From Patrick Malone : Although this was the
only new short in this week's episode, it was a fitting send-off to the third
season. This one was much more surrealistic than the classic shorts. It was
mostly done against plain backgrounds, letting the gags take center stage.
There were some pretty surprising moments, such as Goofy's struggle with
"following the bouncing ball" and a very funny moment when he attempts to
correctly address Queen Elizabeth.
A word has to be said about the narrarator. It looks like we've come full
circle from the original "how-to" shorts. In the first few (such as "How
to Ride a Horse") the original narrarator, John MacLeish was not initially
told that he was going to narrarting a cartoon short, but just a standard
educational short. The contrast between the serious narraration and Goofy's
antics made the shorts much sillier.
Here, though, Goofy has been allowed more and more to interact with the
narrartor, culminating in the ending to this short, where the narrartor finally
gets to say what he's probably really believed from the beginning, and Goofy
finally gets his revenge. Gotta love it.
From Lee Suggs : This is a fun short despite
the fact that this isn't my favorite feature of the MouseWorks series. Goofy
tries to get into a Country Club and is thrown out because he's a bit TOO
country. (His club is thrown out too.) So the narrator sets out to refine
the Goof so he can join the club. The results start out slow, but really
get going with the "poise" segment. This part has some great gags, and I
actually found myself laughing out loud. The short has an excellent ending,
and in general I'd rate it as a good showing for the series.
From Juan F. Lara : This short was set mostly
in an abstract stage that allowed for a lot of cartoon bending of reality.
Some of the cartoony jokes worked really well. I could understand how Goofy
got fed up with that tongue twister making no sense, and I liked that he
tried to fix those subtitles so that he could read them. I also thought the
stuff they threw at Goofy during the poise section was imaginative and well
paced. But the short had a few misses as well. The elocution scene came off
as a ripoff of a Bugs Bunny gag from a certain Chuck Jones cartoon ("Robin
Hare", I think), and was poorly timed. Goofy's toon ability to eat all that
food and everything else seemed out of place for Goofy. Did he ever do a
gag like that in the classic shorts? Still, I thought the hits outweighed
the misses this time, and that this short had some better looking artwork
for this series.
What exactly is the narrator supposed to be? It looked like Goofy was beating
up a camera at the end. That example of reality bending was another gag that
I thought worked very well.
