Goofy in a Fragile Age
Goofy seems like the most indestructible of Mickey Mouse’s classic pals. His pratfalls, contruction experiments, and classic athletic mishaps render him a plastic, pliable sidekick. He stumbles so often that his falling yell is a familiar sound effect.
Goofy perseveres. Perhaps this is why I have always loved the Goof. He was the first character I remember meeting in person, when I was four years old. Perhaps his schlemiel persona, friends with the big cheese but always a little rough around the edges, appealed to me. He evokes for me the funny Jewish sidekick. He was a favorite of my uncle, Ben Eichler, who could do an excellent Goofy impersonation (hyuck, hyuck). Cleaning up my home office last summer, I found a letter Uncle Ben mailed to me in 1985. It was on Sports Goofy stationary. Uncle Ben had written about watching me play soccer and how I reportedly liked Hebrew school. He died in 2014, almost ten years to the day before I found this letter.
Almost two weeks ago, I completed Goofy’s Race-and-a-Half Challenge in Walt Disney World. This meant two races. On January 11th, 2025 I finished the Disney World half-marathon. On January 12th, 2025 I finished the Disney World full marathon, five years to the day after my first Walt Disney World marathon in 2020. Pretty goofy. Sublimely fun. It also sometimes made me question my life choices.
It was the challenge’s twentieth anniversary. When the Goofy Challenge was first introduced, George W. Bush was president. I was a graduate student writing my dissertation while living in New York City. I did not run then. Robert Iger had been CEO of the Walt Disney Company for less than a year. The most recently released Disney full length animated feature was Chicken Little. (If you didn’t see it, you’re not alone. This was not a peak moment for the studios). That letter from my uncle was already two decades old, and I have no idea where it was. We still lived in the same city, my uncle and I, technically, although he would proudly remind us of Brooklyn’s long independence from the rest of nyc, and I didn’t always make the trek from Washington Heights to Park Slope to see him. He and my aunt Beth actually flew to our wedding celebration directly from a visit to Disney World (and boy, he said in his toast, were his arms tired), bringing Disney gifts. Soon I moved to Wisconsin, and all of my home connections attenuated further.
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Chicken Little is an apt reminder that the whole world is indeed a narrow bridge. Goofy, his creators, and his fans are as subject to danger as anyone else. Art Babbitt, born Arthur Babitzky in Omaha, Nebraska, was one of the Disney animators who developed Goofy’s personality in the 1930s. I learned a lot about Babbitt—and Goofy— from historian Jake S. Friedman’s The Disney Revolt: The Great Labor War of Animation’s Golden Age.
In a “Character Analysis of the Goof,” excerpted in that book, Babbitt, a Jewish artist who also worked on Snow White and Fantasia, described him as “a composite of an everlasting optimistic, a gullible Good Samaritan…” and “a hick.” Goofy is both humble and magical. “He is a philosopher of the barbershop variety. No matter what happens, he accepts it finally as being for the best, or at least, amusing …. He is in close contact with sprites, goblins, fairies and other such fantasia” (71).
But a few years later, Babbitt was one of the leaders of the Disney animators’ strike. At one point, he and Walt Disney nearly came to physical blows, and Babbitt was eventually fire from the company. Although Babbitt prevailed in a 1943 Labor Relations Board case and was reinstated, it was clear that his role at Disney animation would never be the same again, and he left for good in 1947. But, as NAME explains in the conclusion of his masterful history, The Disney Revolt, later generations of Disney’s mended fences with Babbitt. In 1987, Walt’s nephew Roy E. Disney invited him to fiftieth anniversary artist reunion for Snow White.
As I sat down to write about the Goofy Challenge, I felt haunted by Babbitt. We are, once again, dwelling in an age of political suspicion, blacklisting, bullying, informants. One of the things I really appreciated about The Disney Revolt was its nuance, its resistance to reducing the whole affair to a story of good guys and bad guys. It’s the story of a lot of flawed, proud, human people.
It is difficult to write now. It has been difficult for me to write since the events of October 7, 2023 made Jewish studies as fraught a field as it has been in been my lifetime, and since my own horror over many atrocities—atrocities against Israelis, atrocities against Palestinians, atrocities against the earth, fires, ice, other wars—made me think, gee, writing about Disney seems pretty pointless right now. I haven’t completely come back from that. The human pain seems still too grim. Not that there has been a single moment in human history without such pain.
It is difficult to write in the United States, today. Why write of the pleasures and perils of Disney while my friends in the sciences don’t know if their funding will even exist tomorrow? While those of us in the humanities don’t know what can and cannot be said, and friends who are experts in my field and adjacent ones are attacked for simply…. teaching the complications of the fields on which they are experts?
There is a plastic Goofy on my office desk, inherited from Uncle Ben. Right now, I have his hand reaching out towards my timeless companion, the workaholic Doozer. Other petite friends dwell nearby. in the background is a small ceramic dish made from a leaf of Walt Disney’s fallen dreaming tree, a cottonwood in Marceline, Missouri…and a story for another day.
I’m glad that I ran the Goofy Challenge, and I’m still writing about Disney, in fits and starts, a few words a day, few of them making much sense. Marathons are run on training and faith. Training, because it’s how you get ready to put one foot in front of another for a really long time. Faith, or maybe better, the Hebrew emunah, implying trust, because you trust your feet to somehow keep carrying you.
RunDisney folks who are slow like me know of, and fear, The Balloon Ladies. They are the harbingers of the sweep— runners who start from the very back of the final corral, going at the minimum required pace, with Mickey Mouse balloons tied around their waists. If you fall behind them and can’t catch up, you are “swept” from the course—-because the roads need to re-open.
Although I finished ahead of them, this was the first race where I have ever actually seen them, very late in the race, probably about 1.5 miles behind me, as I left behind the Blizzard Beach parking lot and they were on their trek there. (If you squint, you can see them the balloons in the picture below, on the opposite side of the median).
Here is what happened when the runners near me saw them, and the very, very back of the pack.
They all started screaming and cheering them on at the top of their longs. I joined in.
You can do this! You’ve got this! we screamed.
At heart, even in a cruel world, I need to remember this. I need to remember the love of these humans for one another. Not you weaklings, the balloon ladies will catch you. No, just love and encouragement. GO FOR IT!
You’ve got this! Forward!
If we are lucky, life is a marathon and not a sprint. Or rather, it’s a marathon that could turn into a sprint at a moment’s notice. We simply never know when.
In that race, be like my fellow runners in the final few miles of the Walt Disney marathon. Lift up the other runners.
That’s what Goofy would do.
In my last post, I promised I would share my first peer-reviewed Disney article when it came out. If you haven’t already seen me post it on social media, it’s out now! You can read “Exploring Disney’s World’s Through Religious Studies” from Religion Compass at your leisure. Enjoy, and check out all of the great resources in the bibliography. You don’t need a subscription to read the article.
