Which was based on a Canadian TV play!
I’m not sure if this was obvious to everyone else or not. I’ve heard the song Our House by Madness a bazillion times and I always heard ‘sister sewing in her sleep,’ which is much more evocative (to me) than ‘sighing in her sleep.’
Meyer Landsman, the Philip Marlowe-esque protagonist of The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, has a rough phonetic approximation of “Marlowe” hidden in his name.
I’m an IDIOT.
I always thought Vader got to Cloud City first by divining it with his “Sorcerer Ways”
Completely forgetting Boba Fett following the Falcon.
This is a coincidence, not a deliberate shout-out, but I just noticed it, so I’ll share it.
In the movie Stand By Me, before Gordie, Wil Wheaton’s character, tells the pie-contest story, there’s a montage of the boys free-associating. Cherry-flavored Pez, if Pluto’s a dog then what the heck is Goofy*, and then Gordie says, “Wagon Train’s a pretty cool show. But did you ever notice they never get anywhere? They just keep wagon training.”
A year later, Wil Wheaton would be cast in Star Trek: the Next Generation. The original Trek was pitched by Gene Roddenberry to NBC as Wagon Train To the Stars.
*I honestly thought Goofy was a horse. Doesn’t he kind of look like one? But the official word from Disney is that Goofy is a “dawg”; a cartoon dog, humanized the way Mickey and Donald are. Pluto is more like what today we call a(n) NPC. He’s not a character: he’s Mickey’s pet, and he doesn’t speak (that I recall?) Mice don’t look like Mickey, after all, and Goofy is in the same class as Mickey, so he’s a “dawg” while Pluto is a dog.
Sorry, my inner nerd demands I “Um, actually…” this.
NPC stands for “Non-Player Character,” and wouldn’t really apply to any character in most traditional narrative media. The term originates from Dungeons and Dragons, where it referred to any character in the story controlled by the Dungeon Master, as opposed to one of the characters controlled by a player. It got ported over to video games in largely the same sense - a video game NPC is any character controlled by the computer. It doesn’t reflect the character’s importance to the story, except that NPCs are almost definitionally not protagonists, because that’s what the player is there for.
Pluto himself was the protagonist in nearly fifty Disney shorts from the '30s through the '50s, in addition to dozens of appearances as a supporting character in Mickey Mouse cartoons. I believe he was also a non-controllable character in some of the Kingdom Hearts video games, which would indeed make him an NPC.
That would be Horace Horsecollar.
Yep, Pluto has been the star in quite a few shorts.
I’m assuming that no one wants to rehash the old* theory: “If Minnie and Pluto had a love child, wouldn’t it look a lot like Goofy?”…
.
*developed during the middle of Stand By Me.
(by me, but I’m willing to share authorship of the article in a prestigious scientific journal, with anyone here who’ll admit to having the same thought…)
The Disney characters are fictional (you’d be surprised that needs to be foundational). They live in a fictional world where they take the form of anthropomorphized animals. They aren’t really mice or ducks or dogs, but are functionally humans. Pluto is a dog in that he functions as a pet. Just like Hello Kitty is not a cat, but is a little girl anthropomorphized in the form of a cat and has a pet who functions as a cat. The mind blower is that she’s not even Japanese, but is British.
Sooooo…They’re all furries?
The one that gets me: Gadget Hackwrench, a mouse, is about the same size as Chip and Dale. Chip and Dale have also appeared together with Donald, who’s about eight times their height. Donald is about the same height as Mickey, a mouse.
Furries would be the fandom. Just like LARPers to whatever world they are celebrating. They are “meta”.
If a humanized dog is a “dawg”, wouldn’t Mickey and Donald, as humanized animals, be a “mowse” and a “duk”, respectively?
Perhaps if they had to differentiate between Mickey and vermin or if they had Donald feeding bread to ducks. I don’t recall the same situation as Pluto with the other residents. Ducks have a special status thanks to Carl Banks so I doubt they would need to.
Blows my mind: Animals having other animals as pets. A mouse “owning” a dog! A “kitty” owning a cat… I can’t think of that showing up anywhere else… Zootopia? Mighty Mouse? Rescue Rangers? Duck Tales?
Tangent: That reminds me once again of the time someone in a meeting ended with “Well, that’s interesting. Might solve a mystery…”
Me: “Or rewrite history.” “Duck Tales, a-woo-hoo…”
Ross from Friends had a pet monkey.
As I pointed out (somewhere), there are the Carl Banks ducks who look like they’re about three feet tall– Donald, Uncle Scrooge, etc., and then there are more generalized “humanoids with bills” who are further up the anthropomorphization scale.
I mean, they’re all obviously various degrees of human-animal hybrids, right?
Goofy started out as a character named “Dippy Dawg”, which would seem to cement his identity as canine.
At the same time, Warner Brothers cartoons had a character named “Goopy Geer”, who was also a dog. Goopy and Dippy looked suspiciously similar
It’s also suspicious that “Dippy” morphed into “Goofy”, which differs by only one letter from “Goopy”. For some reason, Goopy faded from the Warners lineup in 1933.
If you look at early black and white cartoons you see plenty of similarities, and not a lot of variation. Being stuck in black and white mode, without evebn shades of gray to modulate things, seemed to limit creativity in his regard. “Foxy” from arner Brothers looks so much like Mickey Mouse that I thought they were the same character as a kid. I saw one cartoon from the 1920s where I swear every character looked like Mickey Mouse, as he was drawn then.