5/26/2023 0 Comments Goofy movie characters![]() A Goofy Movie ramps things up a couple of years so that Max can be a teenager (and I'm stymied as to whether we're meant to be looking at the summer between 8th grade and high school, or the summer after freshman year), and gives us a long hard look at the intense challenges of keeping the relationship between a single father and a teenage son alive. ![]() The point is, Goof Troop takes the "Goofy the husband and father" shorts, fast-forwards to the point that Junior turns into a rather princessy 11-year-old named Max, wishes Unseen Mom out to the cornfield, and drops the whole shebang in the 1990s. But this is not the time for that conversation, I suppose. Not that much of Disney's short output during the 1950s was all that exciting, anyway after the studio began to produce films in earnest around 1940, the shorts quickly turned into an afterthought. I am here speaking privately, you understand, but as long as I've been able to articulate an opinion on the matter, it's been clear that these are not at all the best Goofy had to offer: he was best as a foil to the competent Mickey and the irascible Donald, of course, but in his solo days, the slapstick "How To" shorts from the '40s, and especially those involving Goofy's misadventures with professional sports, are clearly the cream of the crop. ![]() Goof Troop, to my mind, always suffered from a single, crippling flaw: it was seemingly derived from the run of Goofy shorts in the 1950s when the character, divorced of his longstanding context alongside Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, stood in as the All-American Suburban Husband, in stories parodying the culture of Eisenhower Era life, with an unseen wife and a small Goofy clone only ever called Junior. Max was trying to navigate the complexities of high school life and get Roxanne to notice him, but the prank he pulled to do it made Goofy think Max needed some family bonding time.To those who have no knowledge of Goof Troop, allow me a brief primer: it was one of several cartoons produced by Walt Disney Television Animation in the early 1990s, when the returns on DuckTales and Chip 'n' Dale Rescue Rangers made afternoon television seem like the most golden and self-renewing of all untapped revenue streams * giving old-school characters a chance to breathe in a new environment (even when, as in TaleSpin, that environment made no damn sense - I spent much of my childhood, all of my adolescence, and an unhealthy portion of early adulthood wondering why wild animals from the British Raj would end up as businessmen, club owners, and daredevil flyers in the 1930s in the North Atlantic). ![]() Having a klutzy dad like Goofy wasn’t a laugh-fest for Max it was an unendurable roller coaster of embarrassment. It focused on the hilariously inept Goofy and his son Max, who he whisked off on a family vacation right when Max was developing feelings for his friend Roxanne. This sly little gem wasn’t made by Walt Disney Animation Studios, but rather Disneytoon Studios, and was a modest release that didn’t have to live up to the expectations of the bigger animated films that Disney made in that time period-that being somewhere between Beauty and the Beast and Mulan. If you grew up in the 90s, chances are you remember A Goofy Movie.
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