Who could ever imagine that the creator of the beloved Disney cartoon character Goofy actually hated that sweet silly guy? Why? Well, let’s see if we can find out why. According to an in-depth interview with the great Walt Disney by Neal Gabler, who wrote an entire book about the subject that later won the L.A. Times Book Prize for biographies, Walt was many different things to many different people. To some people, he was a visionary and the founder of the entertainment empire that includes TV, movies, theme parks and, of course, the marvelous Mickey Mouse. But, to many other folks, he was Uncle Walt, a fantasy world icon. And, to those who actually knew him personally, he was driven, ambitious, and a creative yet obsessive force who had very few friends and a really short temper.
Disney Compared to Picasso
According to Gabler, it’s been said of the greats of the 20th Century that it had just two amazing visual imaginations and they were Picasso and Disney. Interestingly though is the fact that a couple of dozen biographies were written about Picasso but only a few about Walt Disney. In addition to Gabler, the others were written by authors Marc Eliot, Leonard Mosley, Richard Schickel, and Bob Thomas. And, Gabler was assisted by Disney’s own daughter, Diane Disney Miller, who was reticent at first because she was wary of authors writing about her father since they weren’t portraying him accurately. Gabel vowed to make his book a real honest look at Disney and he even quoted one critic named Richard Schickel who once said that, in the final analysis, Walt’s greatest creation was Walt Disney himself.
Walt Hated the Goofy Cartoons
So, the fact that he hated Goofy in his cartoons seems kind of out there but it was also true. He basically said that his opinion of those cartoons was that they were just plain stupid. Walt also felt that he had been striving for a long time to overcome the public’s notion that all he did was put together a lot of gags without any emotional context or other bigger narrative context. He probably would’ve eliminated Goofy many times over if he could have, except for the fact that he was keeping the studio animators working consistently, which was definitely what the studio wanted. So, that’s what he did.
And, it’s not so much that he hated Goofy. who after all was not even a real person but a cartoon character, but that he just disliked the silly cartoons. It seems such a shame, too, that so many people got so much enjoyment out of the Goofy cartoons and Walt never got the enjoy them himself. So, his biggest kid on earth persona was just plain not true. It’s clear that he was much more serious and less fun-loving than he was perceived to be by the public. Some say he was a difficult man to get along with and even more difficult to work for. But, as for the rest of us, we’re just grateful for all of the joy he brought into our world and we’ll never forget him, not only for Goofy but for every other amazing character that ever came out of the Disney Studios.
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