Goopy Geer is a animated cartoon character in the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series of cartoons from Warner Bros. The character is a tall, lanky humanoid dog with scruffy whiskers and long, expressive ears. In all of his animated appearances, Goopy is depicted as light colored, but in an early promotional drawing for his first cartoon, he had black fur. His overall appearance is very similar to that of Walt Disney's Goofy, but because both characters appeared for the first time in 1932, there is little chance that either was intended to be a copy of the other.
Goopy Geer was the last attempt by animator Rudolf Ising to feature a recurring character in the Merrie Melodies series of films. Like most other sound-era cartoon characters, Ising's Goopy has little personality of his own. Instead, he sings and dances his way through a musical world in perfect syncopation. Ising only featured the character in three cartoons. In the first, "Goopy Geer " (April 16, 1932), he plays a popular pianist entertaining at a nightclub. In Ising's other two Goopy films, both in 1932, he cast the dog first as a hillbilly in "Moonlight for Two " (June 11, 1932), then as a court jester in "The Queen Was in the Parlor " (July 9, 1932). All of these cartoons also feature Goopy's unnamed girlfriend who debuted without her gangly consort in the earlier Merrie Melodie "Freddy the Freshman " (February 20, 1932). Goopy would make a cameo in the Bosko cartoon "Bosko in Dutch " (January 14, 1933), but after Ising left Warner Bros. that same year, Goopy and other recurring Merrie Melodies characters were retired and future Merrie Melodies were one-shot affairs with no recurring characters until the 1940s when Bugs Bunny was introduced.
Goopy Geer had a small role in the 1990s animated series Tiny Toon Adventures. In the episode "Two-Tone Town " (September 28, 1992), Goopy, reprising his role as the happy-go-lucky pianist from his first cartoon, meets the series' stars when they visit the "black-and-white" part of town. His appearance in this cartoon is updated somewhat, and seems to be based on early promotional drawings where his fur is black, rather than his actual cartoon appearances.
External links
