Goopy Geer is an animated cartoon character created by Rudolf Ising for the Merrie Melodies series of cartoons from Warner Bros. Pictures. He is a singing, dancing, piano-playing dog who is considered the first recurring protagonist in the Merrie Melodies series, although he only starred in three cartoons.
History
The character is a tall, lanky anthropomorphic dog with scruffy whiskers and long, expressive ears. He was "a wisecracking entertainer -- 'part comedian, part musician and part dancer' -- inspired by vaudeville showmen of [the 1930s]."
Goopy's character was based on a familiar archetype of entertainment, as Hank Sartin says in Reading the Rabbit:
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.
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 early sound-era cartoon characters, Ising's Goopy has little personality of his own, but unlike Foxy and Piggy, his appearance and personality were not a derivative of Bosko. 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 with a falsetto voice 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).
A month after Goopy Geer's first cartoon had been released, Walt Disney Productions released a cartoon called "Mickey's Revue" with a character named Dippy Dawg, whose overall appearance was very similar to that of Goopy Geer; due to the close proximity of the two cartoons' releases, there is little chance that either character was intended to be a copy of the other. Dippy Dawg would eventually be renamed to "Goofy".
Goopy later appeared in two Looney Tunes cartoons starring Bosko: "Bosko the Drawback" (October 22, 1932) and "Bosko in Dutch" (January 14, 1933), but after Ising left Warner Bros. with Hugh Harman for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Ising took the rights of Goopy with him; Goopy was made redundant in favor of a redesigned Bosko and the Happy Harmonies series. Turner Entertainment Co. eventually reunited Goopy Geer with his Merrie Melodies library through its purchases of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Associated Artists Productions library, and eventually back to Warner Bros. which acquired Turner Broadcasting System.
Later appearances
Goopy Geer had a small role in the 1990s animated series Tiny Toon Adventures episode "Two-Tone Town" voiced by Robert Morse. 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.