In 1946, Disney released the theatrical cartoon short Double Dribble, which depicted many hulking characters of the Goofy species playing a five-on-five college basketball game between P.U. and U.U. Deep on the bench for P.U. lies the only normal-sized player on either team, a diminutive but excited Goofy character who just wants to play.
After the two gargantuan teams go back-and-forth for a bit, tiny Goofy is forced into the game as a last resort following a series of injuries and fouls. His coach ends up tearing up his own contract, presuming it’ll be the end of his career. He’s totally outmatched by his competition. Just watch tiny Goofy try to compete: he has no business even being on the court.
At one point the ball accidentally ends up in his hands, and he’s picked off the floor like a piece of garbage. But due to a series of slapstick mishaps and highly illegal basketball moves, diminutive Goofy ends up flying into the basket with the ball in his hands into the basket (which, in the short, actually looks like his own basket, but I’m not going to dive too deeply into this one).
The big Goofy players from U.U. lost in the upset. But as someone at the arena noted to us last night, 70 years after the release, big Goofy finally got his revenge in the form of Spurs rookie center Boban Marjanovic.
These were just two of Marjanovic’s 13 points in just 13 minutes of playing time against the Brooklyn Nets, and he got them all in particularly big Goofy fashion: hanging around the rim and tossing the ball in above his competition. It seemed like he didn’t even need to get off the floor to dunk. Marjanovic bent the sport into “nerf basketball,” as Ian Eagle put it following the above play.
If seeing the hulking 7-foot-3 Marjanovic dominate garbage time in a win doesn’t convince you that Double Dribble was ahead of its time, you might also be interested to know that Goofy’s Double Dribble game featured optical tracking SportVU data, almost 70 years before it caught on in the NBA.
A timeless classic, indeed.
