The Rescuers 1977 Rewatched

I had a occasion this afternoon that was one of those magical moments where you see something that takes you back to childhood in an instant.

It was this:

Do you see my name? 

It might not actually be my name, but I saw it on the large screen when I was seven years old, in the theater in Pasadena that we had gone to, when this, the only Disney film to be released in my childhood, came to theaters. 

It is very early in the film and I don't recall that I ever mentioned it to my parents afterwards. But I remember very clearly seeing it and being quite excited.

And then I forgot. 

For some 42 years.

And then, this afternoon, I decided I would watch the DVD. I was surprised when I pulled it from the shelf to discover it was still in its shrink wrap inside the little cardboard box slider. It had never been watched. I don't even know if either of my children ever saw it, but if they did, it would have been on VHS, as we collected those in their plastic clamshell cases during their childhoods of the 90s. And if we did watch it, I didn't catch the split second on the screen and thus didn't remember.

I must have bought this one on sale at some point, thinking it should be in the DVD collection after all, as the only feature length Disney film I went to the theater to see on its first run as a child. 

(I was too little in 1973 for Robin Hood, you see, and only months old for the Aristocats in 1970.) There wouldn't be another first run animated feature until The Fox and the Hound which came out just ahead of my entry into junior high.

So there it is. My name, on Penny note in a bottle that washed up in New York City and is read at the Rescue Aid Society inside the United Nations. Rediscovered today.

I knew the plot quite well and all the songs because while I only saw it in theaters once at the age of seven, I had the 78" record with the story and songs and a few pages of animated stills that came in the record sleeve. But on rewatching there was quite a lot I'd never noticed, mainly because at seven, I didn't know these things.

One thing that struck me is how the color palette of purples and blues have long been my favorite hues. Did I pick that up as a child here?

When I was seven, about the age Penny is in the film, of course I had no notion of the United Nations, or any appreciation that the Indian woman seen entering it in the film is Indira Ghandi before she was murdered. 

I didn't catch all the clever little nods in the Mouse Assembly inside the steamer trunk, the red carpet tie for the carpet, the shoes and drawers, even the Mickey Mouse wristwatch hanging on the wall!

I didn't have any frame of reference for what was the seedy New York of the 1970s, the danger of walking through Central Park (zoo) in the dark. I was amused by the utter lack of cars when Madame Medusa peels out from her pawn shop and drives in what is clearly as retread of Cruella Deville, through the empty New York streets at night. And the complete gridlock as the mice fly over the streets on the back of Orville the Albatross. Those old cars!

It turns out, the animators actually meant for this to be Cruella DeVille until Ollie Johnston, one of the original 9 Old Men of Disney still working said he didn't want it to be a sequel. There actually wasn't a Disney sequel to any animated film until Rescuers Down Under in 1990. 

It's so very seventies, the songs, the rainbows, etc. 

Another of the 9 Old Men, Milt Kahl, was working on the project and created Madame Medusa, from one of the Rescuer books, and based her animation on his then wife, soon to be ex, Phyllis Bounds, the niece of Walt Disney's wife Lillian, to whom a small fortune had been inherited upon his death. It not exactly the most flattering portrait, to be sure. 

Anyway, on rewatching, poor Penny is apparently entirely dependent on her looks to get adopted. She tells Rufus the cat at the orphanage that on adoption day, people picked a pretty little redhead over her because she's not pretty enough to get a set of parents. (She has brown hair.) And when she asks Medusa if she will take her back to the orphanage to get adopted, the horrible woman says, "who would ever want to adopt a homely little girl like you?" Yikes.

Miss Bianca (voiced by Eva Gabor) wants the assignment to rescue Penny and Bernard (voiced by Bob Newhart) wants to be chivalrous and protect her. So, too, do all the other men in the Society...

I supposed it would be too much to ask Bianca to choose another girl to go along, right?

Bianca is always wearing perfume (it's what the gators smell, instead of mice smell?) and needing to pack and not wanting to wrinkle her dress. But at least she does have an equal hand in the rescue.

I remember loving Evinrude the dragonfly's antics when I was seven, even though I had no idea he got his name from a boat motor at the time. 

And I was struck by all the retread characters they used for the little crew of critters in the bayou. 

And my jaw dropped when I realized they used a shot of Bambi and his mother (pre-deceased, obvs...) They somehow meandered from the meadow to the Louisiana bayou for a graze.

Add to the easter eggs trivia, not present in my copy of the DVD, but apparently quite the scandal... the topless woman that triggered a recall of one release of the film on VHS... The things you can learn on Google!