Hi, I am no stranger to animation reviews. Last year or so I did a few online for The Raccoons. Well I’m back with another animated feature, and for good reason, as this one had the potential to be a total trainwreck, or not.
A little background first…most people know about Chip ‘n’ Dale Rescue Rangers (also sometimes using a possessive version of the title, Chip ‘n’ Dale’s Rescue Rangers…) and moreso the block it belonged to, The Disney Afternoon. Starting with The Adventures of the Gummi Bears and DuckTales, carryovers from Saturday Morning and syndication, TDA would add new series in the coming years such as TaleSpin, Darkwing Duck, and of course the Rescue Rangers, which debuted in 1989 on Disney Channel airings then crossed over into the Afternoon block. Originally meant to be inspired by the movie The Rescuers, then to feature original characters, Disney eventually made the show into an updated version of the adventures of Chip ‘n’ Dale, its two chipmunk characters who usually spent classic shorts antagonizing Donald Duck. Now, they solve crimes along with cheese enthusiast Australian mouse Monterrey Jack, and female mouse inventor Gadget, whom certain populations built unhealthy fandoms for. No, really, there was a cult in Russia devoted to Gadget, look it up.
After the series ended, CnD did appear in other shows but not in their TDA personas. The DuckTales reboot of the late 2010s did feature a cameo by the Rescue Rangers…well, sort of. It was obviously them, but they could not mention them by name nor give them dialogue because of rights issues imposed by Disney over a planned RR movie. And that movie is why we are here today.
A couple months ago, trailers finally arrived for said movie, and…it did not look promising. It appeared to be a PG-rated Robot Chicken sketch. Chip and Dale did not have their trademark sped-up voices, instead being portrayed by John Mulaney and Andy Samberg. And the entire plot sounded like a Vince Russo Special, where everything was fake except what we were watching right now, which was real. You see, the Rescue Rangers was just a TV show all along, and this was the story of how CnD coped after being out of the spotlight, and how they would presumably become real adventurers. And the 4chan “leaks”….oh, the 4chan leaks. Among other things, they had Pluto being the film’s mystery villain.
It also felt like a half-assed, lower budget Roger Rabbit sequel without the Roger (barring a cameo). As such, I toyed around with the idea that Bonkers should have been the star instead of Chip and Dale. His cartoon took place in Toontown after all, and he was pretty much a Captain Ersatz version of Roger. He even has a ready-made story where he’s the most underappreciated Disney Afternoon character, and thus has been down on his luck since his show went off the air. Given what we know now about the RR movie, he could even finally confront the Warner Brothers and Warner Sister for years of mean-spirited jokes on Animaniacs.
But…name recognition and all. This is the same reason Disney doesn’t use its live action powers to reboot Black Cauldron, and instead we get creepy Lion King, recycled Beauty and the Beast, and oh yeah, the Misunderstood Villainess Universe.
As a result, I wasn’t exactly looking forward to May 20th, when the movie dropped on Disney+. If I was to watch it, I was ready to do so preparing to give it the Christmas Story 2 treatment. Am I? Or has my stance softened? Let’s find out…
(SPOILERS FROM THIS POINT ON…)
So the voices…I actually got used to the “human” CnD voices. Look, I get that now, voice actors have to be actual actors, and well known ones at that. And perhaps this was a punishment for when we complained, “Why get Jesse McCartney, etc…they’re going to speed up their voices anyway!” But…it worked for what it was. More importantly, they get the characters right. Chip is still the sensible one, Dale the goof. No major derailment there.
Blink and you miss Tress MacNeille and Corey Burton return for the times CnD’s voices are sped up, though. At first it is a put-on for the show. But we later see that when they get angry and start fighting, they have the sped-up voices again. Maybe they’re like MCU Hulk, “That’s my secret” and all, but still, you won’t like him when he’s angry.
Tress is back as Gadget as well. Though it being 30 years since the original series had me double checking that it was her for sure. (same thing with her Dot voice on the Hulu Animaniacs being kind of lower)
Jim Cummings is also back. He’s not Monty, but he’s…someone else. A couple of someone elses.
I was tickled to see Rachel Bloom have role(s) in the film, being a big Crazy Ex-Girlfriend fan. I do wonder….the Dale Rhymes With Whale rap…did she help write that? Her using the same word to “rhyme” seems like her, based on some CXG songs. (see the S2 and S3 theme songs where the chorus is just ending each line with “crazy,” for example.)
So the story. Yes, Rescue Rangers was just a TV show, and Chip and Dale, friends since childhood – more on that in a bit – end up parting ways when Dale accepts a solo project. Flash forward, and Chip sells insurance while Dale uses his past stardom on the convention circuit. When Monterrey finds himself in trouble and calls the boys for help, we learn that someone’s been kidnapping toons and bootlegging them…as in, transforming them into ripoff characters…yep, not unlike Dingo Pictures. (Yet Disney had Meeko at the ready somewhere and they DIDN’T do a Wabuu reference? That is SOOOOO STOOOOPID!) Anyway, can CnD become a team again and more importantly, real heroes, etc etc? Will their other co-stars be around to help out?
The “Double 0 Dale” role he accepts was a reference to a well-known original episode, one that infamously features Gadget being “hot” when she dresses up. Still, I felt like it would have been a good double meaning (triple?) as a reference to the Double 0 Duck episode of DuckTales ’17 as well, where the Not Rangers, But Totally Rangers appeared. As a stand-in moment between the originals and the movie.
Fact is, the movie is also like one big reference to the Flash the Wonder Dog episode (TV heroes aren’t really heroes, but must become real heroes) Given the plot I was surprised there wasn’t at least a throwaway line recalling Flash.
So…they went along with what was in the trailers by implying that CnD first got big with the Rescue Rangers, and in fact they first met in 1982. Which means this continuity is ignoring the original shorts. It’s like Sony’s stance on Wheel of Fortune, pretending it began in 1983.
Yes, we get the mandatory human lead: a detective named Ellie who wants to help find Monty, as she grew up a Rescue Rangers fan and has the memorabilia to prove it (including the NES game we all remember…and a fictional arcade counterpart) She doesn’t Shia LeBeouf things, however…while she is a thing here, this is still mostly CnD’s story.
There’s a lot of snarking about reboots, remakes, creepy “realistic” animation…I’d appreciate it more if we all knew that people will still do all of the above after this film is said and done. That and it’s nothing I haven’t heard from online reviewers the last 2 decades or so.
Now…for the crossovers, and boy is there a lot to unwrap here. You can probably look online for an extensive list of cameos and guest stars. From what we saw, Disney was able to use characters from: Hasbro, Warner Bros., NBCUniversal, and ViacomCBS properties. There are smaller references to other properties here and there. Definitely an improvement over the trailers, which mostly featured the obvious Disney crossovers with a surprise here and there (M.C. Skat Kat! My Little Pony!) We got some serious Forbidden Door moments. And they appear in all kinds of forms: straight-up cameos, verbal references, and some examples where multiple characters are mashed up together. It all feels a LOT more organic than Space Jam : A New Ad for HBO Max, er, Legacy.
To wit, an important character in this film is…the movie version of Sonic the Hedgehog. Only it’s the version from the ORIGINAL trailer for the first movie, before the redesign…yes, human mouth and all.
For 80s kids, Blaster from the Transformers is there. And more importantly..He-Man and Skeletor. And Skel is ALAN OPPENHEIMER again!! Which I guess puts the Lonely Island dudes above Kevin Smith, am I right?
And about Warner Bros. characters getting in there…there was a lost opportunity to somehow reference the Goofy Gophers. They get the Alvin and the Chipmunks knock in, but really, it was the Gophers everyone confused CnD with, thinking they too did the overly polite schtick. But yeah, a nod at that would have been fun. Especially in the scene where we see what rebooted CnD could look like.
(another Blink And You’ll Miss: in the same scene, we briefly see Deadpool, or at least Dale if he was Deadpool. So we were looking for him in the wrong multiverse film)
Another WB note: there’s a ET vs. Batman gag here too, movie ad plus clip of said movie. Guess which cult of a certain director was overjoyed to see that the Bats they use is pretty much Batman v. Superman version? Rescue Rangers in the Snyderverse CONFIRMED!
Yet the movie does invent a Muppet who’s not even called a Muppet as such. Kermit and company get no respect, I tell you.
The kinda creepy elephants in the room: Evil Peter Pan as the mastermind. If you want to know why that is a controversy, go on Twitter. Also, what we know about Gadget and Zipper (they got together after the show, then mated). Repellent to thinking Gadget is hot or not? You decide. If you want to know more about THAT, go back to 4chan.
I must say the choice of final boss is better than all the rumors, and appropriate for the Rescue Rangers, as it marks the return of Fat Cat. Well kind of. It’s actually “Sweet Pete” (the evil Pan) combining several toons in one (you’ll see Optimus Prime’s leg and Shredder’s armor in there, as well as Wreck-It Ralph’s arm). But come on, he has Fat Cat’s head and face, Fat Cat is the dominant personality, it’s Fat Cat to me, or at least Composite Fat Cat.
Knowing how protective Disney is of the Mickey Mouse “immediate family” (Mickey is another who was banned from being used in DuckTales ‘17), I should have known the Pluto thing wasn’t kosher, though it would weirdly make sense since he was another victim of Chip and Dale in the older shorts, which don’t exist in this continuity, we think….so that should have been a red flag too.
Oh, and Ugly Sonic returning to help defeat a character with Jim Cummings’ voice? And one that’s been, shall we say, ROBOTICIZED? Makes sense.
Ellie also should have gotten Wanda Maximoff to take care of the Not Gumby claymation dirty cop. We know he wouldn’t last 5 seconds.
And oh yeah, We DO want Darkwing!
So as you can see, there’s very little that I went off on. I actually…sounded enthusiastic about a lot of things. So yeah, I didn’t hate it. It wasn’t the greatest thing ever, but it didn’t make me want to hit my head against hard surfaces. I’d place it above Space Jam 2, but below, say, Into the Spider-Verse. You do the math.
I’d still like a proper adventure series to compliment this movieverse, though…if you can get the DuckTales reboot people behind it, even better.
Or building on the supposed UnPersoning of pre-1989 Chip ‘n’ Dale…how about a Chipperverse Sequel? You can have the Rescue Rangers, and it turns out the original shorts version exist in another dimension. Maybe have the “actual” 1989 Rangers in another. Add Nutty Tales, those hideous things from the Disney+ shorts, the “Intelligent Rodents” from DuckTales, and I dunno…maybe pixel/NES CnD? Guys in suits from the theme parks? Then the imperfect clones like, well, the Goofy Gophers. Throw in the Sevilles and the Nutty Squirrels too for good measure.
Where was I? Oh, not a bad way to spend 90 minutes by any means. Give it a try at least.