A few GOOFY comments and a question

[Daniel J Neyer]

Just managed to get ahold of a copy of the Abbeville Press book GOOFY,
and was overall very pleased with it. I've been after this one ever since
David Gerstein stated on this list that GOOFY, unlike Abbeville's MICKEY
MOUSE, featured Floyd Gottfredson's tales in their original form, not
translated-re-translated versions. It was a treat to get to read "The
Mighty Whale Hunter", "The Black Crow Mystery", "The Gleam" (or is its
official title "The Jewel Robbery"?), and "Love Trouble" for the first
time. It was also good to have a version of "Oscar the Ostrich" that left
Tony's Italian dialect intact (the Gladstone version removed the
dialect). A few comments and a question:

The stories, for the most part, seemed to be completely "tamper free."
However, there was an odd part in the Black Crow Mystery that made me
think there had been a little censorship. Mickey spots a strange-looking
farm hand during a fire, and queries a farmer about him. The dialogue
seems oddly weak, though it occupies an entire strip, and stranger yet,
nothing more is made of the strange-looking farm hand. The farm hand
looks very much like the caricatured "Jap" typical in WW2-era propaganda,
so I wonder if the original sequence contained some anti-Japanese slurs?
There certainly seems to be a joke or punch line missing in the two-strip
sequence. Was the presumed anti-Japanese joke removed when the story was
published in "Mickey Mouse Weekly" (the British magazine from which all
the albums' stories seem to be taken), or was it removed when Horst
Shroder edited the volume for United States audiences? I'm sure David
Gerstein can tell us.

A few comments--the "Gleam" story was hilarious, especially Goofy's
confrontation with the villain. One of the Goof's finest moments. Didn't
Bill Wright ink this story? It seems he re-used the gag of Goofy's being
resistant to hypnotism in his later story "The Sinister Sorcerer", which
was reprinted by Gladstone. It was also fun to see Detective Casey
again--I had always assumed that his only appearance was in the Phantom
Blot story. I also enjoyed "Mighty Whale Hunter"; I suspect it was
intended as a bit of a spoof of "Captains Courageous"--the movie of
"Captains" with Spencer Tracy came out around the same time. The
Portuguese sailor character Pedro talks in the same dialect Tracy used in
the movie, and Mickey, mimicking him, calls him "leetle fish" at one
point. "Leetle fish" is what Tracy calls Freddie Bartholomew in the
movie, of course. Gottfredson and De Maris's characterization of the
irascible Captain in this story was also excellent--the character was
impossibly cranky, hilarious, and yet lovable at the same time. He
dominated the story at times. I would have loved to see the Captain,
Pedro, and the other crew members of the "Lady Daffodil" reused in other
tales.