Studio: Walt Disney Productions
Distributor: RKO Radio Pictures
Produced by: Walt Disney
Short Synopsis
Goofy reads from his diary, recounting his safari to Africa, and the film shows the trip as he tells it, in the style of a travel lecture. He sets off with his porters through the jungle and across the savannah, the line of bearers trailing behind him in a long procession of dots along a winding path. He tries his hand at big-game hunting and finds the animals far more capable than he is: a little antelope bounds off through the reeds, and a small oxpecker bird turns out to matter more than it looks. Above all, he runs into a black rhinoceros, and his safari ends in trouble with it. Goofy stands in the long grass at sunset, in his explorer's outfit, taking it all in with the same cheerful incomprehension.
Why It Matters
- The film turns the safari travelogue, a staple of 1930s and 1940s cinema, into a gentle Goofy farce, and its backgrounds, with orange earth, lush jungle and a pink-and-gold sunset over the savannah, are especially rich.
- It belongs to Jack Kinney's Goofy series of the 1940s, which used Goofy as a deadpan everyman in parodies of documentaries and instructional films. These shorts kept Goofy in steady production as a solo star and fed directly into the "How to" format of his later films.
Notes and Trivia
- The narrator is Frank Graham, one of the busiest voice actors of the period, heard in many Tex Avery cartoons.
- Plot detail beyond the diary framing and the rhinoceros chase is not described in sources this book could check, and the summary of the middle section is general.
- See also: The Olympic Champ (1942).