“How to Play Golf”

Play the ball where it lies!

I had something else on today’s schedule, but it was so far as I could tell only available on Sketchy Russian Websites (TM). It’s been a long week, and I’m getting to this late, and I wasn’t sure what it was about, and I just couldn’t today. So I went to this huge compilation I use when I don’t have anything else planned, and after two I’d already written about, the next short was a Goofy how-to. And there is nothing to soothe my mind, at least, at the end of a stressful week full of plumbing drama and too many appointments like watching Goofy fail to understand how to do something.

In this case, yes, golf. As was often the case, our narrator is Fred Shields, He informs us that golf is not a waste of time, and he instructs Goofy on how to play. This short’s particular gimmick is “breaking the game down to its most basic elements,” or in other words having a stick figure playing golf. (Apparently, the game’s most basic elements includes the shoes and hat.) The stick figure gets right what Goofy gets wrong. It escapes into the “real” world and therefore is part of the goings-on when Play The Ball Where It Lies involves a bull.

The line about golf’s not being a waste of time feels pointed, as though someone’s wife had been complaining. Donald had played golf six years earlier, in “Donald’s Golf Game.” Three years after that and before this, Mickey played in “Canine Caddy.” It seems quite likely to me that the animators were playing a lot of golf and their wives were complaining. So for a six-year stretch, you could at least claim it was for work. But after you’ve sent the Big Three golfing, what could they have done?

What’s particularly strange to me is that this cartoon, and “Canine Caddy,” are so far before their mid-century personality changes. Okay, this one dates to the Issues Pinto Colvig had with Disney; he was just in the process of coming back to the studio at the time, after having done things like “play Coily the Spring Sprite.” But they’re such ‘50s cartoons in their outlook. It’s one of those things that feels in the Mad Men sort of thing, that weird mid-century time where Men Were Men And Didn’t Talk To Their Families.

It’s a visually intriguing cartoon, with the ongoing participation of the stick figure. (Because it doesn’t have Goofy’s facial features, I’ve never thought of it as being a fake Goofy. It is also smarter than Goofy is.) Sure, okay, it’s got the weird anthropological issue of golf and men, but that’s something you’re just dealing with when it comes to cartoons about golf. What they did with this one, though, is something more creative than anything else I’ve ever seen to do with golf. Which is, you know, something.