Iñaki Villanueva Kegel

Universidad Anáhuac México Norte

210

A Goofy Magazine

Contents Introduction ........................................................................................................................................ 3

The Goofy story ................................................................................................................................... 4

Creation of Goofy and first appearances ........................................................................................ 4

Trio years with Mickey and Donald ................................................................................................. 5

Breakoff into solo series .................................................................................................................. 6

The Everyman years ........................................................................................................................ 7

Later appearances ........................................................................................................................... 8

Goofy specifics and Trivia .................................................................................................................. 10

Feature Films ................................................................................................................................. 10

Goofy in Video Games ................................................................................................................... 13

Confusion concerning Goofy and Pluto......................................................................................... 14

Illustration Index ............................................................................................................................... 15

Keyword Index ................................................................................................................................... 15

Referencias ........................................................................................................................................ 15

Introduction

Goofy is an animated cartoon character from the Walt

Disney's Mickey Mouse universe. He is an anthropomorphic

dog and is one of

Mickey Mouse's

best friends. His

original concept

name was "Dippy

Dawg" in cartoon

shorts created

during the 1930s;

then his name was

given as "George

Geef" or "G.G.

Geef" in cartoon

shorts during the

1950s, implying that "Goofy" was a nickname. Contemporary

sources, including the Goof Troop television show and A

Goofy Movie, now give the character's full name to be Goofy

Goof. The Goof Troop pilot also refers to 'G. G. Goof' on a

diploma, likely a reference to the 1950s name. On the other

hand, the comics sometimes refer to him as Goofus D. Dawg.

Along with being not intelligent, Goofy's main flaw is,

predictably, clumsiness. His birthday is May 25, 1932.

Imagen 1

The Goofy story

Creation of Goofy and first appearances

Of Disney studio animators, Art Babbitt is most regarded for

the creation of the Goofy character, while original concept

drawings were by Frank Webb. In a 1930s lecture, Babbitt

described the character as "a composite of an everlasting

optimist, a gullible Good

Samaritan, a halfwit and a

shiftless, good-natured hick".

Goofy first appeared in Mickey's

Revue, first released on May

25, 1932. Directed by Wilfred

Jackson this short movie

features Mickey Mouse, Minnie

Mouse, Horace Horsecollar and

Clarabelle Cow1 performing another

song and dance show. Mickey and his gang's animated shorts

by this point routinely featured song and dance numbers. It

begins as a typical Mickey cartoon of the time, but what would

set this short apart from all that had come before was the

appearance of a new character, whose behavior served as a

running gag. Dippy Dawg, as he was named by Disney artists,

was a member of the audience. He constantly irritated his

fellow spectators by noisily crunching peanuts and laughing

loudly, till two of those fellow spectators knocked him out with

their mallets (and then did the same exact laugh as he did).

This early version of Goofy had other differences with the later

1 More information regarding Disney characters can be obtained at

http://disney.go.com/vault/archives/characters_ai.html

Imagen 2

and more developed ones besides the name. He was an old

man with a white beard, a puffy tail and no trousers, shorts, or

undergarments. But the short introduced Goofy's distinct

laughter. This laughter was provided by Pinto Colvig. A

considerably younger Dippy Dawg then appeared in The

Whoopee Party, first released on September 17, 1932, as a

party guest and a friend of Mickey and his gang. Dippy Dawg

made a total of four appearances in 1932 and two more in

1933, but most of them were mere cameos. But by his

seventh appearance, in Orphan's Benefit first released on

August 11, 1934, he gained the new name "Goofy" and

became a regular member of the gang along with new

additions Donald Duck and Clara Cluck.

Trio years with Mickey and Donald

Mickey's Service Station directed by Ben Sharpsteen, first

released on March 16, 1935, was the first of the classic

"Mickey, Donald, and Goofy" comedy shorts. Those films had

the trio trying to cooperate in performing a certain assignment

given to them. Early on they became separated from each

other. Then the short's focus started alternating between each

of them facing the problems at hand, each in their own way

and distinct style of comedy. The end of the short would

reunite the three to

share the fruits of

their efforts, failure

more often than

success. Clock

Cleaners, first

released on October

15, 1937, and

Imagen 3

Lonesome Ghosts, first released on December 24, 1937, are

usually considered the highlights of this series and animated

classics.

Progressively during the series Mickey's part diminished in

favor of Donald, Goofy, and Pluto. The reason for this was

simple. Between the easily frustrated Donald and Pluto and

the always-living-in-a-world-of-his-own Goofy, Mickey—who

became progressively gentler and more laid-back—seemed to

act as the straight-man of the trio. The Studio's artists found

that it had become easier coming up with new gags for Goofy

or Donald than Mickey, to a point that Mickey's role had

become unnecessary. Polar Trappers, first released on June

17, 1938, was the first film to feature Goofy and Donald as a

duo. The short features the duo as partners and owners of

"Donald and Goofy Trapping Co." They have settled in the

Arctic for an unspecified period of time, to capture live

walruses to bring back to civilization. Their food supplies

consist of canned beans. The focus shifts between Goofy

trying to set traps for walruses and Donald trying to catch

penguins to use as food — both with the same lack of

success. Mickey would return in The Whalers, first released in

August 19, 1938, but this and also Tugboat Mickey, released

on April 26, 1940 would be the last two shorts to feature all

three characters as a team.

Breakoff into solo series

Goofy next starred at his first solo cartoon Goofy and Wilbur

directed by Dick Huemer, first

released in March 17, 1939. The

short featured Goofy fishing with

Imagen 4

the help of Wilbur, his pet grasshopper. In 1939, Colvig had a

fallout with Disney and left the studio, leaving Goofy without a

voice. According to Leonard Maltin this is what caused the

How to... cartoons of the 1940s in which Goofy had little

dialogue, and a narrator (often John McLeish) was used (they

would also reuse Colvig's voice in recording or hire a voice

actor to imitate it). In the cartoons Goofy would demonstrate,

clumsily but always determined and never frustrated, how to

do everything from snow ski, to sleeping, to football, to riding

a horse. The Goofy How to... cartoons worked so well they

that they became a staple format, and are still used in current

Goofy shorts, the most recent being How to Hook Up Your

Home Theatre (2007).

Later, starting with How to Play Baseball (1942), Goofy

starred in a series of cartoons

where every single character in

the cartoon was a different

version of Goofy. This took

Goofy out of the role of just

being a clumsy cartoon dog and

into an Everyman figure. Colvig

returned to Disney in 1944 and

resumed the voice of Goofy.

Many of the Goofy cartoons

were directed by Jack Kinney.

The Everyman years

The 1950s saw Goofy

transformed into a family man

going through the trials of

Imagen 5

everyday life, such as dieting, giving up smoking, and the

problems of raising children. Walt Disney himself came up

with this idea, hoping it would put personality back into the

character which he felt was lost when Goofy was merely a

crowd of extras. Interestingly, Goofy is never referred to as

"Goofy" during this period. While every cartoon continued with

the opening, "Walt Disney presents Goofy" before each

cartoon's title, he was usually called "George Geef" in the

cartoons' dialogue.

When the stories featured Goofy as multiple characters, then

he had numerous other names as well. In addition, the 50's

Goofy shorts gave Goofy a makeover. He was more

intelligent, had smaller eyes with eyebrows, often his whole

body was flesh-colored instead of just his face (while the rest

was black), and sometimes had a normal voice. He even

lacked his droopy ears, the external pair of teeth and white

gloves in some shorts.

Later appearances

After the 1965 educational film Goofy's Freeway Troubles,

Goofy was all but retired except for cameos, and a brief

appearance in Disney/Amblin's Who Framed Roger Rabbit, as

well as in Sport Goofy in Soccermania which was originally

intended to be released theatrically in 1984, but was aired as

a 1987 TV special instead. With Colvig dead, Goofy was then

voiced with different voice actors until Bill Farmer became the

official voice. In the 1990s Goofy got his own TV series called

Goof Troop. In the show Goofy lives with his son Max and his

cat Waffles, and they live next door to Pete and his family.

Goof Troop eventually led to Goofy starring in his own movies:

A Goofy Movie (in 1995) and An Extremely Goofy Movie (in

2000). You can learn more about these feature films in page X

One aspect of Goofy's life that is never clarified in the

theatrical films is the status of his wife, Max's mother. While

Goofy is clearly depicted as a single custodial parent in both

films, and at the end of An Extremely Goofy Movie he begins

a romance with the character Sylvia Marpole, it is never made

clear whether he is divorced or widowed.

Goofy reverted back to his traditional personality on Mickey

Mouse Works and appeared as head waiter on House of

Mouse (2001 to 2004). Goofy's son Max Goof also appeared

in House of Mouse as the nightclub's valet, so that Goofy

juggled not only his conventional antics but also the father-

role displayed in Goof Troop and A Goofy Movie. In both

Mickey Mouse Works and House of Mouse Goofy also

seemed to have a crush on Clarabelle Cow, as he asks her on

a date in the House of Mouse episode "Super Goof" and is

being stalked by the bovine in the Mickey Mouse Works

cartoon "How To Be a Spy." Clarabelle has been noted as

Horace Horsecollar's fiance in early decades, but according to

comics from the 1960s and 1970s and more recent cartoons

like "House of Mouse," "Mouseworks," and Mickey, Donald,

Goofy: The Three Musketeers, Goofy and Clarabelle seem to

have affections for one another; perhaps as an attempt for

Disney to give Goofy a girlfriend to match his two male co-

stars. Later in An Extremely Goofy Movie, he gains a girlfriend

named Sylvia Marpole.

Goofy also appears in the children's television series, Mickey

Mouse Clubhouse, with his trademark attire and personality.

Goofy appeared in The Lion King 1½. Recently, Goofy starred

in a new theatrical cartoon short called How to Hook Up Your

Home Theater, which premiered at the Ottawa International

Animation Festival. The short received a positive review from

animation historian Jerry Beck and then had wide release on

December 21, 2007 in front of National Treasure: Book of

Secrets.

Goofy specifics and Trivia

Feature Films

A Goofy Movie is an animated film, produced by DisneyToon

Studios and released in theaters during Spring of 1995 by

Walt Disney Pictures. The film features characters from The

Disney Afternoon television series Goof Troop.

The film's plot revolves around the father-son relationship

between Goofy and Max as they struggle to find common

ground despite Max's persistence in having his own life and

winning the girl of his dreams.

Director Kevin Lima said that "Instead of just keeping Goofy

one-dimensional as he's been in the past, we wanted to give

an emotional side that would

add to the emotional arc of

the story. We wanted the

audience to see his feelings

instead of just his antics."

The main characters of this

film, specifically Goofy, Max

Goof, Pete and PJ, are based Imagen 6

on their incarnations in the Goof Troop television show, albeit

slightly older. In the television series, Max and PJ were middle

school students, but in this film they are portrayed as older

teenagers. However, other characters that had been

established in Goof Troop do not appear in this film, such as

Pete's wife Peg, his daughter Pistol, and pets Waffles and

Chainsaw. Goofy and Pete retain their classic looks from the

1940s cartoons as opposed to the looks that they had in the

1950s cartoons and Goof Troop.

Although based upon a Disney TV series, production on A

Goofy Movie was handled by Walt Disney Feature Animation

instead of Walt Disney Television Animation. Pre-production

was done at the main WDFA studio in California starting as

early as mid-1993. The animation work was done at WDFA's

then-new satellite shop (formerly the Brizzi studio) in Paris,

France supervised by Paul and Gaëtan Brizzi, as well as at

the Walt Disney Animation studio in Sydney, Australia (later

DisneyToon Studios), with their sequences directed by Steve

Moore. Additional clean-up animation was done by Phoenix

Animation Studios in Canada, and digital ink and paint by the

Pixibox studio in France.

A sequel to this film was released in 2000, titled An Extremely

Goofy Movie. The sequel takes place some time after this film,

involving Max's freshman year in college. Characters that

returned for the sequel were Goofy, Max, PJ, Pete, and

Bobby, but most notable is that Roxanne, Max's love interest,

is absent from the sequel and not referenced at all. However,

Roxanne did appear in the television series, House of Mouse

(specifically the episode "Max's Embarrassing Date"), where

she was voiced by Grey DeLisle instead of Kellie Martin.

A Goofy Movie garnered mixed opinions from critics, and

received a 54% rating from Rotten Tomatoes2. Variety's Todd

McCarthy criticized the film's score, calling the six featured

songs "unmemorable". He also felt that the personality of

Goofy's character, while agreeable enough in support, proved

a bit over the top for a headliner, and that "by any reasonable

reckoning, he's distinctly overbearing and selfish, and

responds with a bland dismissal to any opinion offered up by

his son." However, McCarthy praised the film's technical

aspects, citing them as "crisp and clean". Louis Black of The

Austin Chronicle summed up his review by saying the film was

"bland, a barely television-length cartoon stretched out to fill a

feature, and not much fun." The film was nominated for "Best

Animated Feature" in the production categories and "Best

Production Design", "Best Storyboarding", "Best Music", and

"Best Animation" in the individual categories at the 23rd Annie

Awards. According to Box Office Mojo, A Goofy Movie

grossed $35,348,597 at the United States box office, and was

the 51st highest-grossing domestic film in 1995.

2 Rotten Tomatoes specializes on gathering reviews for recently released films. Visit them at

www.rottentomatoes.com

Goofy in Video Games

Goofy’s most famous appearence in video games is in the

game series “Kingdom Hearts3”. Goofy is captain of the royal

guard at Disney Castle in the Kingdom Hearts video game

series. Averse to using actual weapons, Goofy fights with a

shield. This job doesn't involve much, since the castle is

usually a peaceful place, until King Mickey disappears.

Following a letter the King left, he and

Donald (the court magician) meet Sora

and embark on a quest with him to find

the King and Sora's missing friends. In

the game series, Goofy still suffers

from being the butt of comic relief, but

also is the constant voice of optimism

and, surprisingly, selectively

perceptive, often noticing things others

miss and keeping his cool when Sora

and Donald lose it. When Sora,

Donald, and Goofy enter the realm

known as Timeless River, Goofy states

that the world looks familiar; a reference to his cartoons done

in the early to mid 1930s. At many times in the Kingdom

Hearts series, Goofy is shown to still be his clumsy self,

however, in Kingdom Hearts II, he is very keen to details and

has very accurate assumptions of certain things. For example,

he was the first to figure out why Organization XIII was after

the Beast, and he was the first to see through Fa Mulan's

disguise and discovery that Mulan was actually a woman

dressed as a male soldier. There were even several instances

3 Illustrated is the box art for the second game in the series

Imagen 7

where Goofy seemed to have more common sense then Sora

and Donald, even saying they should "look before we leap"

when Sora and Donald saw Mushu's shadow resembling a

dragon, that Sora was mistaken for a Heartless.

Around the middle of Kingdom Hearts II, in possibly one of the

series' most mature scenes, Goofy pushes King Mickey out of

the way of an oncoming boulder and is hit directly on the head

instead, at which point he falls to the ground and lands

against a wall, supposedly dead. However, Goofy later

catches up to the heroes completely unscathed, and explains

that he gets "bonked" on the head all the time, perhaps a

reference to many of his cartoons

Confusion concerning Goofy and Pluto

Disney has needed to deal with a certain amount of confusion

concerning the fact that the anthropomorphic Goofy, and dog-

like Pluto often appear on screen together, yet are the same

species. On their web site, it's stated that "Goofy was

originally created as

Dippy Dawg" and "was

created as a human

character, as opposed

to Pluto, who was a

pet, so [Goofy] walked

upright and had a

speaking voice". This

problem was

humorously illustrated

in the movie Stand By

Me in which one of the boys ponders, "Mickey's a mouse,

Donald's a duck, and Pluto's a dog. What's Goofy?" There is

Imagen 8

also an episode of the Disney Channel series Even Stevens

called "Scrub Day" where in Louis' rallying-the-troops speech

he wonders why Goofy got to walk and talk and Pluto has to

eat from a dog bowl.

Illustration Index Imagen 1 .............................................................................................................................................. 3

Imagen 2 .............................................................................................................................................. 4

Imagen 3 .............................................................................................................................................. 5

Imagen 4 .............................................................................................................................................. 6

Imagen 5 .............................................................................................................................................. 7

Imagen 6 ............................................................................................................................................ 10

Imagen 7 ............................................................................................................................................ 13

Imagen 8 ............................................................................................................................................ 14

Keyword Index

A Goofy Movie, 10 Art Babbitt, 3 Bill Farmer, 8 Donald and Goofy Trapping Co, 6 George Geef, 8 Goofy, 3

Goofy and Wilbur, 6 Kingdom Hearts, 13 Mickey, Donald, and Goofy, 5 Mickey's Revue, 4 Orphan's Benefit, 5 Pluto, 14

Referencias Wikipedia [homepage on the web]; USA [Accesed on February 19, 2010]; Goofy;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goofy#1960s

Disney Archives [homepage on the web]; USA [Accesed on February 19, 2010]; Goofy;

http://disney.go.com/vault/archives/characterstandard/goofy/goofy.html

Wikipedia [homepage on the web]; USA [Accesed on February 19, 2010]; A Goofy Movie;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Goofy_Movie