Johnny Eyeball/Goofy (How to Be a Detective)

Goofy created by Walt Disney, Pinto Colvig, Tom Palmer & Art Babbitt
Johnny Eyeball created by Dick Kinney

Beloved Disney character GOOFY is JOHNNY EYEBALL, in “How to Be a Detective,” a 1952 cartoon short. Something of a send-up of assorted private eye and noir-ish tropes (before noir was even recognized as a thing), it’s an almost hallucinogenic romp with the always affable anthropomorphic dog  stepping into the gumshoes of a hard-boiled shamus. And the case is a corker, featuring the mysterious Al Muldoon, the missing person Johnny has been hired to find, a femme fatale (in a veil, no less) who knows more than she’s telling, a cigar-chomping sheriff (played by Bad Pete) who’d prefer Johnny keep his nose out of police business and a gun-toting weasel (an actual weasel, of course) who seems to be everywhere.

What’s notable is the unexpected amount of violence in its frantic six-minute running time: there’s a slam-bang car chase, someone goes off a bridge, several folks are shot,strangled, beaten or hung (in silhouette). No wonder everyone seems to be packing heat (Goofy has an actual gun drawer inside his trench coat). There are plenty of sight gags, and the vibe–remember this is Disney–is often surprisingly dark, like a montage of homicides in progress presented just in passing just to set the tone..

And Johnny/Goofy is certainly put through the wringer himself here, as he fumbles and bumbles his way through the case. He gets slipped a Mickey Finn,  falls down an elevator shaft and is tossed in the river with his feet wrapped in concrete. At one point a morgue attendant turns Goofy away, telling him “Don’t come back ‘til you’re ready.”

Many consider this one of the best Goofy cartoons of the fifties, although the darkness may be why it’s now so hard to find. Supposedly Disney stopped airing it at some point because of its surprisingly violent tone, and the only official release that I know of is on Disney Treasures: The Complete Goofy DVD set (though, if you poke around enough online, it’s surprising what you can find).