Disneyland: Serious . . . and Goofy : Symbol: Max schmoozes at the park and stars in a cartoon with his dad. But inquiring minds want the poop on the pup, like who’s his mom?

Did Goofy goof? Was Disney’s lovable man-dog too doggone loving?

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Nobody’s quite sure and Disney is at a loss to explain it, but this much is clear: Goofy has a son named Max. What Goofy doesn’t have is a wife, a steady girlfriend or an answer to the question: “Who is Max’s mother?”

“That’s kind of a gray area,” said Disneyland publicist Lindsay Schnebly.

Said another Disneyland spokesman, John McClintock: “That’s the ultimate question, and I’m not going to touch it. Quite frankly we don’t know.”

What Disney does know is that Goofy’s 11-year-old son is a successful new addition to the Anaheim theme park.

Max, a hip-talking, cool-dressing, chip off the ol’ blockhead, has been walking around Disneyland greeting many of his young fans since June. Max is also featured with his father in a Disney afternoon cartoon series called “Goof Troop” on KCAL Channel 9.

“He’s real popular with the kids,” McClintock said of Max.

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Although Disney officials say the emergence of Max wasn’t specifically designed to appeal to non-traditional families, he has unwittingly become somewhat of a symbol.

That was especially true during the presidential election, when then-Vice President Dan Quayle attacked the fictional television character Murphy Brown for being an unwed mother. Similar criticisms were leveled at Goofy, said Dave Smith, an archivist for the Disney Co.

Smith said the entertainment company has received letters recently from people commenting on the parentage of Max and many inquiries over the years about the genealogy of other Disney characters, such as Mickey’s nephews, Morty and Ferdie, and Donald Ducks’s nephews, Huey, Dewey and Louie.

“We get a lot of people writing to complain about the family trees of characters,” Smith said. “Some people get it in their minds that these are real people. . . . We’ve even had people ask why Donald Duck doesn’t wear pants.”

Smith said part of the problem lies with Disney’s cartoon writers.

“There’s no continuity. Writers don’t always remember what happened to a character years ago.”

For instance, in the 1940s, Goofy had a wife and a son--neither related to Max--in several cartoon shorts. But even in those cartoons, the identity of Goofy’s wife was a secret; only her arm was seen by the audience.

Disney officials do not know what happened to that wife or child.

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Smith said Disney has taken the view that the characters are actors playing a role in a film, in the way that Mickey was cast as Steamboat Willie in his first cartoon.

“They’re fictional characters created by the stroke of a pen,” Smith said.

As for Max’s mother?

“Who cares?” he asked. “Putting human values to fictional characters sometimes doesn’t work.”

Laurel Whitcomb, a spokeswoman for Disney’s Buena Vista Television, said the creators of Max have not addressed the issue of Max’s mother. An explanation may appear someday in the cartoon, but there are no current plans for that.

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Whitcomb said the cartoon, which premiered in September, was fashioned as a sitcom with Goofy living in suburbia and coping with the challenges of raising his son. The idea was to make it “contemporary” and show the “father-son” relationship, she said.

She said Max was not created to “capitalize on any particular trend or pop culture” of single parents.

So far, Goofy’s single-parent status has not undermined Disney’s position as icon of American values. Still, some people who see the young pup are curious about who Max’s mother is.

“Everybody asks,” Disney spokesman McClintock said. “We all ask. Nobody knows.”

Steve Pendergraft, a spokesman for the Traditional Values Coalition, said he thought Disney was using the single-parent issue as a ploy to attract single fathers into the park.

“I don’t think there is a single father out there that doesn’t want to have a mother to help him raise his son,” Pendergraft said.