I’ve been watching a lot of late-series M*A*S*H lately, and one of the odder running bits is that Charles has a secret yen for deeply lowbrow comedy. He’s shown loving a Three Stooges movie—I do not love the Three Stooges and therefore do not remember which one—and when he’s wooing a French woman, he confides in her his love of Tom and Jerry, describing the gag where it takes a minute to recognize running on air before falling with more pure joy than he expresses anywhere else in the series. I cannot help suspecting that this is a Disney short that would be right in his wheelhouse.

Goofy is working at a railroad depot. He gets a telegraph in that a magician’s trunk absolutely has to go on the next train. Simple enough! Except of course it isn’t. The handle breaks off, and the trunk opens. Now, Goofy gets to deal with all the sorts of things you might expect to find in a magician’s trunk, and this one is one heck of a magician. You’d love to see the show. However, Goofy’s on his own here and doesn’t know what he’s doing, and it’s just one magic-themed sight gag after another.

This is, as I’ve long used the term, a mute cartoon. It is not silent. It has a score and sound effects. There’s a rabbit with the most adorable giggle of all time. I can’t tell you whose giggle it is, because there are a whopping sixteen people listed on IMDb as providing “animal noises.” (And George Johnson as Goofy, of course.) But other than a quick “somethin’ wrong here,” there is no dialogue. Goofy is there alone. And you don’t even need that one line, because it’s just the sort of thing he mutters to himself.

Mostly, this is Goofy dealing with animals, because that’s the funniest thing to put into a cartoon like this. There’s a lengthy section that’s Goofy dealing with a bull that may look vaguely familiar but obviously can’t be the one you’re thinking of, inasmuch as this is not a bull who’s going to Sit Just Quietly and Smell the Flowers. He does deal with a fake woman in a box designed to be cut in half, which is weird because no one’s ever done the trick that way that I know of. There’s no suspense to the trick done that way. It’s just an excuse for Goofy to look shy and then freak out.

You may suspect, based on a lot of what I’ve said, that I don’t like this cartoon. That’s not true; that’s pretty far from the truth. I see a lot of these cartoons through a couple of very long compilation videos on YouTube, and I was pleased to see it come up after a Donald Duck cartoon we’d already covered. I enjoy it. However, it’s also true that what I’ve said about it is not wrong. It is the sort of thing that Charles would like, based on what we know of Charles. It is true that it’s mostly sight gags. And it’s true that I like it anyway.

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