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Underdogs: How A Goofy Movie Became Disney’s Most Unlikely Sleeper Hit

The 1995 animated musical’s cast and crew on how their scrappy little production—“It wasn’t even a B movie. It was a C movie”—beat the odds to become a beloved cult favorite.
Underdogs How A Goofy Movie Became Disneys Most Unlikely Sleeper Hit
© Buena Vista Pictures/Everett Collection.

A Goofy Movie, released 25 years ago this week, had inauspicious beginnings. The film was conceived at a time when Disney’s animated output was critically and commercially unparalleled—but this particular project was developed as a potentially direct-to-video spin-off of Goof Troop, a 1992 animated series that ran during the Disney Afternoon syndicated programming block. “It wasn’t even a B movie. It was a C movie,” remembered veteran Disney producer Don Hahn.

Instead of being produced by what was then known as Walt Disney Feature Animation, A Goofy Movie was developed independently of the company’s other features, using international satellite studios; it was billed as a “Disney MovieToon.” Its box office returns were modest; its critical accolades were nonexistent. For a variety of reasons, A Goofy Movie seemed destined to be forgotten.

But against all odds, it wasn’t. A quarter century after its initial release, A Goofy Movie has become a true cult classic: Eager fans have made live-action tributes to it that have earned millions of views on YouTube. A Goofy Movie merchandise has become a hot ticket at several retailers. A 20th-anniversary cast reunion at the 2015 D23 Expo, Disney’s official biannual fan convention, felt more like a rock concert than a celebration of a seemingly obscure animated favorite.

The way A Goofy Movie achieved its unlikely place in the pantheon of Disney classics is a fascinating tale of false starts, bad ideas, and technical limitations. That this film got made at all is amazing; the fact that it became a cultural phenomenon, decades after its release, is downright miraculous.

© Buena Vista Pictures/Everett Collection.

Even if you’ve never seen A Goofy Movie—and you really should; it’s streaming on Disney+ right now)—you shouldn’t be surprised to learn that it follows Goofy (Bill Farmer), an anthropomorphic dog who decides to take his teenage son Max (Jason Marsden) on a summer road trip. Max acquiesces, begrudgingly, since his main priority when school is out is to attend a concert by his pop idol, a Michael Jackson stand-in named Powerline (played by Prince protégé Tevin Campbell). Along the way, Goofy and Max stop at a backwoods possum farm that’s equal parts Tiger King and the Magic Kingdom’s Country Bear Jamboree; have a memorable encounter with Bigfoot; take an impromptu white-water rafting trip; and, eventually, come to understand each other better, communicating in ways they never had before. The film is heartfelt and fun, with some incredibly catchy tunes and an unexpected emotional layer.

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It was then Disney chief Jeffrey Katzenberg who commissioned the project in the early ’90s, and who suggested its main story line. “Jeffrey Katzenberg, like a lot of parents, was struggling at the time with his teenage daughter,” explained Jymn Magon, Goof Troop’s story supervisor and the first screenwriter to attempt the project. “He said, ‘I couldn’t figure out how to get through to her. But we ended up taking a car trip together.… Somewhere along the way, we bonded. I want a story like that.’ I said, ‘Okay.’” They were off.

But the journey was full of potholes and speed bumps—like an early directive to find a big star to voice the main character. “Jeffrey wanted us to look at Steve Martin,” director Kevin Lima remembered. (Eventually, he convinced the brass that Farmer was indeed the right man for the job.) The film’s modest production stood in sharp contrast to the studio’s bigger-ticket tentpoles: “We didn’t have a lot of money. We didn’t have a Lion King budget.… We were a ragtag group out on the frontier.”

Lima and his team relied on Disney Animation outposts in Paris and Australia to do much of the heavy lifting, as well as outside studios in Spain and Canada. Even then, production setbacks caused them to miss their initial Thanksgiving 1994 release date. The main culprit? A single black dot. “In those early days, you’d set up a camera looking at a large monitor, and you would film that monitor,” Lima explained. “One of the pixels was blown out, and every single scene in the movie had a black dot in it. So we had to go back and reshoot three-quarters of the movie.”

When the film was finally finished, though, they knew they’d made something special. Farmer took his then five-year-old son to an early screening of an unfinished version: “As we left, he was crying a little bit. I said, ‘What’s the matter, buddy? Didn’t you like the movie?’ And he said, ‘When Goofy was going over the waterfall, I thought that was you.’” Lima responded similarly when the film was complete: “I felt we had made something contemporary. We’d made something that spoke to the time that we lived in, as opposed to a fairy-tale past. I was really proud that we were able to do that.”

The movie wasn’t only not made in California—it wasn’t even allowed to premiere there. A Goofy Movie instead made its debut at the AMC Pleasure Island theater at Walt Disney World on April 5, 1995. By then Katzenberg, the executive who had both greenlit the film and demanded they try to make it without Goofy’s signature voice, was gone from the company, after a very public falling out with Michael Eisner. Whatever goodwill there had been toward the project when Katzenberg was there had gone as well. Releasing the film at all, said Hahn, was seen as “fulfilling a corporate legacy.”

That ambivalence was shared by audiences, who didn’t exactly turn up in droves. A Goofy Movie’s entire theatrical box office haul was equivalent to the opening weekend of Pocahontas, which Disney released a few months later. The project very nearly faded into obscurity.

© Buena Vista Pictures/Everett Collection.
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But then something altogether unexpected happened: People started watching A Goofy Movie on home video. Slowly but surely, it became a sleeper hit.

“It started for me a couple of months after the movie had been released on videotape,” Lima remembered. “Because you’re absolutely right—it did not catch the world on fire. I had read an article where this family was talking about how they had a ritual every night in which they raised their glasses before they ate dinner and said, ‘To the open road.’ And I realized, Wow, this thing has outreaching arms in a way I never thought it possibly could.” Mo Shafeek, creative director of records for Mondo, fell for the film on VHS, even though he was a “petulant teen” when it was released: “I remember loving A Goofy Movie, loving that soundtrack. Through the years that took me through high school into becoming a cinephile, A Goofy Movie stood tall.”

As the years passed, the film’s improbable popularity grew. New merchandise inspired by the movie was produced and sold in major retailers like Target and Hot Topic. An anniversary Blu-ray was released exclusively to the Disney Movie Club. A Buzzfeed article suggested that Max was now a hot “lumbersexual.”

Then came a viral 2009 YouTube video that re-created A Goofy Movie’s opening musical number, “After Today,” in live action—and has amassed 5.7 million views to date. Creator Ted Sowards initially planned to tackle a musical number from a more obvious Disney classic, like Mulan or Hercules, before settling on “After Today,” largely for practical reasons. “I can’t remember who pointed it out, but they said, ‘This one is easiest, because it’s just a kid going to school. We don’t need any Greek costumes or anything like that,’” Sowards told me.

Six or seven years ago, while doing auditions for another animated movie, Lima was shocked to discover just how fiercely young actors loved the film: “When they found out that I had done A Goofy Movie, they went crazy.… They were quoting all the lines from the movie.… It was a little overwhelming to me, to be honest with you.”

But it wasn’t until the 2015 D23 Expo in Anaheim, California, that the extent of A Goofy Movie’s continued popularity became really real. “They had a list on some Disney websites about 10 must-see panels at the D23 convention. We weren’t even listed in the top 10,” Farmer remembered. “But we were number one in attendance and audience satisfaction.”

The event pulsed with an energy palpable even in the filmed version that wound up on YouTube. “The place was mobbed. The auditorium held 500 people, and they had to turn away several hundred others. It was crazy,” Magon remembered. It was a revelatory moment for Farmer: “We had an almost three-minute standing ovation at the end. It was incredible. I felt like one of the Beatles.”

If anything, that enthusiasm has only grown over the past five years. In 2019, Disneyland held a ’90s throwback night; the line to meet Max, dressed as Powerline, was the longest of the night. While I was writing this article, a new TikTok dance craze emerged—this one in honor of Powerline’s “I 2 I” musical number. On Friday, Disney’s in-house fan club, D23, is hosting a virtual Disney+ viewing party to celebrate the film’s 25th anniversary, featuring Lima, Magon, and Farmer.

Why, though, has A Goofy Movie endured? Lima credits the movie’s surprising emotional heft. “I think at the core of anything that lasts is something that’s truthful,” he said. “And at some point or another, we all feel this way about our parents. We want to disconnect with our parents, only to realize years later that they were okay. They were doing their best. They loved me.” Magon said that fans frequently tell him that this is why the movie still resonates with them: “I have people come up to me all the time and say, ‘This is the only film that made me connect with my dad,’ that kind of stuff. I find it really touching.”

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The movie’s also now been around long enough for kids who saw it originally to have children of their own. A Goofy Movie, incredibly, has become generational. “It’s a family bonding thing. And everyone thinks their dad is Goofy at least once. It resonates pretty deeply with people’s emotions and family connections, and demonstrates the love that dads and sons have,” Farmer said.

When Hahn introduced the Goofy Movie panel at D23, he called the film “a Disney classic”—even though its production process and release would classify it as anything but. What was his rationale? “It has none of the hallmarks of a Disney classic and all of the hallmarks of a Disney classic,” he explained. “There’s no princess; there’s no castle; there’s some raccoons and a banjo. But it has every hallmark in terms of its emotion, and relationships, and humanity, and storytelling, and connection that you expect from a Disney classic. And that’s what makes it enduring.”

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