The college I attended, The Evergreen State College, had a majority population of what’s called “non-traditional students.” Which translates to “people who were not freshmen coming to college right out of high school.” The summer quarter I was a student, I was twenty-three and the youngest person in my dorm room. It happened. Pretty regularly. But it means that my perspective on the movie is slightly different from the average, both because “ha, he’s old and in college!” was not something that people said at my school and because I know a little bit more than average baout how credits transfer and so forth.

Max Goof (Jason Marsden) is going away to college with his best friends, P.J. Pete (Rob Paulsen) and Bobby Zimmeruski (Pauly Shore for some reason). Max’s father, Goofy (Bill Farmer), is heartbroken. P.J.’s father, Pete (Jim Cummings), is considerably cooler with it. Max is determined that things are going to work out, and he’s going to get into the X Games, and so forth. Goofy is so despairing that he loses focus at work and gets fired. Then it turns out that, because he doesn’t have a BA, he needs to go back to school for a year to finish it if he’s going to find a job. Naturally.

One of the ways Max finds to get his father out of his hair is by setting him up with the head librarian, Sylvia Marpole (Bebe Neuwirth). So that’s pretty nice. It actually works really well. The pair have a lot of common interests. She’s willing to put up with stuff from Goofy that I can assure you I would not. They go out on the town and go dancing, and it’s something they’re both good at and both enjoy. In short, this is a relationship, a romantic relationship, between two adults in a children’s movie that isn’t played for laughs and seems to be a long-term good that is approved of by his son. It makes me very happy all the way around.

Similarly, while Max doesn’t seem to have a particular girlfriend, I like that P.J. ends up with Beret Girl In Cafe (Vicki Lewis), who brings out his inner beat poet. It’s not even played for laughs despite how different we see them as being initially. He sees her do her little “life is a lime” poem, which isn’t bad by movie beat poem standards, and he falls in love. They hit it off. They have a nice, balanced, happy relationship as far as we’re shown, and they both continue to have their interests. It’s lovely.

Honestly, this seems to me like the sort of place where the Geef name should’ve been in play. “Max Geef” is a perfectly . . . well, it’s a cartoon name, but still. It’s a fine name to be used in a cartoon. And then Goofy gets a first name and is George Geef and his nickname is Goofy and, oh, um, no. His only name is Goofy? Yeah, I guess that works, too.

And he never should’ve been in Max’s classes. He’s still explicitly said to have only one year to make up to graduate, so he isn’t having to start over from scratch, so why is he still in all the same classes as his freshman son? I’m not even sure how it logistically would’ve worked to get him into them, because I’m pretty sure Max had not yet told his father what classes he was in, and it seems unlikely the state college here was small enough to support All Freshman In The Same Classes; that would be a very small school indeed, and presumably private.

I really hope I don’t turn out to be the kind of parent Goofy is here. To be so distracted by your kid’s going to college that you actually get fired from work? Okay, maybe finding you need to take a day or two; I can see that. But Goofy is completely wrapped up in Max. He has no other real friends—I don’t consider Pete a friend. He has nothing that is interrupted by spending all his time with Max, because that’s the focus of his life. It’s obsessive and wrong. Not uncommon in this sort of movie, okay, but still. Wow.

I’m barely touching on the X Games plot, because I mostly don’t care about it. Also, it makes even less sense to me than the college plot. The college I went to didn’t have this sort of thing; did anyone go to a school where there were big competitions within the college itself between different groups? Because that’s what’s happening here, and what happens in Monsters University, and various other movies—all the teams are from the same school, and it’s somehow a Huge Deal. In this case, televised and with international judges and one of the contestants is a celebrity and yet somehow it still isn’t noticed that he’s just blatantly cheating. Even by Disney sports standards. “Here, I’m going to stand next to the judge and flash light in my competitor’s eye!”

I will observe that one of the distraction techniques employed at one point is, “Look, Mickey Mouse!” Which is, you know, cute and meta and all that. And one assumes realistic in-universe. But I’ve also always kind of wondered why pretty much everyone in Goofy-centered cartoons looks like Goofy and Donald-centered cartoons looks like Donald despite the fact that both cross over and are friends with Mickey and so forth. Like, is the animated world segregated by species? Does the fact that Pete’s a cat who lives next door to Goofy mean they live in an integrated neighbourhood?

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