A Goofy Movie (1995)

Well gawrsh. Welcome back to Disc Dive! This week we’re hitting the open road with A Goofy Movie, a movie I wore out on VHS and never stopped quoting.

Title: A Goofy Movie

Director: Kevin Lima

Premiered: April 5, 1995 (AMC Pleasure Island at the Walt Disney World Resort)

Runtime: 1 hour 18 minutes

Disc Format: DVD

Max’s (voiced by Jason Marsden) biggest fear is becoming his father. We’re made aware of this from the start with a dream sequence where he morphs into Goofy mid-conversation with his crush, Roxanne (voiced by Kellie Martin). At school, he crashes an assembly dressed as pop star Powerline, lip-syncing “Stand Out” with help from his A.V. classmate Bobby (voiced by Pauly Shore in an uncredited role) until the stunt goes sideways and lands him in the principal’s office. While waiting outside, he scores a date to the school dance with Roxanne.

Meanwhile, Goofy (voiced by Bill Farmer) works as an in-store photographer (think Sears or JCPenney back in the day) and he’s great with the kids and wrangling them for a photo. His boss Pete mentions taking his own son PJ, Max’s best friend, camping this summer. It plants an idea. When Goofy hears about Max’s assembly stunt, he decides a father-son road trip is exactly what they need to reconnect and keep Max out of trouble.

Max is floored. A weeks-long fishing trip is the last thing he wants, especially now that he’s got a date with Roxanne. Desperate to save face, he lies and tells her his dad is taking him to the Powerline concert in LA, a cross-country detour that doesn’t exist.

First stop: Lester’s Possum Park. Goofy’s awash in nostalgia watching the animatronic show. Max is mortified, especially after getting embarrassed in front of the possum crowd. He storms off into the pouring rain before realizing that there’s nowhere to go.

This whole father-son bonding idea is an absolute disaster. Roxanne’s going to find out he’s a fraud. And the trip itself is still far from over.

Is A Goofy Movie one of my favorite musicals?

I don’t know that I ever consciously put it in that category, but it’s hard to ignore how much it functions like one. Ten minutes in and we’ve already had two musical numbers. This was probably my first exposure to a musical built around pre-existing characters rather than original creations. I’d seen the Disney classics (Snow White, Peter Pan, Cinderella, Jungle Book, Robin Hood, etc.) but this felt different. More contemporary, more pop-coded, closer to something you’d actually hear outside of the animated canon.

And those songs still work. “After Today,” “Open Road,” the Powerline songs: all catchy as hell and actually moving the story forward.

The animation holds up better than it probably should. There’s a warmth to it that hasn’t faded. It’s not the last of Disney’s hand-drawn features, but you can sense where things are headed, especially knowing Toy Story drops later the same year.

Nostalgia is a hell of a drug, and the high is real with A Goofy Movie. I didn’t realize until this rewatch how much of the film I could recite from memory. Not just the Powerline numbers, but the rhythm of the road trip, the back-and-forth between Max and Goofy, “who’s your favorite possum?”, all of it came back immediately.

It’s entertaining as a kid. The older you get, the more you realize how well it nails what it’s actually about: a father and son who love each other but can’t figure out how to connect. A Goofy Movie doesn’t take shortcuts with that dynamic. It lets both of them be wrong, lets the tension sit, and earns every beat of where it eventually lands without ever feeling heavy-handed.

I had the clamshell VHS copy of this and wore it out completely. I loved it then. I still love it now.

Does A Goofy Movie still stand out above the crowd for you?