"Christmas Maximus"

 I guess the rule was that the title just had to have "Max" in it?  Okay.  Impressive work, everyone.  Time for coffee and doughnuts!

Actually, I'm slightly boggled: in looking up information about Max, I learned that Goofy had previously had a son, possibly called Goofy Jr, who appeared in a series of fifties shorts.  And my boggling is because I had NEVER seen any of these and so never encountered this version of Goofy before, presented as a kind of everyman with a completely different voice than normal.  Thanks, I hate it.  I had no idea such things existed, which is kind of interesting, but the result...boy.  I forced myself to watch a few of them to get some idea of what they were about, and they did NOT grow on me, I will tell you that much.  This was apparently Walt's own idea.  Well, they can't all be winners--though it does deal a blow to the Dorfman/Mattelart idea that there's nefarious intent behind all the nieces and nephews.

Well, this early Goofy-offspring is clearly not the same character as Max, in spite of what this claims.  Max was created in 1992 for Goof Troop, a show I have never seen--well, I did see A Goofy Movie in the theater; to the very limited extent to which I remember it, I think I liked it, more or less.  But that's it (I'm sure someone will tell me if the show's any good).  Does he have a mother, or what (Goofy Jr does; we occasionally hear from her or sort of see her, though her face is never revealed)?  And since Goofy apparently has sole custody, can we assume that she was deemed an even less suitable guardian?  The mind reels.  Or, I suppose, she could have tragically died young, leaving him a widower.  There's potential drama here!  Albeit not of the sort that The Walt Disney Company would likely address.

It's hard for me to have a strong opinion about Max, really.  I don't love his mullet-like hair, I'll tell you that much.  We could compare him to Gilbert if we wanted to: both of them habitually embarrassed by their flesh and blood's ineptitude.  The big difference is that, unlike Gilbert, Max is an audience-identification character.  Has anyone ever identified with Gilbert?  If so, I can't decide if I'd like to meet them or run screaming.

I don't know.  Max could be an okay character--better than Gilbert, certainly, and I like him well enough in the present story--but how much I can tolerate him elsewhere will probably depend inversely on how much nineties attitude they have given him.  Maybe we'll see someday!  Or maybe not.  Could go either way.

Of course, the other interesting thing about him is that his age is variable: in Once Upon a Christmas he was a little kid; here, he seems to be college-age--while HDL remain the same age in both.  It's a little spooky when there's contrast like that.

So this is kind of the main conflict, in Max's brain.  In the animated version, this whole thing is presented as a not noticeably Christmas-y song.  As these things go, it isn't terrible (low bar, granted), but it feels really, really strange to have a song wedged into this otherwise non-musical (apart from miscellaneous Christmas songs) film.  WEIRD.

Roooooooxaaaanne!  Who's Roxanne?  Okay okay, I know the answer; she's Max's love interest in A Goofy Movie and I guess has appeared a few times since.  But why mention her here?  Is the idea to appease hardcore Max/Roxanne stans?  Are there such people?  And even if there are, is this going to satisfy them?  The implication here appears to be that she dumped him because she couldn't stand his dad's idiocy.  That's not very satisfying.

Anyway, I suppose we have to at least touch on this "make her mine" stuff, because ol' Max is absolutely obsessed with it.  If I asked you what does it mean, in a vacuum, when you say you want to 'make someone yours,' you'd probably say, "well, it can be a little nebulous, but all things being equal, I'd say it generally means you want the someone to be your boy/girlfriend.  Now how do we get out of this vacuum?  It's dark in here!"  Okay, right, but Mona (who as far as I can tell appears nowhere other than this story) is clearly already his girlfriend.  In that sense she's already 'his.'  

It could be as simple as "I really like her and I don't want to be embarrassed in front of her"--as, indeed, he more or less articulates in the beginning.  Nothing more to it than that.  But all of this "make her mine" stuff--I feel like it's more down to the ineptitude of the scenario writers than anything else that this really, really comes across as "he wants to get laid."  Not that that wouldn't in any case be a subtextual element, but the way the story's written, it's very difficult not to see it as kind of the most important thing.  This is okay, storywise; it's just that I kind of think they weren't considering very closely what they were doing and would have been uncomfortable with it if they had been.  Look at that middle panel with Max looking at the just-married couple: sure, he might be thinking of marriage down the road.  When you're in love with someone it's natural to think about these things, even if you realize rationally that they're a bit premature.  But that element was not present in the cartoon, and it very much looks as though somebody at some level thought "huh.  In retrospect, I'm not one hundred percent happy with what this is suggesting.  Can we somehow include some level of plausible deniability here?" and this is what we get.  Obviously, that didn't work too well!

One of the most interesting things about Max--in theory, at least--is him worrying about turning into his father.  Here we see Mona with Goofy-style teeth, which happens right near the end of the cartoon and is supposed to be a big revelation; here, it is revealed a bit early.

Given how dismissive I was of "A Very Goofy Christmas," would it surprise you to know that this one is actually my favorite of the batch?  The scenario isn't super-developed, and as I noted above I don't think the writers were always in control of the narrative, but the end result is still kind of sweet.  Clearly all of these are going for sweetness, but this is really the only one that made me feel any particular emotion, so we'll chalk it up as a win.

I mean...yeah, okay!  This is fairly credibly-done.  There's a lot here that's not, so I want to give them all the positive reinforcement I can when I can.  Happy holidays.