Have you ever seen or heard of Disney’s animated feature The Rescuers Down Under?
Well-known amongst many a Disney or animation fanatic, The Rescuers Down Under was made and released during Disney’s much-heralded Renaissance period. The era that produced critical darling megahits like The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The Lion King. Often times, whenever the Renaissance is looked back upon, The Rescuers Down Under is mostly ignored. It was the one film released during that era that underperformed at the box office, and its critical reception wasn’t on the level of the other films made by studio at the time.
The Rescuers Down Under, in case you didn’t know, was actually the second feature in the Renaissance line-up, the first obviously being the 1989 smash The Little Mermaid. A sequel to the studio’s 1977 hit The Rescuers, it had many firsts for Disney Animation, but its place in the animation studio’s historically tends to be overlooked because of its fate. For many years, we’ve only known one major reason why the movie wasn’t a success like its brethren, and was the one box office stumble during a period of climbing for the once-quiet studio. Jeffrey Katzenberg, then chairman of the Walt Disney Studios and a major executive within the feature animation wing, had all of the marketing for the film pulled after its opening weekend…
The horse was essentially gunned down before it could even dart out of the gate. And so that was the end of that story, and The Rescuers Down Under became one of the more “obscure” Disney animated features with a small but nonetheless devoted following. (I’m one of them.) However, there is more to this story…
I know this holds little to no relevance, but Disney history is one of my interests, and with some new knowledge I kind of wanted to dive into the fate of this feature.
Back in November, a guest commented on an article I did on Disney animated feature flops, shedding some light on why Jeffrey Katzenberg had pulled all of the marketing for the feature after a somewhat-disappointing opening weekend gross…
You know what’s interesting? There was an interview on the Animation Guild with some Disney animator whose name escapes me. Anyway, he was talking about The Rescuers Down Under and that the studio lost interest in the film a year-and-a-half before it was set to open, due to a failed reissue of The Rescuers in early 1989. Disney might have shut down “RDU” immediately if they hadn’t already spent a great amount of time and money on its production. Disney even told this to the animators after the poor opening weekend of the Rescuers re-release, which I’m pretty sure wasn’t a good idea.
When you think about it, Katzenberg’s decision to pull all “RDU” advertising after the opening weekend makes sense. Disney knew it was going to bomb, and after it was crushed by Home Alone, they quietly threw it under the rug.
That’s a major piece of information that helps one understand what went wrong with The Rescuers Down Under at the box office during the holiday season of 1990.
Prior to the age of home video, the Disney enterprise re-released the majority of their animated classics theatrically. The first time a re-release ever occurred was in 1944, when Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs returned to silver screens for the first time since its general release in early 1938. The success of the re-issue helped an in-debt Disney as the war raged on across the Atlantic. Naturally, other Disney features would see re-issues, including films that flopped at first. Pinocchio followed in 1945, a 120-minute cut of Fantasia (known as the “general release version” of the film) followed in 1946, and Bambi returned to theaters in 1947. Soon, a cycle began to take shape. Snow White reappeared in 1952, Pinocchio returned in 1953, Fantasia in 1956, so on, so forth.
Flash-forward to the 1980s. Walt Disney had been dead since 1966, but the re-issues of his classic films showed what kind of staying power they had. By contrast, a lot of the company’s newer animated films did rather so-so business during their re-issues. For example, in 1982, a re-release of Robin Hood pulled in $10 million. That same year, Peter Pan took in $17 million and Bambi scored with $23 million. Cinderella – arriving in Christmas 1981 and making a chunk of its money in early 1982 – pulled in $28 million.
In 1983, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs collected $30 million, while The Rescuers did fine enough with $21 million. There was still some juice left in what was then one of Disney’s biggest contemporary animated features. Also of note, The Sword in the Stone was re-released this same year but puttered with $11 million.
Flash-forward four years later. Disney has now comfortably eased into releasing their animated classics on home video, but will continue to re-release the films that haven’t been released on black-shelled cassettes just yet. Only one Disney animated feature of the pre-Renaissance era were re-released theatrically after it hit video, and that was Pinocchio in 1992.
In 1987, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs returned to theaters for its 50th anniversary. Still not on video, the re-release made an impressive $46 million. This gross rivaled that of Don Bluth’s An American Tail, which had then become the highest-grossing animated feature on its initial domestic release. Cinderella was also re-released in 1987, the holiday return of Walt’s beloved classic made a whopping $34 million. That same year, Disney also re-released The Aristocats, the first of the post-Walt animated features. It only made $17 million…
The next year, Disney re-released The Fox and the Hound in the spring, and Bambi during the summer. Bambi collected $39 million, while The Fox and the Hound – once the highest-grossing animated feature on initial release – stalled at $23 million.
Now we get to 1989: The Rescuers re-release occurred in the spring, later that year there was a re-issue of Peter Pan. The Rescuers made $21 million, which was the same amount it made unadjusted back in 1983, which didn’t look too hot. Peter Pan did a bit better with $29 million. The Rescuers Down Under was well into production by this point, as it was scheduled to be the next release after The Little Mermaid, which of course opened in fall of 1989. The Rescuers Down Under would be next in fall 1990, the film had been in active development since roughly 1986… Perhaps Disney no longer saw The Rescuers as a long-lasting flavor. A big hit in 1977, and considered a high point for the post-Walt animated output, some 12 years later it seemed like a “lesser” kind of Disney animated feature. I had previously looked at the 1970s and early 1980s Disney animated features, and how they’re often considered the work of a “Dark Age”. It is certainly true that most of the films made during that period are viewed as lesser nowadays, or aren’t people’s first choice whenever you say “Disney movies”. The Aristocats, Robin Hood, and The Rescuers might now be remembered by people my age, folks who had them on VHS as young’uns, but they don’t seem to have had much longevity beyond that. It also appears that in the late 1980s, those films were drying up as well. Again, The Aristocats did so-so during the 1987 re-release, and The Rescuers performed similarly in 1989. Disney executives probably realized “Oh my, we’re making a sequel to this thing?”
The Rescuers Down Under is the first true Disney animated feature sequel, which is what makes it particularly interesting in this context. While one can mount an argument for The Three Caballeros being the first Disney animated sequel, it was basically another anthology about Central and South America, following up on Saludos Amigos. The same goes for Make Mine Music and Melody Time, those are both anthologies exploring music and setting animated stories to those pieces, which could make them stealth follow-ups to Fantasia. No, The Rescuers Down Under is the first direct sequel, a film that continues the storyline of the preceding feature. Saludos, Caballeros, Make Mine, etc. are all just collections of segments with no singular story.
Anyways, it was the first of the sequels, and it makes sense that Disney picked this story in the mid-1980s out of their wide library. Suppose you are at Disney and you’re going to greenlight a sequel to one of the features, you wouldn’t choose older films like Snow White and Pinocchio because the casts are mostly deceased, and those are films that Walt did not want to make sequels to. Walt had entertained the idea of a Snow White sequel and a Bambi sequel, but wisely decided against making them. Roy E. Disney probably wouldn’t have allowed for it, either, he even tried to keep certain Disney animated films from coming out on home video. It made sense that Disney chose a more recent film that was produced after the death of Walt Disney. What did they have to chose from? The Aristocats? No. The Fox and the Hound? Definitely not, given how that story ended. Robin Hood could’ve possibly spawned a sequel, or even an animated series made by Disney Television Animation. (Why one never happened is beyond me, or at least a series featuring the cast a la TaleSpin.) The Black Cauldron flopped, but if it hadn’t, I think a sequel to that would’ve been very possible given that the source – Lloyd Alexander’s The Chronicles of Prydain – material was a 5-book series. I wonder if they went into making The Black Cauldron with the intent of having a sequel to it?
Given that The Rescuers was the most-liked of the post-Walt era films, a very successful film upon its first release, and one of the few films that had potential for a sequel, it was picked. The Rescuers played out more like an adventure story than a drama or a comedy, so it was ripe for a sequel. The characters could very well return and help another person in distress. The first Rescuers was based on Margery Sharp’s two books The Rescuers and Miss Bianca, a lot of it took more form the latter than the former. Disney ignored the source material altogether for the most part for this sequel and made their own original Australian-set story featuring Bernard and Miss Bianca. Troubles did ensue during production, notably a disagreement over the ethnicity of the kidnapped boy. The late Joe Ranft, a story supervisor on the project who was instrumental in its development, wanted the boy to be Aboriginal, but the executives wanted him to be white. It was either him or Brenda Chapman who remarked that with this requirement, the film could’ve been set in Arizona rather than Australia.
After The Rescuers came and went during its 1989 re-release, the project was going to be dead on arrival. The higher-ups appeared to have had more interest in what was next, namely Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin, and not a sequel to some old has-been. It’s so baffling, because The Rescuers Down Under was actually a big undertaking for Disney at the time. We all know it was the first-ever film done entirely in the newly-minted CAPS (Computer Animation Production System) process, but it also extensively blended CG imagery with hand-drawn characters and environments. After some objects in The Black Cauldron, the Big Ben gears in The Great Mouse Detective, the subway and vehicles in Oliver & Company, and various ships and objects in The Little Mermaid, this was actually quite a big step forward. Yes, some of the CGI in the film is very dated. The New York skyline, including the United Nations building, look like slightly upscaled TRON environments, but consider how much of a technical leap ahead this was for feature animation back then. No rotoscoped sets or anything. Then a year later, Disney Feature Animation refined this blend in Beauty and the Beast‘s still-dazzling ballroom sequence. That progression is very much there. CAPS took the laborious multiplane camera process and made it much easier, and several sequences in The Rescuers Down Under took advantage of that. McLeach’s threatening buschwhacker truck was cel-shaded, a good progression from other cel-shaded moving objects we saw in the previous four films that seamlessly integrated it with what was onscreen.
Technical achievements aside, The Rescuers Down Under didn’t necessarily draw on the events of the first Rescuers to push the story forward, but quietly developed Bernard and Miss Bianca’s romance. No one from the original sans the Rescue Aid Society returns, Albatross Orville was replaced by his risible brother Wilbur since his voice actor (Jim Jordan) had passed away during production. New setting, new faces, no looking back. No throwaway lines like “remember how we helped Penny get the Devil’s Eye out of the skull?” No references to Penny, Madam Medusa, even Evinrude is absent. I guess he decided New York wasn’t for him! Functioning as its own chapter, the film is a real breeze from start to finish, not at all dependent on the original. Interestingly, the film had no musical numbers or songs in it whatsoever, much like the flop The Black Cauldron. The first film had at least one musical number, the rest were numbers sung offscreen. This? Only a section of the 1957 Joe Bennett & the Sparkletones rock n’ roll classic ‘Black Slacks’, which Wilbur loudly rocks along to in a fun sequence. I feel this lack of songs is actually for the better, because this also proved that a Disney animated feature didn’t need to have singing, or songs even. A Disney animated film could just be a straightforward adventure. If anything, the really cool non-musicals the studio is making now, such as Wreck-It Ralph and Zootopia, owe quite a bit to this film and The Black Cauldron. Truly the anomaly of the musical-dominated Renaissance string of hits, and all the more fascinating because of it.
The Rescuers Down Under, had it been backed with more confidence, could’ve been a respectable hit in its own right and could’ve shown audiences that a Disney animated feature could rival any live-action blockbuster that was out at the time. The thrilling action beats that made the film stand out were later incorporated into the later, more conventional Renaissance offerings like Aladdin and The Lion King. Perhaps the Michael Eisner brigade saw the flopping of the original Rescuers‘ re-release in early 1989 as an excuse to abandon the film, since the original was made long before they ever got to Disney. We saw some of that same attitude in John Lasseter and Ed Catmull, when they were in charge of Walt Disney Animation Studios up until last year. There was a disregard, even contempt for the films produced during the era that preceded them. (The late ’90s/early-to-mid ’00s.) Lasseter despised Lilo & Stitch, for starters. Perhaps Eisner, Katzenberg, et al. just didn’t view the ’70s and early ’80s Disney animated features with much respect or couldn’t care any less for them.
So now we know the rest of the story… The Rescuers Down Under opened on November 16, 1990. The first weekend gross was viewed as disappointing, and then all of the marketing was pulled. It didn’t stand a chance against Home Alone, which opened the same day. It was as if it was 1985 again, Disney had put their all into an animated action-adventure spectacle, only to fail to capture the imaginations and hearts of the public while some live-action flick playing next door did just that. The Rescuers Down Under was released on video in September 1991, and had sold over five million or so units by mid-1992, so it did live something of a second life. Perhaps its availability on Disney+ will introduce a new generation of folks to it?
Maybe one day it will be widely seen as an important part of the Disney Renaissance…
UPDAT (12/16/2019): Here is the podcast of origin. In Part 2, animator Nik Ranieri explains what happened early on in The Rescuers Down Under‘s production…