A Disney Executive Really Wanted to Cast Steve Martin as Goofy

Disney’s A Goofy Movie was unlike any of the studio’s previous animated features. The 1995 release attempted to combine the slapstick zaniness of Goofy with the drama of adolescent angst. To this day, it’s the only Disney movie that opens with an intensely horny body horror nightmare sequence.

The big-screen adaptation of TV’s Goof Troop didn’t do much business at the box office, but it eventually became a cult classic thanks to home video. Although it’s hard to imagine that the movie would be quite so beloved today if Goofy had sounded like a 50-year-old Steve Martin.

The production of A Goofy Movie is now the subject of a new documentary: Not Just a Goof. The doc, which was produced independently but is now streaming on Disney+, doesn’t shy away from depicting the Mouse House’s corporate blunders. Specifically, there’s a segment focusing on former Disney chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg’s inane casting suggestion. Katzenberg, the same guy who gave us Quibi, and was nearly mauled to death by a lion while promoting The Lion King, first commissioned the project, and even came up with the film’s basic plot, inspired by a real-life road trip with his daughter.

But as director Kevin Lima recalled in the doc, Katzenberg then outlined a truly terrible idea. “What if Steve Martin were Goofy? Wouldn’t that be fabulous?” Katzenberg said. “Imagine how you could sell that, that would be great.” 

When Lima asked if the exec wanted “Steve Martin to do the Goofy voice,” Katzenberg responded, “No, no, no, no — he’s going to use his own voice so that we know who he is.”

Obviously this made zero sense considering that the movie was a follow-up to a pre-existing TV series starring a character whose speaking voice was established in the 1930s. “How can you play Goofy with just a regular person’s voice? That would be like Mickey Mouse (speaking) with Cary Grant’s voice,” Lima argued. “It’s just incredibly ridiculous. But we had to because he’s the boss.”

So Lima set out to prove to Katzenberg that this approach was a “bad idea.” Instead of paying for Steve Martin, he had Bill Farmer, the voice of Goofy, record several scenes using his natural, non-Goof voice. Unfortunately, the actor had a “complete meltdown” over the studio’s criticisms. “Don’t they want to hear Goofy when they (see) A Goofy Movie?” he understandably questioned. 

“We did several days of recording in my voice, more as an experiment,” Farmer recalled. When Katzenberg was shown the resulting footage, pairing Goofy animation with the sound of a regular dude talking, he did a complete 180. “I agree with you, we shouldn’t do it,” he told Lima. 

In Not Just a Goof, Lima, who went on to direct 102 Dalmatians and Enchanted pointed out that this anecdote just goes to show that “the whim of a studio executive can change in a moment, if you don’t fight back against a bad idea.”

Of course, since it was the mid-’90s nobody fought back against the idea of putting Pauly Shore in the movie.