“Motor Mania”

By a strange twist of circumstances, I was once the student aid in a drivers’ ed class, before I was old enough to take it. I’ve mentioned this before, and I’ve also mentioned that one of my jobs was to run the projector, and occasionally the VCR. (Hi, summer 1991!) I no longer remember even half of what we watched in those days. But I’m pretty sure there were at least a couple of things from Disney on the list, and this was likely one of them. Everyone in the class but the teacher was still a pedestrian at this point, as this was the class you had to take before they put you behind the wheel of a car, so we all felt strongly that pedestrians should be protected.

Today, we do not have Goofy. We have Mr. Walker. (Bob Jackman, unlikely to be related to Hugh.) A normal pedestrian living a normal suburban life. Until he gets into the driver’s seat of his car, at which point he becomes the demonic Mr. Wheeler. He owns the road. He doesn’t care about you. Then he gets out of the car again, becomes Mr. Walker again, gets irate at crazy drivers. Then he gets back in the car again, becomes Mr. Wheeler again, becomes a crazy driver again.

Because he lives in suburbia, there aren’t a lot of options beyond driving. Personally I’m not walking distance from much of anything. A lake, the public boat launch of which is a couple of blocks from here. That’s it. The kids can’t walk to school and never will; there’s no grocery shopping within walking distance. So you have to drive to go anywhere. Due to certain vagaries of our landscape, you can’t even get a public bus much closer than a mile away. I have no doubt a lot of the animators were dealing with similar issues. I happen to know for a fact it would’ve taken Saul Bass over half an hour at the best of times to drive from his house to Universal Studios, and I’m sure it’s similar for Disney animators.

The problem is not just the need to drive. Which is there, for many reasons. And this is not the time or place for a discussion on the issues of suburban America. The problem, and this has not changed, is the fact that you can completely isolate yourself from the world around you as a driver, and you stop thinking about pedestrians and other drivers as people. You are a person. The people in your car are people. No one else. And since they’re not people, they don’t count. It’s the old saw about wondering what everyone else is doing on the road, given you’re on the road yourself. You have a reason. What’s with them?

Goofy is such an odd choice for these shorts, but I assume that it’s the point. He seems so harmless. So innocent. He’s sweet and charming and, well, goofy. And then behind the wheel of a car he’s a madman. If it were Donald, you could say, well, sure, it’s Donald. And they wouldn’t do this to Mickey. But we know Goofy, and we have an image of him. The idea that the image we have can change when he goes from being a pedestrian to being a driver suggests that this is in fact true of the rest of us as well.