Retro Reviews: A Goofy Movie!

Michael Wermuth- A Goofy Movie is a movie starring Goofy, and is more or less based on Goof Troop. I didn’t watch Goof Troop often, but knew enough of the show to know who Max and PJ are, enough to wonder why PJ and Pete weren’t in the commercials (and wondering if they’d even be in the movie), and enough to be confused by Max and PJ being older. I was also confused by Max being embarrassed by his father, but I still don’t know whether that was a normal character trait on the show.

Anyway, in A Goofy Movie, Max is a high school student. The tagline for the movie was, “It’s hard to be cool when your dad is Goofy”, and here Max is a laughing stock of most of the school due to his father’s reputation. On the last day of school, Max, with help from PJ and audio visual nerd Bobby, has a plan to show the school that he’s cool, and to impress his love interest, Roxanne. Max dresses up as Powerline, a big rock star, and turns a school assembly into a concert. Max gets caught, but it also makes him popular, and he gets a date with Roxanne to a summer party where they’ll be watching an upcoming Powerline concert on Pay-Per-View. However, the principal calls Goofy about the incident, and over exaggerates on what happened, leading Goofy to believe that unless action is taken soon, Max will be sent to the electric chair.

Remembering past trips with his dad as a child, Goofy decides to take Max on an cross-country fishing trip with no notice and against his sons will. Max does get to explain to Roxanne that he can’t take her to the party, but when she considers going with somebody else, Max not only lies that Goofy is taking him to LA to the Powerline concert, but that Goofy and Powerline are old friends and that Max will appear on-stage at the concert. The road trip doesn’t go too well at first, with an embarrassing experience at a possum theme park and an encounter with Big Foot, but Max soon finds the map and manages to change the direction to LA. Luckily for Max, after this Goofy decides to stop looking at the map and make Max the official navigator (which Goofy had refused to do earlier), and after this they start to bond better, but eventually they encounter Pete and PJ (who are also traveling), and Pete overhears Max and PJ talking about how he’d changed the map. Goofy at first doesn’t believe Pete, but ends up looking at the map and seeing that he’s right. This leads to a climax on the river, and then a happy ending, of course.

This is a great movie. Goofy and Max are both relatable characters – Max is relatable to teenagers embarrassed by their parents, and I’m sure Goofy is relatable to parents whose kids want to distance themselves from them. All of the songs are good (I used to have the soundtrack album), and I can’t decide which I like best between “After Today”, “On the Open Road”, and “Nobody Else But You”. I highly recommend A Goofy Movie.