It’s a bit odd, now I come to think about it, that my favourite of the Big Three of Disney cartoons is Goofy. Mickey is frequently bland, especially in his ’50s and ’60s cartoons, and we’ve talked repeatedly about Donald Duck, Aquatic Sociopath, but my irritation with stupidity should eliminate Goofy as well. But even leaving out simple process of elimination, there’s a sense of fun to a lot of the Goofy cartoons—and a strange amount of worldbuilding that doesn’t show up in this cartoon but is underlying the stuff I like about a lot of the cartoons.

This one, I think, is simply a play on the many, many Westerns of the ’50s. Goofy is a-ropin’ and a-ridin’ and accidentally gets the drop on “Pistol Pete” while he’s robbing a stagecoach. Goofy falls in love with a female passenger. He then makes his way to a town that Pete routinely shoots up and rather falls into the role of sheriff, Pete having killed the previous one and all interest in taking the job. In his serendipitous way, he manages to survive and of course become the hero of a small Western town.

I think one of the things I like about Goofy is that there’s no malice to him. Not in a bland sort of way, the sort of Bing Crosby-era Mickey way, but in a purely innocent way. In this cartoon, he’s so struck by the girl that he mostly fails to notice Pete altogether. He claims that he’d “plug [Pete] right between the eyes,” but that never really happens, does it? It’s just a series of accidents that leads to things that lead to things that ends with a happy result.

We never see the girl’s face. It’s deep in the bonnet. Presumably Goofy sees it, but she’s also the only woman in the cartoon. I suppose this is in part economy of storytelling—we have three characters and only need three characters. (And the undertaker, a standard Western comedy trope.) So we don’t need any other woman, and I suppose we also get into the problem of how you show a woman who appeals to Goofy without it being weird.

There’s not much to the cartoon, I suppose. I like this cartoon and have for years. It’s a light, amusing little thing, one of the better of the rash of ’50s satires on the Western that followed the ’50s rash of Westerns. I suppose because there’s not really much to it, and it’s short enough not to run its joke into the ground. There are worse things to say about cartoons.

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