Teaming of Mickey and Goofy

[Gerstein, David DK - ECN]

	FRANK (and others):

>In short: Horace's star was already fading in the cartoons of the time, so 
>he wasn't the ideal companion for Mickey anymore, and Donald had to be 
>cancelled for business reasons. The only remaining option was Goofy. It 
>wasn't a natural teaming, but I'm sure Gottfredson and his collaborators 
>noticed very soon that they were on the right track.

	And this sounds about right to me.

	When Mickey and Goofy first appear as a duo in the comics ("The
Crazy Crime Wave", "The Sacred Jewel"), many mechanisms of the later
relationship fall almost instantly into place. So it's interesting that the
duo structure takes so long to become a fixture after that.
	For me, the two stories that crystallize it are "Island in the Sky"
and "In Search of Jungle Treasure". 
	In the former, Goofy opens the story by suggesting he and Mickey go
into partnership: the first time, I think, that such initiative was
displayed. Then, in the immediately following "Jungle Treasure", Mickey and
Minnie get ready to go on a treasure hunt. "I'll just round up Goofy," says
Mickey as though it were second nature- and this is first we've heard of
Goofy in this story.

	However, as Byron Erickson reminds us Egmonters, Mickey and Goofy
might be best friends in Gottfredson, but even so they are never "joined at
the hip". Goofy and Mickey are often a team, for instance, in the "Bar None
Ranch" story (1940), but they have plenty of solo bits of business, too,
enabling them to grow as characters on their own.
	In the 1940s stories of Gottfredson, Mickey is a solo star more
often then he is paired with Goofy, though the pairing does occur. Romano
Scarpa followed on this tradition in the 1950s.

	IMHO, the tradition of Mickey and Goofy as an *unbreakable* pair,
*always* together, really starts in the late 1940s and early 1950s at
*Western Publishing*. Why?
	Because Western had two fundamental funny animal plot types at the
time: the "Donald Duck" (put-upon lead accompanied by smart kids, bossy
girlfriend, and nasty neighbor) and the "Andy Panda" (straight man hero with
a wacky sidekick, most typically fighting crime). Fitting Mickey and Goofy
into formula two made them easy to write for. So they ran with it.
	Many of Western's Mickey stories are interesting as plots, but in
terms of characterizations, they could have substituted others for Mickey
and Goofy. (Of course, there were exceptions. But I'm speaking generally,
here...)

	For me, the excellence of particularly Gottfredson's and Scarpa's
Mickey and Goofy (and Horace, and Minnie, and others) is that the behavior
in the stories is that of unique human beings, for whom other characters
simply cannot be easily substituted.
	Barks' Duck stories of course use the Donald Duck formula, as they
star (surprise!) Donald Duck. But the genius of them is that the characters
are human and unique, and the stories far from formulaic. The best Mickey
stories follow, IMHO, the same path.

	David