Trivia / Goofy

• Actor Allusion:
  • Once or twice in the old cartoons, Goofy would be humming the song "The World Owes Me a Living", the song of the Silly Symphonies short "The Grasshopper and the Ants", the eponymous grasshopper also being voiced by Goofy's actor, Pinto Colvig. This song is also very applicable to Goofy's early happy-go-lucky nature.
  • In his very first solo cartoon, "Goofy and Wilbur" (where, ironically, he is not voiced by Colvig (see The Other Darrin below)), he also has a pet grasshopper named Wilbur, which is most likely an allusion to this as well.
• Creator Backlash: Director Jack Kinney disliked the "George Geef" cartoons of 1951, calling them "disasters" in a later interview.
• Executive Meddling: According to some of the Disney staff members, Walt Disney himself^note who, according to Harry Tytle, found the Goofy cartoons "no good for merchandising" tried to give more personality to Goofy by retooling him into The Everyman, with the gag-based nature of the older "How-To" cartoons giving way to Slice of Life scenarios. As noted in Creator Backlash above, director Jack Kinney, for one, did not like the move.
• Follow the Leader:
  • A few of Disney's staff members admitted to cribbing the narrator for the "How To..." cartoons from, of all things, Tex Avery's travelogue spoofs. Avery was reportedly very flattered.
  • George Lucas based Jar Jar Binks on Goofy.
• God Never Said That: During an interview done in the wake of the publication of his biography on Walt Disney, Neal Gabler claimed that Walt "absolutely hated" the Goofy cartoons, thinking they were nothing but "stupid cartoons with gags tied together." However, there is no primary source to confirm that Walt actually said that. The fact that Neal Gabler didn't cite all his sources—a major flaw for a biographer—doesn't help.^note If anything, Harry Tytle, who actually worked with Walt, is a more reliable source on the matter; according to his book One of Walt's Boys, in a chapter called "Shorts Go Out of Style," Walt's main issue with the Goofy cartoons was the difficulties they posed during the waning years of The Golden Age of Animation, especially when it came to merchandising.
  • To make matters worse, there is a recent rumor on Reddit which claims that one of the notes Walt wrote towards the end of his life reads "Kill Goofy." Of all of Walt's notes on his desk (most of which indeed date back to his final years), not one of them says anything of the kind.
• The Other Darrin: Has been voiced by many different actors (Pinto Colvig, Hannes Schroll^note Who originally provided the famous Goofy Holler, Bob Jackman, George Johnson, Hal Smith, Tony Pope, Will Ryan, Jack Wagner and his current actor, Bill Farmer) over the course of his career.

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