Goofy was never older than on the first day of his life.

Ninety years ago "Mickey's Revue" was released in American cinemas, a short animated film which, as was so often the case in the early years of Disney productions, revolved around a concert conducted by Mickey Mouse.

And which is inconsiderately disturbed by some listener.

In this case, an old hillbilly dog ​​wearing wire-rimmed glasses, noisily munching his peanuts and letting his chuckles of laughter sound even louder.

Andrew Plathaus

Responsible editor for literature and literary life.

  • Follow I follow

This was Goofy's first appearance, and its main purpose was to showcase the voice talents of a voice actor named Pinto Colvig, who has made some unforgettable sounds for Walt Disney.

The most characteristic of these was Goofy's laugh.

From Dippy Dawg to Goofy

This character was beaten up in the film by the upset neighbors, but was never addressed by name;

however, in the script, she was referred to as "Dippy Dawg" (crazy dog).

Their first artist was Art Babbit, a Disney employee who would later fall out with his boss while leading the great strike of 1941.

Pinto Colvig had already resigned three years earlier.

The two actual fathers of the character were gone, but the public considered Walt Disney to be the inventor of all the characters that appeared in his films.

Goofy would go on to become one of the most famous.

He got his final name ("goofy

"

which translates to "silly") in the 1934 short film "Orphan's Benefit," which derailed a charity gala directed by Mickey Mouse.

But not because of Goofy;

This time he is even a participant on stage: as a clumsy dancer in a ballet trio, and accordingly he had mutated into a young man.

In the announcement of the number, his new name is mentioned for the first time: Micky introduces him as Goofy.

In the years to come, both would become inseparable screen partners.

Third in the group at the time was Donald Duck.

He and Goofy had adopted character traits from Mickey Mouse that Walt Disney no longer seemed appropriate for his now world-famous star.

A crowd pleaser couldn't gloat;

henceforth that was Donald instead.

And not clumsy either;

this role has now been taken over by Goofy.

As a result, the main character became more and more boring, while her two companions were sure to get the laughs of the cinema audience.

Consequently, both got their own film series in the late thirties, in which they now played the leading roles.

Since then, Goofy has made almost sixty such solo appearances, and the most successful of them owe an astonishing change of image: the silly hillbilly became a middle-class existence that repeatedly fails due to its own expertise.

"How to Ride a Horse" was the prelude to this in 1950, and the last appearance of this kind to date was only in 2021: "How to Stay at Home", in which Goofy tries to cope with the isolation rules of the corona pandemic.

This prime role as an unsuccessful advisor is limited to the films.

In the comics, Goofy is sort of frozen in his mid-1930s and continues to be the always clumsy partner of the clean-cut Mickey Mouse.

That's because it wasn't until Goofy's beginning success as a movie character that it was taken into comics, in the Mickey Mouse serialized stories drawn by Floyd Gottfredson for newspapers, which were adventures, not humoresques.

There, unlike Donald Duck, he never became popular enough to get his own series.

So he stayed loyal to Mickey in the comics, and Goofy's innocent presence only makes the infallible mouse bearable at all.

No wonder he was the one chosen among all the Disney characters when it came to creating a parody of the superhero comics.

1965 saw the first appearance of Supergoof, the red one-piece clad secret existence who owes his ability to fly and other powers to consuming a certain type of peanut - a very funny throwback to the character's very first appearance in May 1932.

The discrepancy between goofy Goofy and his heroic second identity was so well received that historical figures were embodied (and made fun of) by Goofy in the 1970s: Leonardo da Vinci, Christopher Columbus, Johannes Gutenberg or Ludwig van Beethoven, to name just a few .

You can do anything with Goofy.

And the fact that the artists do the same thing kept him young.

You can't tell he's ninety years old.