So if Pluto Is a Dog, What Is Goofy?

At last, a new cartoon may shed some light on this very difficult, puzzling conundrum...



I mean, what the hell are these creatures? Animal/human/alien hybrids? The missing link between dog and man? Some genetic experiment gone horribly wrong?

The world demands answers!

New Mickey Mouse Cartoon Weighs In on the Pluto vs. Goofy Paradox

 

Snoop DogG

 

^Exactly what I thought of (Stand By Me).

 

Pluto is the outlier. Not anthropomorphized. Doesn't speak.

 

I swear, there's a cartoon where Mickey is annoyed by house pests and lays out some mouse traps in the kitchen.

And I've told this story before: in Duck Tales, if Donald Duck & the nephews went to the beach, they all wore bathing suits. Anywhere else, they wear sailor hats and shirts, but no pants. I asked the producer, "so why the bathing suits? They're ducks!" And she shook her head and said, "we decided that if they had no suits, they'd be naked, and we can't show that."

So there are rules. And Pluto has to live with a collar on in the backyard and eat dog food, but Goofy gets to live inside a house and drive a car.

 

ah ha! THAT'S HYSTERICAL...MICKEY HAS NO MIRRORS...

 

Goofy had a panel van with no windows on the sides. He'd pull up to grade schools and offer the kids wall-hanging murals of dogs playing poker (Cassius Marcellus Coolidge, 1894). Pluto was in the back - a regretable planet, ready to roll tape. They meant no harm, though it was all very subversive. Goofy would take off his dog mask and frighten the children with his horribly scarred visage - the victim of being peppered with German shrapnel during the First World War.

Sometimes Goofy pondered if he was more dog than man. The mask had started out as a means to cover his disfigured face, at the same time entertaining little children. As time passed, though, Goofy developed the overhwelming sensation that he was too scared to eat at the table. He felt the need to eat out of a dog bowl. Steak Wellington, lime custard, all went into the bowl.

In his unpublished autobiography, Goofy: Only in Name, Goofy claims to have first experienced these canine sympathies under a heroin haze, as Pluto began to speak to him about communist priciples, Marxists views, and CIA agents imbeded into Disney's infrastructure. At the time of his death, in 1967, a Carcano rifle was found in Goofy's Scottsdale, Arizona residence, with the name of Pinto Golvig written on the reciept. The rifle was purchased under the name Jack Leonard Ruby, from Dallas, Texas.

That's all that's known.

 

It's late night here and I'm a bit tired, so sorry for my ignorance but... What the F is this!?



Somehow I think I saw this before but can't figure out where.

 

I guess Goofy is a human dog and Pluto is a dog dog.^^

 

I worked on the Chipmunks show every week for 4 years for Ruby-Spears ("Rooby Rears!") in the 1980s, and the producer and I used to always laugh as to what the hell the Chimpunks were. His theory was the humanoid/chipmunk hybrid, but there were still a plethora of troubling unanswered questions, like why a single male like David Seville was allowed to adopt them, where the Chipettes came from, who their real parents were, and so on. There are many mysteries about cartoons, some of which we may never truly understand.

 

Well, isn't that (kids) fantasy after all? It's basically the same with things like talking sponges or yellow skinned people with big billiard ball-like eyes.^^

 

I believe that is an ottoman/dog from Beast’s castle.

 

Ah, from the Beast film! I guessed that, too. Man, I watched that film the last time just before I entered primary school.^^

 

We’ve had a lot of dogs. Our current queen of the house has her own Facebook page and communicates clearly on a wide variety of needs and wishes. We’ve had other dearly beloved dogs who only really cared about bones and food and being petted.

So Goofy and Pluto can both be dogs... separate but equal. Vive la difference.

 

Goofy is also a dog. I've never even questioned it. Dogs come in many shapes and sizes and they all have their own individual 'personalities.'

Plus, if we can accept the idea of a talking dog what's so weird about the idea that some talk and some don't?

 

Goofy, is science experiment gone very wrong..

 

I was surprised that was an actual Disney cartoon. The violence level reminded me more of the Warner Bros. cartoons.

 

Cruel dichotomy. Still love WB releases.

 

Naaaa, I continue to insist that the best fantasy still has to observe the rules of drama and conflict, plus it has to make sense. I point to the Harry Potter novels as examples of stories where there are very strict rules about how and why magic can be employed, and there's certain things they can't do: they can't bring people back from the dead, they can't make food out of thin air, stuff like that. Even in cartoons, there's a structure and a sense to it. (And I have no problem with "Warner Bros.' Physics," where the Coyote can run off a cliff, pause in the air to glance at the camera and wave goodbye, and then plummet to his apparent death.)

Ehhhh... they tried a "separate but equal" thing with people a few years back, and that didn't work out too well. Just sayin'.

 

I assumed Goofy was exposed to atomic radiation while in the womb and is therefor obviously a mutant just like the big mouse in pants. What I want to know is in Donald Duck where did Huey, Dewey and that other guy come from... and where do the eggs on Grandma ducks farm that they have at breakfast come from?

 

Other people have pointed out bacon-and-eggs breakfast scenes in Duck Tales and some of the Donald Duck comic books before.

 

That short about Fifi is a grab bag of the things that irk me about contemporary animation: manic pace, absurd situations.

 

I love it when focus groups do bad things to corporate icons....



...meanwhile, how has this not shown up on Cartoon Brew yet...?