“How to Play Football”

There’s an exhaustive plot summary for this cartoon on Wikipedia, and I can’t fathom who cares that much. I grant you that I walk the border of the dreaded term Disney Adult, inasmuch as Disney isn’t my full identity, but surely the plot of this short doesn’t matter. There are any number of Disney shorts that don’t have their own Wikipedia pages, and if you’re that obsessive, go work on that instead. Presumably what we have here is a Disney adult football fan; weirder crossovers surely exist. It seems this cartoon is extremely popular, I guess because it’s a Disney cartoon that you can like because it’s about football.

But yeah, this is in the no Colvig era of Goofy shorts, where you get a whole bunch of Goofys doing a thing while a narrator (Frank Bull) explains things to you. In this case, football. Taxidermy Tech and Anthropology A&M are battling one another in a stadium. There’s a lot of football jokes. Some of them are, I suspect, like the hockey ones and funnier if you know a lot about football. Unlike the hockey short, there’s no focus on the spectators; we get the head coach of Tech instead.

One of the jokes that does land is that some people claim football to be a violent game, but that’s just silly. Meanwhile, people are being carried off the field on stretchers. “Swivel Hips” Smith is the star player for Tech, and even though the narrator informs us that the coach is saving him and protecting him and so forth, he gets absolutely devastated. And that’s the safe, protected player. There’s a reason I’m not going to let my kids play football; imagine the brain damage Swivel Hips suffers.

This is from the days when few of the people involved in making things were credited. People mock particularly long credits now, but this cartoon doesn’t even credit its voice actors. Apparently a lot of people believe the narration is by long-time Disney standard Billy Bletcher, and the cartoon obviously doesn’t dissuade you. The narrator could be Frank Bull or Billy Bletcher or the summoned ghost of Elias Disney for all the cartoon will tell you, and one of the things that makes me a bit sad is that a lot of works has been lost by the lack of crediting onscreen. However, they did manage to sneak in tributes nonetheless, as in various players are named after people who worked on the cartoon.

The team sport how-to cartoons are by and large not as fun to me. I like it more when it’s essentially a combat between Goofy and the narrator, with Goofy doing what he can to follow the instructions even when they don’t make sense or he’s not equipped to do so. Or when he’s doing what he can but things just go wrong for him because he’s Goofy. Two dozen Goofys all playing a game that’s only a slight exaggeration of the real one is not the best cartoon possible. Not when you can, say, get the narrator all distracted into reciting “Crossing the Bar” while he’s supposed to be instructing, one of the best moments from the series.