Five-and-a-half hours of Goofy may seem like overkill, but for the connoisseur of such things it's nice to have the complete set.
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"'Dippy Dawg' and, later, 'Dippy the Goof' were the names under which the character now known as Goofy originally appeared." I'll bet you didn't know that, but it's right there on the postcard enclosed with this two-disc set of every Goofy cartoon the Disney Studios ever made.
Without knowing it I was lucky enough to have grown up in the heyday of the Goofy era, the late forties and fifties. These two discs include Goofy's starring roles in features from 1939 to 1961. I have to admit I took the Goof for granted as just another animated character among seemingly dozens I enjoyed during Saturday-morning cartoon-fests. But I must also admit I liked him a lot better than I did that boring goody-goody, Mickey Mouse. Sorry, Mick.
Apparently, I wasn't the only one who felt that way, though. After the appearance of the famous rodent in the late twenties, Disney began introducing more characters to his Mickey Mouse menagerie in the thirties in an effort to bolster Mick's flagging popularity. Seems the mouse was a little too bland for a lot of people, so along came companions like Goofy, Pluto, Donald Duck, and the rest. I may have taken Goofy for granted, but he was always a favorite among the Disney group.
The Goof's first appearance in a film was in the 1932 short, "Mickey's Revue," where he looked more like the Big Bad Wolf than the character we've all come to know and love today. But his distinctive voice was already on display, done by Disney vocal artist Pinto Colvig, who, with the exception of a few years he took off, would do the voice for the rest of the series.
Goofy got his big break in 1939 with a starring role in "Goofy and Wilbur," a short about the mishaps of a fishing expedition. Wilbur is a grasshopper, a precursor to Jiminy Cricket the next year. Like all of the earliest Goofy cartoons, this one is marked by its beautifully detailed background paintings, a hallmark of so many of Disney's full-length animations. Mountains, hills, trees, sky, and clouds are distinctively rendered in utmost precision and almost three-dimensional realism. It's a shame that by the mid forties, cost factors apparently forced Disney to cut back on the elaborate production values of these late thirties' and early forties' entries in Disney's "Golden Age."
The two discs in the "Disney Treasures" set include all forty-six short subjects starring Goofy, and combined with the several bonus items they comprise almost five-and-a-half hours of playing time. You get your money's worth. My wife remarked that Goofy always seems to have all the time in the world to do things, whereas Mickey always seems to be in a hurry to go somewhere or fix something. So, I suppose it's fitting that the Goofy collection take its time about presenting all the material available, short subjects that can be viewed chronologically or alphabetically, incidentally.
I'm not going to list every cartoon on the discs for you, but there are a few that stand out. "Baggage Busters" and "The Art of Skiing" from 1941 are cute, the former getting Goofy involved with the contents of a magician's trunk and the latter showing us the Goof at a ski lodge. "The Art of Self Defense," 1941, was the first one in this DVD collection that made me smile broadly, and "How To Play Baseball," 1942, was the first one that actually made me laugh.
Understand, the Goofy cartoons are not particularly clever in the manner of many of the Warner Bros. cartoons of the era, nor do they contain the kind of adversarial conflicts their WB counterparts embraced. Disney cartoons will always be Disney cartoons, mild and naive and gently playful. The Goofy shorts, like the character of Goofy himself, are amiable and silly; and that they are often repetitious as well is beside the point. Goofy was once described by his creators as a lovable oaf, "a good-natured hick," apt representations of the character we love to love.
The early forties saw the best of the Goofy animations, both visually and thematically, in a series of "How To" sketches. I already mentioned "How To Play Baseball," but there's also "How To Swim" and "How To Fish," 1942, and "How To Play Golf" (my favorite Goofy cartoon) and "How To Play Football," 1944. The 1943 short "Victory Vehicles" contains a zippy song, "Hop on Your Pogo Stick," that I got a kick out of (or maybe a bounce), and the "How To Be Sailor" short adds some additional color depth to the image.
With "Tiger Trouble" in the mid forties, the art work begins to decline in quality, or at least in detail and realism. Backdrops begin to take on a simpler, flatter, more stylized appearance, and the time length of the cartoons begins to shorten slightly to about six minutes each.
Then in 1949 a major transformation occurs in the Goofy character. With "Goofy Gymnastics" he becomes a middle-class Everyman, the persona he would continue for the next decade. Indeed, many of the Goofy cartoons of the late forties and fifties don't even seem to be about the original Goofy character at all, but feature Goofy look-alikes. In most of the shorts the Goof becomes a bland, homogenized, 1950's kind of guy, losing his distinctive voice, his two widely spaced front teeth, and his cornball charm, usually going under the name "George." Fortunately, the cartoons themselves, like "Motor Mania," 1950, still have their fair share of inspired moments. Too bad they don't have their fair share of Goofy.
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