26 Years On, This Is Still Disney’s Best Sequel (& It Deserves More Respect)

26 years ago nearly today, Disney released their best sequel and it deserves way more respect because fans might have missed out on the direct to DVD launch. Disney has a better track record when it comes to sequels these days as they often make their way to theaters with just as big of a to-do about them as the original. They are held on the same kind of big event level as their first film now, but it wasn’t always that way. Disney sequels used to be much quieter and much less ambitious.

There was an era of Disney where their feature film sequels would not release in theaters, but instead would launch directly on home video and DVD instead. These sequels would be much smaller in scope than their theatrical counterparts, and often were seen as less than by many fans as a result. But there’s one sequel that turned out to not only be much better than the other direct to DVD hits, but would be on par with the original too. And that is An Extremely Goofy Movie, released 26 years ago on February 29, 2000.

An Extremely Goofy Movie Released 26 Years Ago Today

An Extremely Goofy Movie is in a rather interesting place within Disney’s history overall. A Goofy Movie ended up aging into one of the most beloved Disney animated classics of the millennial generation (as we’ve seen many examples of when it celebrated its 30th anniversary), but upon its debut was far from being as popular as many of the other renaissance films releasing around it. But what was special about A Goofy Movie was that it always was kind of a smaller feature compared to those other epic stories anyway.

This made it the perfect film to get a direct to DVD sequel. An Extremely Goofy Movie takes place a few years after the events of the original feature film, and sees Max going off to college for the first time. Goofy goes through some trouble when he starts missing his son once more (much like the original), and learns he needs a college degree to get a new job. Enrolling in the same college as his son, Goofy and Max then become classmates and things get much wackier from that point on. It’s a grounded story like the first, but is all the more successful because of it.

An Extremely Goofy Movie tells a very human story that you can imagine with real life actors, and that’s part of why the sequel works as well as it does. Goofy is up to his usual shenanigans, but ultimately the core focus of the story is about how Max wants to further distance himself from his father and how Goofy grows into being an independent person not reliant on having his son around. It’s something you don’t need to go to theaters with, yet still feels like it fully completes the picture that began outlining with A Goofy Movie.

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Why An Extremely Goofy Movie Is So Special

An Extremely Goofy Movie might have a much smaller scope, but it’s also a perfect time capsule of the era it was released in. It dropped right at the start of the new millennium, so it was doing a lot of things that it felt like a cool college kid from the 2000s would be interested in. Max and his friends are great at extreme sports, and thus enter the college version of the X Games and take on their rivals in school through some big challenges.

It’s one of those elements that would seem like it ages the film poorly because it so firmly plants it in 2000, but it’s actually gone the other route. Now it’s a fully nostalgic way to instantly jump into that time period, and you’ll see just how notable the sequel really was for the time. It’s a sequel that cares about its characters, and cares about how their lives are changing after the original series. And because that first film continues after the Goof Troop TV series, it feels even more full circle as a result.

Other Disney sequels try and maintain what fans loved about that first film, and are scared to make any major adjustments that would alter its icons for fear of pushing that audience away. An Extremely Goofy Movie eschews that thought and really focuses on having a new father and son adventure at a different point in their lives. We find some new things about each character, and even give Goofy and Max a happy ending. But more fans need to see the sequel in action because they’ve likely missed out on it so far.

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