Harlow Wilcox

Fibber McGee enlists the help of Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy in enticing an aircraft manufacturer to build a factory in the small town of Wistful Vista. Based on the "Fibber McGee and Molly" radio series

Period music, film clips and newsreel footage combined into a visual exploration of the American entertainment industry during the Great Depression.

At the race track, various spectators (all Goofy lookalikes) are playing the ponies. A posh rich Goofy bets on the equally posh Snapshot III while another more common looking Goofy bets on the bedraggled Old Moe. When the race begins, Snapshot and the rider are so overconfident they wait a few minutes after the race has begun to start running. When they finally do get going, Snapshot is not above stooping to dirty tricks such as tripping and biting the other horses. Sadly, Snapshot's vanity is what costs him winning the race (he stops to pose for the photo finish) and Old Moe is declared the winner.

This generous collection includes 46 of the 48 shorts that starred Goofy between 1939 and 1961 (but none of the great Mickey-Donald-Goofy films from the mid-'30s). The "How to Ride a Horse" sequence in The Reluctant Dragon (1941) set the pattern for many of these cartoons. An elegant narrator (artist John Ployardt) explains a sport that Goofy attempts to demonstrate. The character that animator Art Babbitt described in a 1935 lecture (quoted in the DVD bonus material) as an easygoing dimbulb gave way to an enthusiastic but spectacularly maladroit figure. One of the funniest entries in the series, "Hockey Homicide," contains several studio in-jokes: dueling stars Icebox Bertino and Fearless Ferguson, and referee Clean-Game Kinney are named for artists Al Bertino, Norm Ferguson, and director Jack Kinney.