COMPLETE GOOFY: WALT DISNEY TREASURES LIMITED EDITION - DVD review

"'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.

"Hold That Pose," 1950, and "Two-Gun Goofy," 1953, return briefly to the older style of detailed backdrops and a recognizable Goof, but they are exceptions to the rule. Then, after 1953 there's an unexplained jump of nearly eight years with no Goofy releases until 1961 and the final Goofy cartoon, "Aquamania." This last effort is quite different again from anything that went before, displaying the cheap qualities reminiscent of a made-for-television product. Maybe the art work was meant to look rough intentionally as part of some weird artistic style; I don't know. I do know I didn't care for the feature's appearance, and it seemed a sad way to end a series that started out so beautifully rendered.

Video:
The earliest Goofy cartoons are the most visually attractive, with their elaborate scenic precision, but it's here that the colors are very slightly less vivid and bright than the later transfers, and it's here that the most (but not much) grain is evident. From the late forties onward, the colors are more brilliant and the screen is more free of grain. These are relative differences, naturally, and even the earlier Goofy cartoons are quite lovely to look at, some of them announced as restored to their original hues.

Audio:
The sonics are consistent throughout all the Goofy soundtracks: clean, clear monaural. Although no great shakes by today's surround standards, the sound is free of background noise and reproduces the on-screen shenanigans with consummate ease. I daresay, the sound we are hearing today is better than what theater audiences heard fifty or sixty years ago, given the better quality of our modern electronics and speaker systems and the subsequent noise reduction applied to the audio.

Extras:
Both discs in the set contain Goofy cartoons, presented either alphabetically or in the order in which they were made. In addition, both discs contain introductions by film historian and critic Leonard Maltin, who not only gives us information on how and why many of the shorts were made but offers apologies for a few of Disney's depictions of Japanese, Mexican, and Native American stereotypes, as well as for things like making light of school violence. It all has to do with the cultural expectations of the era in which they were made, he explains, and the cartoons in question were all made in good faith and in good fun. In today's age of political correctness, his justifications may or may not sit well with some viewers. Disc one also includes two, brief, five-to-six minute featurettes, the first called "The Essential Goof," about the creation of the Goofy character, and the second, "Pinto Colvig: The Man Behind the Goof," about the fellow who created the voice of the Goof. There is also a menu of program selections, with English as the only spoken language and English captions for the hearing impaired.

Disc two gives us the remainder of the cartoons, plus a fourteen-minute featurette, "A Conversation with Goofy's Voice: Bill Farmer," conducted by Leonard Maltin. Farmer is the current voice of Goofy, a job he tells us he's held since 1986. Then, there are three galleries: "Goofy Through the Years," a poster gallery, and a memorabilia gallery. The discs come in a double keep-case enclosed in an attractively embossed silver-metal box.

Parting Thoughts:
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. Of course, it would also have been nice to have some of the earlier thirties' cartoons, as well, that featured the Goof as a secondary character, but for that you must get the Disney Treasures sets of "Mickey Mouse in Living Color" and "Mickey Mouse in Black and White." The Disney folks must have so much of this stuff in their vaults from over seventy years of filmmaking, they can probably continue issuing Disney Treasures for the next seven decades and have some things left over. Here's hoping.