This movie is one of the primary inspirations for the musical, VoiceZ, I’m working on now. A Goofy Movie was the first movie I bought with my own money, and I did so on a whim while walking through a grocery store. From then on, Goofy would become my favorite Disney character. I began to collect old Goofy shorts recorded on stacks of VHS tapes. I still have a couple surviving to this day, though the quality of the video is hardly watchable. A Goofy Movie came out in 1995, in the middle of what I would call the Golden Age of Disney. But it was different than all those other movies, in that it had a contemporary setting and gave a home life to one of their most well known characters.
I have the words to the songs memorized, the lines of dialogue are carved inside the walls of my cranium and the characters are as normalized to me as my own family. I’ve grown up with this movie, and it’s grown up with me. It doesn’t hurt that it still has a very serious following from avid fans. I want to say that the following is different than those of other nostalgic cartoon memories. It’s morphed into something completely different for me. While I can watch Lion King and laugh along at like I did before, it doesn’t change as a film. I remember parts rather than absorb and dissect them.
One of my favorite new spins on the film is a video that transforms it into a David Lynch style mystery. This Lynchian spin on an old favorite is surreal and spectacular in its handling of David Lynch’s style and the utterly bizarre scenes from A Goofy Movie itself.
I’m tempted to do a full write-up analyzing the film and all the motifs it carries with it. It’s rife for picking, but I’ve never actually attempted it. I tend to spare the things I enjoy most from any form of critical analysis, but I think A Goofy Movie’s time has come.
July 18, 2009, 5:47pm
