I'm ashamed to admit that I watched just about three whole minutes of "A Goofy Movie" on the Disney Channel today.

It should be noted that, while I have great respect for many of the past works of the Disney Animation company, I revile just about every last one of their half-hour animated series featuring revisionist views of their classic characters -- save "Duck Tales," which were based largely on the works of the great Carl Barks. Of all those other revisions, however, I have a special, cold, pitch-black place deep in my gallbladder reserved specifically for the abomination that was "Goof Troop."

I'm not gonna get too deep into this part, because there's easily a week's worth of whining about this in me, but I will say this -- the REAL Goofy is probably childless, but if we accept his having a child as series canon, then it is the red-haired child he was depicted with in various short films of the nineteen-fifties, and the child's name was 'Junior,' not 'Max.' I'm not even going to get into how Pete squares with his earlier incarnations, save to note that he was always Mickey's arch-nemesis, and scarcely dealt with Goofy at all -- making "Goof Troop" the equivalent of a sitcom featuring Batman living next door to Lex Luthor.

I secretly hope that I'm the first person to ever compare Batman with Goofy, but I rather doubt I can claim the honor.

Anyway, the three minutes of "A Goofy Movie" I watched were both wretched and derivative, but it's not like I wasn't expecting it, so I can hardly complain. What struck me about it, however, was how well it was animated. It was animated very well, indeed! How depressing is that? Good, American animation (or French or Korean, depending on whether or not it was outsourced) wasted on a movie which, if it DIDN'T go directly to video, sure should've. It's no wonder Micheal Eisner declared that 2-D animation was dead -- anybody who saw the quality of the animation in this thing and compared it with what would inevitably have been some godawful reviews and tepid box-office reciepts would have simply assumed that the artform had run its course... and that's why they're currently shoving CG bugs and farm animals down our throats.

Assuming they left any of the 2-D animators alive at Disney, somebody needs to unchain 'em and get 'em onto some project worthy of their skill.

By which I mean, of course, "Lady and the Tramp 4."