Slapshot”, of course.
– “The Big Wash” is another oddity because there’s no narrator — it’s about Goofy trying to clean an elephant. It’s one of the very few Goofy shorts with no narrator, in fact.
– “Tomorrow We Diet”, about Goofy’s struggle with weight loss (“eat eat eat “) features what I think is the wittiest one-liner ever to end a cartoon — “Eat, drink and be merry — tomorrow we diet.” That’s some bloody brilliant punning going on there.
– “Get Rich Quick” features one of the funniest one-off gags I’ve ever seen — Goofy is gambling in a back-alley poker game, and emerges hours later with only a barrel. A taxi pulls up, and he tips the barrel over — to reveal that it’s loaded with cash! Irony at its best.
– “Teachers are People” is kinda scary and uncomfortable, because it features school violence presented at a time when there wasn’t such a thing. It was funny back then to see little junior dumping the contents of his pockets into a drawer and seeing handguns and grenades, but it’s not so funny today. And when the cartoon ends with the kid bombing the school and having to write “I will not bomb the school” 100 times on the blackboard, well, it just makes you even sadder that things have come to a point where Leonard Maltin NEEDS to add a disclaimer to the beginning pointing out that it was produced in a simpler time. It’s funny for what it is, but when one scene features the kid pulling a squirt gun (looking exactly like a pistol) on another kid in retribution for a prank, it just hits too close to home for comfort. This would never, ever, get produced today.
– “Aquamania”, the final Goofy solo cartoon, features him taking his son for a waterskiing trip and ending up partnered with an octopus in a death-defying race through a carnival. It’s sad that this was the last one produced, because it’s absolutely brilliant and shows flashes of the inspiration that were present in the early Goofy shorts. The animation was by then becoming rushed and rough-looking, so maybe it’s best they quit while they were ahead.
At nearly 6 hours long, the highlights above aren’t even scratching the surface of the entertainment value you’re getting out of this thing. Teach your Pokemon-watching kids what REAL cartoons look like. They’re still funny, to kids and adults alike, and for good reason — bodily harm is always funnier when it’s happening to someone else.
The Video:
You will be ASTOUNDED that these things are nearly 60 years old (and older in some cases) when you see the colors and clarity of the video. Stock footage of the cartoons is shown in some of the bonus features, and you can immediately tell the difference between the neglected TV versions of the prints and the remastered film presented here. Colors are bright and vibrant, noise and dirt is almost completely eliminated (well, as much as possible) and contrasts are exactly as intended. This is truly an amazing restoration, and one that they probably could have gotten away with backing out of due to the age of the materials. Thankfully, they didn’t use that excuse, and it looks as good as what was probably shown in the 40s. There’s some compression problems because it’s 3 hours of material per disc and animation tends to be blocky on DVD at the best of times, but it’s nothing you’ll notice unless you’re looking for it. Top-notch stuff, and kudos to Disney.
The Audio:
Well, it is what it is. Dolby Digital mono, and unfortunately they didn’t take quite the same care with the sound as they did with the video. The narrator can be a bit muffled at times and the sound is pretty flat, but again, it’s cartoons from 1940-60, so what can you expect?
The Extras:
Pretty good little crop of stuff here, including a reproduction of a lecture detailing the Goofy character for animators, a featurette on Pinto Colvig, an interview with Bill Farmer (the current Goofy), extensive poster and memorabilia galleries (with select commentary from Maltin) and a “Goofy through the years” art gallery. Nothing to gripe about here.
Ratings:
The Film: *****
The Video: ****
The Audio: *
The Extras: ***
