Growing up, I was always a Looney Tunes fan more than I was a Mickey Mouse / Disney fan. Having said that, I always got a kick out of the Goofy “How to” series. I remember seeing these on TV, not sure where or when, but they were always hilarious. Goofy usually didn’t talk and a narrator would explain things as Goofy tried them. I remember ones about skiing and football, but there are quite a few more. Now, 46 years later, Goofy will return to the silver-screen with a new short, How to Hook Up Your Home Theater.

How cool is that? Not only is it the format I love, but it’s a subject I love as well (having worked in Home Electronics for years). We recently went to see Meet the Robinsons and the Donald Duck / Chip and Dale cartoon Working for Peanuts was in front of the film. I’ll have to say, the prospect of a new Goofy short would get me to see a film I was only mildly interested in, not that Meet the Robinsons was bad, it was actually quite fun.

Anyway, when Disney and Pixar merged, many predicted that Pixar head John Lasseter would do great as the new head of Disney animation, so far, I’ll have to agree. Not only did he announce the return of traditional animation (The Frog Princess), he also brought back the classic “shorts” that often ran before Disney’s feature films.

Already, a number of the upcoming titles have been leaked, including The Ballad Of Nessie (a stylized account of the origin of the Loch Ness monster), Golgo’s Guest (about the meeting between a Russian frontier guard and an extraterrestrial), Prep And Landing (in which two inept elves ready a house for Santa’s visit) and what we can reveal is now known as How To Hook Up Your Home Theater. This is the much anticipated and very welcome return to the big screen of one of Walt’s most popular characters, Goofy, in an update to the ever popular How To cartoons of the ’40s and ’50s in which a deadpan narrator (usually John McLeish) explained how to play a sport or execute a task, while The Goof attempts to demonstrate, usually with unexpected and disastrous results!

Animated Views has got a great interview with Disney animators Andreas Deja and Mark Henn that reveals a lot more details about the new short. It sounds very “classic” in style. Old style Goofy with no kids or any of the other characters that were added years later in the Goof Troop animated show.