“How to Fish”

I remember going fishing as a child, but I don’t remember actually catching any fish. My dad bought me a fishing rod, which means I was very young indeed. I think it was a Snoopy-themed one, because bizarre themed merchandise is not new. The picture I have is from a trip involving a family reunion, and I think I am fishing in either the Sacramento or American River, since I remember being in Sacramento at the time. I cannot imagine I was worse at fishing than Goofy.

Goofy, at least, has the benefit of a deep-voiced narrator (this week, John McLeish). There is in theory instruction here, but it feels more as though the narrator is walking us through Goofy’s expeditions. At first, Goofy is captured by the spirit of water, represented by the constellation Pisces. He is drawn to the mountains, where he camps next to a stream in the open, finding the one rainy valley there. Then, he tries fishing in a boat, which goes equally well.

Fishing is one of those activities that rapidly leaps from “basically just a string on a stick” to “you spend thousands of dollars on complicated equipment.” You can use “here is a thing I found in the dirt” for bait, or you can spend large amounts of money of very specific bait, or you can make fake bait using bits of wire and feather and things. Or you can pay someone else to make fake bait for you. This cartoon basically does not get into that; fly fishing is reduced to a gag where we get a fish conga line. And we are sticking to freshwater fishing, presumably because Goofy shipwrecked is a different cartoon.

We’ve actually seen Goofy fish before. His very first solo short was “Goofy and Wilbur,” wherein he went fishing with a pet grasshopper. Because why not. Actually, Goofy was considerably more successful in that short, because the point of these cartoons is not for Goofy to succeed at the thing he’s being taught. Where’s the fun in that? And to be fair, he’s not really the one doing the work of fishing in that other short, either.

It’s funny, if you think about it, that modern life has turned hunting and gathering, and even low-level agriculture, into hobbies. Okay, there are still people who rely on this kind of subsistence food acquisition to survive, but that’s not what Goofy’s doing. It is, I admit, hard to imagine Goofy in “How to Hunt.” That sounds appalling and like something that would end with Goofy’s head on a deer’s wall. We just don’t think of fish the same way, somehow.