This week, we jump the shark on this segment for sure by going all corporate sell-out, with one Goofy, a/k/a George Geef a/k/a Dippy Dawg, the “good-natured” suburbanite “everyman” that Disney added to the canon along with an anthropomorphic effeminate rodent and a lisping bird (I realize that Warner Bros. also featured a lisping bird, but that bird, to his credit, is affirmatively mean-spirited, perennially pithhhhed off, and can’t hide Mel Blanc’s underlying New York accent… and let’s not even go near Warner Bros. house rodent…).
Goofy is actually quintessentially “American” (as Karl Rove would define the term): he is “optimistic,” he is “fun,” he is easily satisfied with good-sounding explanations even if the reality of them is somewhat more complicated, he is “happy-go-lucky” (mostly because he is quite lucky to be alive, let alone apparently successful, given just how fundamentally incompetent he is at almost all aspects of being alive), and what was that one again…. oh yes: he is incompetent. Remind you’all of anyone else named George? Anyway…
Americans find this amusing… not in the sense that we laugh at the great Jackie Chan, for being apparently klutz-like while actually in fact being a brilliant acrobat, but because he so wonderfully reminds us of our self-satisfied selves. The Goofster… just doesn’t bring much to the table, other than “a sunny disposition,” and yet, that seems to be enough. Our system is so forgiving (at least if you’re from the right breeding, and Goofy appears to be an Ohio Wirehaired Whitebread), that a basic command of our official language (query if you even need that?) and “the right attitude” would seem be enough to assure one a satisfying bourgeois lifestyle.
America: what a country.
tdog
Does Dog the Bounty Hunter count as a talking dog?