The original plan, it seems, had been to make a Rescuers TV show. That makes a lot of sense; the Rescuers comes from a series of books and would translate well to a serialized format. However, as the series was in development, so was Rescuers Down Under. As it happens, I’ve suggested a TV version of The Rescuers as a more interesting way to develop an existing Disney property for series than a lot of the things they’ve actually done over the years. Including, I’ll be honest, this one; it’s not that this show is bad, but it’s kind of bland. Which makes me assume so would the originally planned show, so there it is.

Chip (Tress MacNeille) and Dale (Corey Burton) live in a city that is apparently intended to be San Francisco but is never identified. They, along with mice Monterey Jack (Peter Cullen or Jim Cummings), Gadget (also MacNeille), and fly Zipper (also Burton), live in a tree. They solve crimes, mostly involving assorted other animals. The humans sometimes notice them but don’t seem to notice that they are in fact wearing clothes and so forth, and apparently they can’t understand the characters.

The intention was to give us familiar Disney characters. However, are they really all that familiar in this incarnation? They have the same approximate voices they did in the older cartoons—new voices, but they’ve gone through a few voices over the years. It’s also true that Chip was long the smarter one, from as soon as they were really distinguished from one another at all. But almost the entire personality they had in those days was “smart one” and “foolish one.” In this one, there’s a bit more to it than that. What will sustain an eight-minute short will not sustain a half-hour TV show, especially not in series.

Theoretically, you should know more about them by the fact that Chip is dressed like Indiana Jones and Dale is dressed like Thomas Magnum. Chip should be smarter and more driven; Dale should be more laid back and willing to let the clues come to him. (Though Magnum was smarter than his reputation; it’s just that it was a more street smart than Indy’s actual professorial nature.) In practical terms, none of the plots are detailed enough for that to really matter.

Meanwhile, Monterey Jack reminds me of the “Bart Vs. Australia” episode of The Simpsons, where a lot of problems stem from the Australians’ belief that an American fixation with their country would last more than a few months or years. Young Einstein came out the year before this show’s debut. Crocodile Dundee was three years before this show. It is, along with The Rescuers Down Under, proof that animation takes time—the fad nature of Australia was on its downswing at the time, and Monterey Jack’s persona was basically “big, bluff Australian.”

As for Gadget . . . well. She is your standard absentminded inventor type; she has a lot of Ned Brainard in her DNA. She is also there so that Chip and Dale have a girl to bicker over, something that happened more often in their individual shorts than you might realize. Gadget seems mostly oblivious to the chipmunks’ interest in her, though the internet has noticed it. A frankly alarming number of people who post their art on the internet seem to have had her as a major figure in their sexual awakenings.

I never got into this show when it originally aired; my younger sister liked it, but I was much more into Darkwing Duck. I think this is because, show’s theme song notwithstanding, these two aren’t really gumshoes. They stumble into things, and they get nabbed by villains who think the Rescue Rangers are into them, but they only seem to do any real detective work about half the time if that. Gadget and Chip are bright, but they don’t seem to be terribly good at actual problem-solving. There’s an episode decrying luck, but without luck, they would’ve been eaten by Fat Cat (also Cummings) fairly early in the series.

Honestly, the best of the episodes tend to be the ones without villains. It’s not just my fondness for Humphrey the Bear (James MacDonald, his actual original voice actor) that made me think that episode held together better than most of the caper ones. I think the show is afraid that kids won’t be able to follow a mystery if the characters actually solve one. By 1989, I was reading real mystery stories, which goes a long way toward explaining why this show didn’t hold my interest.

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