Random Thoughts - Chip and Dale Rescue Rangers

Background: Loosely (and, boy, do I mean loosely) based on the Disney Afternoon show, Chip (voiced by John Mulaney) and Dale (voiced by Andy Samberg) are on the outs ever since Dale's grasp at success caused the cancellation of their show, "Chip and Dale Rescue Rangers". A number of animated characters - including former co-star Monterey Jack (voiced by Eric Bana, because Australia?) - have been kidnapped, leading the boys into a case every bit as unusual as the ones they pretended to solve.

Maybe, just maybe, I could’ve let this go as one more thing that people love for reasons beyond normal grasp, but it just won for an Emmy for Best Made-for-Television Movie. If I don’t say something, who will?

And this is just an ordinary joe’s read on things. I admired the show growing up and revisiting it in Disney XD’s marathon proved that the show held up. These are far from the ravings of a super fan. Speaking of which...

- Much like The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, this film features an eager young female law enforcement officer assigned to the case featuring the titular cartoon animals who happens to be a big fan of their show from back in the day. However, the big difference is that unlike FBI agent Karen Sympathy (Piper Perabo), who got something in the way of a character arc, I'm hard pressed to remember much about Det. Ellie Steckler (Kiki Layne).

- I'm sure you (fans of the original show) all remember Gadget Hackwrench. Sweet, somewhat scatterbrained inventor. Well, except for providing a flying apparatus to get to the big showdown, she doesn't have much to do here. Disappointing? Hell yes. But a girl with 42 kids probably shouldn't be exerting herself in this narrative. Wait, what? Gadget is married with children? That's odd. So, who's the lucky rodent she settled down with? Well...

- Zipper is also conspicuously missing from this story. Huh. Well, I'm sure that a fly who can get into tiny spaces too small even for the rest of the team wouldn't be all that helpful. I'm sure he kept in touch with his co-stars. (This is my long-winded way of telling you that Gadget and Zipper hooked up. Yeah. As random as anything else in this movie.) Still, this feels like a roundabout way to get Dennis Haysbert to say "Rescue Rangers away!" and I can't be entirely upset with that.

- For an ostensible comedy with a dazzling array of comic talent on both sides of the camera, this was incredibly not funny. It was almost like a Transformers movie in how many misfired gags there were: the ‘Whale Rap’; Seth Rogen’s CGI characters filling the screen and doing a creepy laugh, for some reason; Chip believing that Ellie is a suspect because she mentioned that her grandmother taped episodes of the show for her and according to Chip, old people can’t work VCRs and what’s the deal with airplane food? Have you seen this? Who...are...these people? And the nadir: the constant focus on the creepy design of Sonic the Hedgehog from the original trailer for the 2020 movie. Pro tip: You can't just point your camera at random bullshit and claim that it's comedy. You're not goddamn Tim and Eric.

- To be honest, I did laugh once: when the boys were arguing and their voices changed from those of the celeb performers to the distinctive, high-pitched tones of Tress MacNeille and Corey Burton.

- As it turns out, the scheme was masterminded by a now-middle aged Peter Pan (Will Arnett). After the success of his movie, puberty hit him like a truck and suddenly, the studio didn't want jack to do with him. Now, why does this sound so familiar? Because it happens to be the actual backstory of Peter Pan's original voice actor, Bobby Driscoll (if you are ever feeling too happy, just Google Driscoll for the whole sordid tale, but be warned: it's super depressing). I’m giving the writers the benefit of the doubt on this one, for two reasons: a) Driscoll’s tragic fate isn’t common knowledge; it’s something the studio would likely have done their best to bury and b) you’d have to be one sociopathic, shit-sucking mother grabber to have full knowledge of that story and still make a joke out of it. Given the roughly hundred years of lore in Walt Disney Pictures, it is impossible to know every single aspect of their history, much less their movies, but even so, a much better version of this villain was done in Meet the Robinsons. (A major event in a young boy's life makes him isolated and weird and as an adult, he lashes out at the world that rejected him. Yeah.) Trust me, it’s better than you remember.

- As I mentioned, people have compared this (erroneously) to Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Given that the movies chasing this dragon include Cool World, Looney Tunes: Back in Action*, the aforementioned The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and both Space Jams, maybe it's about time for studios to retire live-action/animation hybrids. Roger Rabbit really was one of those lightning-in-a-bottle type of things and nobody seems to want to put in the work to match it. (If anything, this film didn’t try as much to be like Roger Rabbit as it was trying to emulate 21 Jump Street: taking the piss out of an old TV show with a variety of funny people...but it even missed this mark. Now that I think about it, the film seems much closer to CHiPs or Baywatch, films that tried for the Jump Street vibe, but just seemed to look down rather intensely on the source material, and that contempt could be felt in the end product.)

- Post Malone's cover of the theme song. So, the copy of the song that he was asked to emulate had a glitch, resulting in only the first half of it being clear and instead of admitting that he never heard the second half (or, I don't know, checked YouTube for the full theme), he decided to fake it and hope that would be good enough?

- Much like with Space Jam: a New Legacy, this film is stuffed to the gills with characters from past media and other studios...and no way did they come cheap. What was even the budget on this thing?

And I can hear some of you groaning, ‘You’re wrong! It’s The Lonely Island! They won’t let me down!’. Heroes are fallible. It’s a simple fact of life. Even Lord and Miller shat the bed with that one show with Max from "Happy Endings" as a time-traveling dope. Like the man said, pobody’s nerfect.

* - I remembered this being very much on Roger Rabbit's level when I first saw it in 2003, but a recent re-watch kinda broke my heart. Don't get me wrong; there are some strong laughs in this movie, easily identifiable as aligning with Joe Dante's sensibilities and not the studio's corporate interests. Good luck finding anything as witty as a black-and-white Kevin McCarthy (the one people actually like) carrying a pod and mumbling 'You're next, you're next...!' in subsequent live-action/animation hybrids.