Well it’s time to go back to the well of the Disney Afternoon. It’s something I’ve gone back to many times because well of a few reasons. It’s always fun to talk about the shows made by Disney regardless of how good they are. The second reason is that The Disney Afternoon was something I would watch the hell out of. Or at least watch the shows ON the Disney Afternoon a lot. DuckTales, Darkwing Duck and Chip N Dale Rescue Rangers being my favourites. I watched all of the Disney Afternoon shows, even Quack Pack and Mighty Ducks. The stuff no one cared about!
So let’s get into the history of Goofy! He first appeared in a Mickey Mouse cartoon all the way back in 1932. That’s right ninety one years! Originally called Dippy Dawg. He was created by Walt Disney, Wilfred Jackson, and Tom Palmer. Art Babbitt came in and helped develop the character further. Pretty much turning him into a goofy hick. Goofy then got a series of cartoons in 1939. These changed a bit in the 1950s where Goofy was given a red headed child and I guess that’s what inspired the creator of Goof Troop, Michael Peraza, Jr, A Cuban-American animator.
The premise of the show had Goofy returning to his home town Spoonerville with his cool early 90s son Max (voiced by Dana Hill who voiced a LOT of cartoons and was the second Audrey Griswald in National Lampoon’s European Vacation a movie that I like regardless of what many others say. It’s fun!!) and meeting up with Pete, you know the big scary dog guy from the old Mickey Mouse cartoons. Yeah he’s now a used car salesman and has a family. Peg, Pistol and PJ. These characters would have a series of pretty wild adventures. One involved a dragon like creature!
One thing I must talk about is how great the theme song is. It is very 1990s. It even has a smooth black man voice in it. Think Barry White. It is very smooth. It goes YEAH at the end in only a way that a smooth black man could. They are very good at making any word cool as hell with their voice. I wish I had a smooth black man voice. Anyway, the show lasted for one year with one syndicated season and one season on ABC. It lasted from September 5th to December 5th, 1992. It lasted for a few years until something like Gargoyles took its place. In 1995 they made a fantastic movie called A Goofy Movie which was like one of the few good things Pauly Shore ever made.
So now that we know about Goofy, and we know about the show, we are going to get into The Final Episode of this series! It’s called “Clan of the Cave Goof” you know after that novel “Clan of the Cave Bear” that had a movie with Darryl Hannah in it. I miss that lady. She was really great in movies and I wish she’d come back to the movie screen. Enough about things and people I miss we need to go and discuss this Final Episode. Anyway apparenly (because I remember watching this show a lot and I do not remember these episodes) there would be episodes that took on the history of the Goof Family. They did episodes on Robin Hood, Sherlock Holmes, Elliott Ness (this means Batman AND Goofy were both Elliott Ness at one point. How cool is that?) and yes there was an episode where they were Cavemen! One that made me want to check out the other history episodes because they couldn’t have been as bad as this one.
Yep, this is another Final Episode that ends the show on a sour note because the episode is not very good. I never expected so many Final Episodes just be either blah to absolutely terrible. This is better than a clip show (except the Webster clip show. That one is amazing.) but not by much. It starts off with Goofy creating a machine that opens up the soda whenever he pets his cat Waffles. So then Max comes home and Goofy reminds him of the dentist appointment he has. Max complains and then Goofy brings out the Goofy Family photo album! I like the fact that they have a picture of Caveman Goof.
Caveman Goof is apparently an inventor, just having invented the Boomerang which he throws into Chief Pete’s cave hut. Pete fixes the Boomerang and throws it screaming IT WONT COME BACK NOW and it does. I also had a Boomerang as a child and I could NEVER get the thing to work. I get the feeling the Boomerang was faulty. Or I was just really bad at or. Hell let’s just go in the middle and say it was both. Now we go to Chief Pete’s cave hut and we see Peg’s ancestor. Also is it just weird that you always find a person that looks just like your wife all over time? Wouldn’t that mean they were related somehow? I don’t know why I brought that up.
So she brings up fire and Chief Pete pretty much forces Caveman Goof to come up with fire. By threat of being eaten by the one and only meat eating Brontosaurus ever! He tells him about the Cave of Knowledge and Goofy goes to find it. Which he does after some goofy like antics. He finds out that the keeper of the Cave of Knowledge is Pistol’s historical counterpart. Weird how shes not Pete and Peg’s daughter in this version but whatever. I’m thinking way too much over this episode. Anyway she gives him a book about making Fire and then we get a voice over about how to create fire like in those old How-To Goofy shorts. Sadly these scenes were not as funny as those old cartoons but hey I like that they referenced them.
After the How-To scenes happen, Goofy goes back to the Cave of Knowledge and he is sick and tired and Pistol gives him a nice bowl of Chicken Soup. He puts tons of pepper in it and then he gets fire breath. He sets fire to the table and viola, he now invented fire. Which he brings to Chief Pete. You now might be asking your asking yourself “What in the fuck does this have to do with going to the dentist”. You’ll see. You get the idea that two guys on the writing team had two ideas that worked for 11 minutes each and then went what the hell why don’t we just mush these two together. We gotta get seventy eight of these things out in one year! Just remember no matter what the TV show is, one episode had to be the clear winner for the worst and I think for Goof Troop this just might be it.
So Peg starts cooking like a lunatic. Cakes and pies and all kinds of sweets. Chief Pete eats every one of them and gets a toothache. He goes to the dentist and is scared away because he thought the watering tool for plants was actually a drill. He then goes to Caveman Goof to get him to help. They do a bunch of stuff that just flew right out of my head the second I saw them. It ends with Caveman Goof making a wheel for a cart so that Pete can have his tooth pulled by putting rope around the tooth and then around a tree. It doesn’t work and he’s right back at the dentist. Yes I know I skipped over stuff but you try to make this D- material into a workable blog post.
We then go back to 1992 when Max is all amped up to go to the dentist now and Goofy is like “We should ask the Dentist to see me. I think I drank too much sodey pop” as he holds his face. Wah wah music does not play but really should have.
FINAL VERDICT: This was a pretty dull Final Episode. I also watched another better episode from the ABC season that appeared on Saturday Morning called Pistolgeist and it was much better. Funnier, better paced, and would have made for a fun discussion as a Final Episode. Another weird point is that Darkwing Duck also ended as a story in caveman times. That episode wasn’t amazing but it was certainly better than this one. This just felt like the writers going “Oh shit all the scripts are due this week and we clearly do not have any ideas left” I would actually like to sit down and watch those other History Goof episodes and see if they had some kind of weird moral to tell kids of today and if it was done a lot better. I really enjoyed this show as a kid and wish it had ended on a higher note.
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