Double Dribble

Goofy hits the hardwoods (many very tall Goofy's) and we have another sport recognized. The game has some semblance of real basketball, but it is still filled with every aberration from reality. The players run around, attack one another, ignore real rules of basketball. It's like the others. It is Goofy, but there is nothing about his general character that is shown.

Goofy visits a basketball game where he is the only one rooting for the visiting team. There's really not much of a story here, just a lot of Goofys on the court playing a very confusing and chaotic game. Lots of back and forth, and in the basket then out then basket. The announcer tries his best to cover the game, but you'll have to listen very carefully to follow.

Almost no laughs in this one, and Goofy is hardly in it.

Grade D--

A Walt Disney GOOFY Cartoon.

It's DOUBLE DRIBBLE time as U. U. plays visiting P. U. for the all-important university basketball game.

Hoop fans will get the most enjoyment out of this little film which spoofs the popular sport. The animation is routine. The main difficulty with some of these Goofy sports cartoons is that the real Goofy never appears, leaving his myriad look-alikes to carry out the plot.

Walt Disney (1901-1966) was always intrigued by drawings. As a lad in Marceline, Missouri, he sketched farm animals on scraps of paper; later, as an ambulance driver in France during the First World War, he drew figures on the sides of his vehicle. Back in Kansas City, along with artist Ub Iwerks, Walt developed a primitive animation studio that provided animated commercials and tiny cartoons for the local movie theaters. Always the innovator, his ALICE IN CARTOONLAND series broke ground in placing a live figure in a cartoon universe. Business reversals sent Disney & Iwerks to Hollywood in 1923, where Walt's older brother Roy became his lifelong business manager & counselor. When a mildly successful series with Oswald The Lucky Rabbit was snatched away by the distributor, the character of Mickey Mouse sprung into Walt's imagination, ensuring Disney's immortality. The happy arrival of sound technology made Mickey's screen debut, STEAMBOAT WILLIE (1928), a tremendous audience success with its use of synchronized music. The SILLY SYMPHONIES soon appeared, and Walt's growing crew of marvelously talented animators were quickly conquering new territory with full color, illusions of depth and radical advancements in personality development, an arena in which Walt's genius was unbeatable. Mickey's feisty, naughty behavior had captured millions of fans, but he was soon to be joined by other animated companions: temperamental Donald Duck, intellectually-challenged Goofy and energetic Pluto. All this was in preparation for Walt's grandest dream - feature length animated films. Against a blizzard of doomsayers, Walt persevered and over the next decades delighted children of all ages with the adventures of Snow White, Pinocchio, Bambi, Peter Pan and Mr. Toad. Walt never forgot that his fortunes were all started by a mouse, or that simplicity of message and lots of hard work always pay off.

I've only ever seen one pro basketball game and this pretty much summed it up. An inordinate load of hype, a cheering crowd stoked on sugar, caffeine, alcohol or more and a game that was almost incidental until the last few minutes when, of course, it was still evenly balanced and set for a cliffhanging ending. This time it's "Goofy" who plays just about every role from the lone visiting fan to the despondent coach, the player always left on the sidelines to the gangly player taller then the hoop. Just like the game itself, I didn't really love this. It's quickly enough paced but overly repetitive and the joke is brought home just once too often.

Goofy is a great character. He is very funny and appealing, and can work very well on his own. Here he takes on the sport of basketball and does so to amusing enough results. Double Dribble is one those shorts of his that is fun and amusing, but not hilarious. The best laughs come from the small Goofy, who is funny and very cute, and I did like how simple the gags were and how the players reacted to one another. There is a running gag however of the Goofs when doing the jump ball that they slapped one another, it was amusing to begin with but got repetitive and tiresome. The story is also routine, with the format and some of what we see quite familiar to us from other Goofy shorts. And while Goofy is still appealing and lots of fun as multiple personalities, we don't see the real him coming out in Double Dribble. The animation is very nicely done though, it is fluidly drawn and the colours have life. The music is lush and characterful, while the narration, very well voiced also, does a good job at both entertaining and teaching. The story while familiar and routine does move swiftly, has a nice light tone and the ending shows a short that has heart and a little bit of a change from the laugh-a-minute visual gags and slapstick seen in shorts before. To conclude, nice and entertaining enough, but not one of Goofy's finest hours. 7/10 Bethany Cox