![]() Not to mention there's a significant mismatch between subject and format that results, because the structure of a slapstick cartoon feature implies certain emotional territory is going to be okay, and the out-and-out rancidity of A Goofy Movie sure as hell isn't it. In, I hasten to point out, a children's movie, children not being the chief target audience for lacerating depictions of enraged teens. That's underselling it, even: the scenario, coupled with Marsden's unexpectedly strident performance, result in a portrayal of teenage angst and resentment that's just so bitter, deep and dark and acidic and unpleasantly hurtful, just to watch it. My overriding problem with A Goofy Movie is like my problem with Goof Troop, only more intense: the central Goofy/Max relationship just isn't that appealing. So the trip starts out with an oblivious, accident-prone dad and a furious teenage boy, and things, as they will, have to get bad before they get good again. The solution, proposed by Goofy's mean-spirited "best friend" Pete (Jim Cummings), is a father-son road trip and this only angers Max all the more, as he'd finally ginned up enough fortitude to ask Roxanne out already, and to excuse himself, fabricated an absurd lie about his and Goofy's destination. For, you see, Max (Jason Marsden) was trying to impress this girl, Roxanne (Kellie Martin), and ended up virtually destroying a school assembly in a way that made him, for the first time, popular among his peers but his father (Bill Farmer, still the official voice of Goofy, as he has been since the mid-'80s) heard only a garbled version of this story from the angry principal (Wallace Shawn), and has it mind that his son is on a short road to the most cruel and vicious sort of juvenile delinquency. 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. 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).
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