One of the defining traits of nerd-dom is the “fan theory.” No pop-culture franchise is so thoroughly and completely detailed that *every* question is answered. And in reality, most franchises are such a plot-hole and contradiction riddled mess that they’re often more question than answer. So it is a fun and challenging intellectual exercise to take disparate, unrelated scraps of evidence and link them, inserting original new content to bridge the gaps and make it all make some sort of sense. This is of course not restricted to science fictional nerds… religious nerds have been doing this forever. Religious texts are notoriously scatter-brained. Rabbis have been arguing over the whichness of the Torahanical why for millenia; more recently, fan theories about the “Rapture” and “Tribulation” promoted by Darby back in the 1800’s have become accepted canon among a lot of fans of the Bible.

But enough of that silly religious stuff, let’s get to something more important: Disney’s animated character Goofy.

Some people are apparently big fans of the anthropomorphized dog-like character Goofy. Goofy appeared in a number of animated shorts in the 50’s and had his own TV series and a couple movies in the 90’s. This was adequate to build up a respectable database on the biography of the character… and it was apparently more than enough for the fans to recognize some disturbing trends and details. Such as: in the 50’s, he had a wife and son, Max. In the 1990’s, he still had his son… but his wife was nowhere to be found. Not mentioned once.  Why? Who knows. Disney has a well-known love of killing off parents and leaving the main characters orphans or at least separating children from parents and sending them out to face the world alone. So Max, it seems, beat the odds and lucked out by at least still having his dad around. But what *did* happen to the mom?

By leaving the question unanswered, that opens the door to fan theories. By leaving the topic unexplored, that paves the way to those fan theories being pretty clever… and pretty dark. behold:

Gawrsh! Goofy’s entire family may be dead

There’s some delightfully dark stuff in there.

I have no idea if the theory that Max is actually the milkman’s kid and that the mom is dead is generally accepted by the Goofy fandom. One suspect that Disney, if they wanted to, could crank out a direct-to-DVD movie that answers all these questions in a typically saccharine fashion (are their any ginger characters in the Goofy legendarium that Disney could erase and replace?). But sometime, that doesn’t work. Sometimes the fan theories are so clever and so popular that when the actual owner of the intellectual property reveals “the answer,” the ftans say “Nope. Wrong.” Look at Star Trek. Ask about a war between the Federation and the Klingons in the years before Kirk taking command of the enterprise, and the license holders will point to STD… but the fans will point to Axanar.