Entertainment
The 90s Movie That Made An Entire Generation Change How They Think About Cheese Forever
By Robert Scucci
| Published
Everybody born in the late 80s and early 90s has one thing in common, and it’s how one scene from a Disney movie changed the way they think about cheese forever. The year was 1995, and A Goofy Movie was making waves at the box office.
We didn’t know it at the time, but one specific moment that takes up all of 16 seconds had a profound impact on all of us: that forbidden motel room pizza shared between P.J. (Rob Paulsen) and Max (Jason Marsden) when they meet up by happenstance during their travels. Here, we catch a glimpse of pizza perfection in the form of a legendary cheese pull on P.J.’s part, cementing in our collective consciousness that this is the only way to live.
Legendary Cheese Pull
For those unlike myself who don’t find themselves chronically online as a means to earn a living, play games, find new music, and socialize, you might not know what a cheese pull is. If you watched A Goofy Movie while your brain was still developing, though, you absolutely know what it is, even if you couldn’t articulate it at the time. A cheese pull is what happens when you pull apart a grilled cheese sandwich, bite into a steamy hot mozzarella stick, or in the case of P.J. and Max in A Goofy Movie, grab a piping hot slice of pepperoni pie while casually shooting the breeze.
P.J. is in his element here, going for that long, upward tug, folding the excess of melty goodness back onto the top of his slice as he goes in for that first glorious, greasy bite. Max, who certainly knows his way around a slice, lets his cheese droop off the side, which some more seasoned pizza aficionados may consider an amateur move.
Cheese Pulls Are Everywhere Now
While I can’t definitively prove that A Goofy Movie is the reason the cheese pull worked its way into the cultural lexicon in such a big way, I have reason to believe that millennials of a certain age fixate on pulling that sweet, sweet curd apart because they watched the film at a pivotal moment in their lives. There are Pizza Hut commercials that predate A Goofy Movie, and there are definitely instances of cheese pulls in these ads, but they’re nowhere near as impressive as the advertisements created today by people who were probably children when A Goofy Movie was first making its rounds.
Simply log into any social media platform, search “cheese pull,” and tell me what you see. Mozzarella stretching across pixelated screens isn’t a privilege anymore, it’s a birthright, and we can’t get enough of it. So much so that TikTok user NomadRyanEats went viral after his trip to Japan to experience the “world’s best cheese pull” ended in disappointment the moment he took what he thought would be the most glorious first bite of his life. He brings the ten-dollar, deep-fried, cheese-filled Yen to his face, closes his eyes, and waits for that legendary pull, only to open his eyes and discover that there was none.
When the light leaves his eyes and he takes stock of what just happened to him, he eventually regroups and gets the bite he was chasing. For a moment he was in a state of raw panic. Watching the video was an emotional rollercoaster for me because, thanks to A Goofy Movie and the impact the pizza scene had on my life, I knew exactly what kind of dragon he was chasing. When his redemption bite proves successful, I dropped the pearls I was clutching because I was genuinely relieved that his travels weren’t in vain.
The Goofy Movie Is Good For Other Reasons Too
All this cheese pull talk aside, A Goofy Movie still rules because it brought us “Hi Dad Soup,” the perfect cast, Powerline’s infectiously positive bop, “Stand Out” (written and recorded by Tevin Campbell), and a heartwarming story about father-son bonding in what I personally think is the ultimate animated coming-of-age road comedy the whole family can enjoy. It also gave us Pauly Shore’s Bobby Zimurusky, who’s also obsessed with cheese, and his unforgettable construction of the “Leaning Tower of Cheeza.”
For whatever reason you happen to enjoy A Goofy Movie, I hope that all of your cheese pulls, past, future, and present, are everything you expect them to be because it’s the glue that holds us all together, one slice at a time.
A Goofy Movie, in all of its cheese pulling glory, can be streamed on Disney+.
