Movies - The Rescuers

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	Movies - The Rescuers

The Rescuers is the twenty-third film in the Disney animated features canon. It was produced by Walt Disney Productions, and first released on June 22, 1977 by Buena Vista Distribution. The film is about a society of mice, called the Rescue Aid Society (RAS), headquartered in New York and shadowing the United Nations, who go about doing good deeds in the world at large. Two of these mice, a hesitant and very New York-sounding Bernard (Bob Newhart) and the elegant, Hungarian-sounding Miss Bianca (Eva Gabor), set about rescuing Penny, a kidnapped girl, with the help of a comical albatross and the various animal inhabitants of the bayou where Penny is being held.

The film was inspired by a series of children's novels by Margery Sharp.

The Characters

Bernard: He is a New York-sounding mouse that has one job: janitor. He is quiet, hesitant and is the most superstitious of the gang as he suffers from Triskaidekaphobia (13 steps on the ladder, Flight 13, 13 steps on the stairs, Friday the 13th), and hates flying. However, when the situation demands it, he is resourceful and courageous.
Miss Bianca: She is an adventurous Hungarian-sounding mouse. She loves Bernard, and sometimes uses a little humor in problems.
Madame Medusa: She is a villainess and only cares about The Devil's Eye, an enormous diamond. She has two pet alligators: Nero and Brutus.
Penny: She is a small orphan girl, abducted by Madam Medusa because she's small enough to fit into the hiding place of The Devil's Eye and retrieve it. She has a beloved teddy bear, which Madame Medusa uses at one point as a new hiding place for the diamond.
Mr. Snoops: He's the partner of Madame Medusa. He is also greedy and hates Penny. His character is based on animation historian John Culhane, who was constantly snooping around the studio at the time the film was made, hence the character's name.

The Sequel

There is a sequel, The Rescuers Down Under
(1990), set in the Australian Outback in which Bob Newhart and Eva Gabor reprised their roles from the first film. John Candy took the late Jim Jordan's place in the comical albatross role.

Re-releases

In December 1983, The Rescuers was re-released with the new Mickey Mouse short, Mickey's Christmas Carol
. It was also re-released in the summer of 1989, due to The Rescuers Down Under
being released in 1990. The VHS and LaserDisc versions of The Rescuers weren't released until 1992, when it was released on those formats in the Walt Disney Classics collection. It was re-released in 1999 as part of the Masterpiece Collection, but was recalled due to a photographic image of a topless woman in the background of New York when they are flying on Orville, the albatross, as mentioned in the following section.

Topless woman controversy

Some prints of the film contain an image of a topless woman hidden in the background of one scene. When the mice are flying over the city, a topless woman is seen very quickly in a window, in just two frames. In 1992, however, the movie was released on video, but didn't have the picture of the topless woman because it was made from a different movie cut.

On January 5, 1999, Disney re-released The Rescuers on video, but complete with the photograph of the topless woman. Disney quickly found it, and on January 8, 1999, they recalled the video tape and laserdisc, and on March 1999, they re-released it with the edited scene. In 2003, Disney released the film on DVD with the edited scene.

The Disney Reprints

In 1976, Disney reprinted Miss Bianca by Margery Sharp and it showed a Eva Gabor look-alike Miss Bianca, and a Bob Newhart look-alike Bernard. Disney later recalled the books, and redesigned Miss Bianca and Bernard due to kids having nightmares about the humanistic mice.

Trivia

This film was the last project for John Lounsberry, one of Disney's "Nine Old Men". In an unfortunate coincidence to Bernard's triskaidekaphobia (fear of the number 13), Lounsberry passed away on Friday, February 13, 1976.

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