Me namesake gets shafted

[Monterey Jack]

Imagine a movie version of, say, Lost, where the plot is it's the washed-up cast of the original series living on the skids, and it's nothing but a bunch of references to other things owned by ABC. THAT's what fans of the original series would want to see, right...?

[Monterey Jack]

Also funny that Eric Bana has been cast as Monterey Jack, because if they don't have an authentic Aussie in the role, someone will get offended!

[Monterey Jack]

Well, at least we got the show on Blu, and thankfully without that awful D+ cropping. Sampled the first two eps tonight, and am very pleased with the transfers. It'd be nice to have the other "Disney Afternoon" shows on Blu at some point as well, especially as nicely restored as this.

[BobaMike]

Yeah, I'd like Tailspin restored. To me, it was the best of the Disney Afternoon shows. The best scoring, and I loved the 1930s/40s take.

Besides the Wuzzles of course!
(kidding)

[Monterey Jack]

Halfway through disc #5, and this has been a blast of nostalgic fun. Great transfers for the most part, although the anomalies in the original animation pop a lot more in HD (and the episode "Prehysterical Pet" looks extremely bad, like a DNR'd version of a VHS master). Still, a really fun show, and I'm glad that Disney saw fit to give it a physical media release in the correct OAR.

[Monterey Jack]

...and, just to crap all over my nostalgic buzz...

[Monterey Jack]

4.5/10



Neither the Happyland Murders-level botch I was dreading nor the unexpectedly clever Who Framed Roger Rabbit/LEGO Movie meta-bash that critics have been surprisingly making claim to, Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers is a typical piece of polished Corporate Product, taking a lite adventure/mystery series for kids that's old enough to be Officially Nostalgic yet semi-obscure enough to not rankle a Star Wars-sized fanbase and thinking it's far more witty than it actually is. As someone who went into this dreading it, I was surprised at how not-terrible it was, yet 90% of the jokes just lay there, taking anemic potshots at today's "reboot culture" yet pulling its punches over and over, because this is just another example of said reboot culture. But, oh yes, it's aware of how much it's wallowing in cliches, so that excuses it...right?

Unlike, say, the original Scream, which sent up 80s slasher-movie tropes with a wink yet also functioned as an especially good example of those same horror cliches done with a great deal of suspenseful skill, Rescue Rangers plays like it wants to be a Sausage Factory-style "naughty" take on 'toons, but lacking the balls to just go all-out with it, settling for a blandly inoffensive PG-rated paste that's bereft of kid-friendly gags and yet with the adult in-jokes landing with a leaden thud. But who cares about that, when we can just point at corners of the screen and squee over cameos by He-Man & Skeletor, the My Little Pony gang, and MC Skat Kat? There are a few stray chuckles, and some of the visual elements are clever (especially "Captain Putty", a gruff, Gumby-esque claymation chief detective brusquely voiced by J.K. Simmons), but mostly this is junk, too in-jokey for kids and lacking in cleverness or even much gratuitous nostalgia for adults (Monterey Jack - voiced, poorly, by Eric Bana - only appears fleetingly at the beginning to set up the film's central mystery, and Gadget - the show's breakout character, and basically a template for the "strong, self-sufficient female" trope that Disney's been beating into the ground for the last decade - only makes a brief appearance in the film's last half-hour, voiced by a noticeably older-sounding Tress MacNeille. And Zipper? Uhhhh, it takes a weird turn). It's neither fish nor fowl, and the mostly positive reviews of this are baffling. It's not funny, it's not endearing (except on the most base, Pavlovian level), it reminds me of something Lukas said about shows like Tiny Toon Adventures in the pages of FSM back in the day, about how it was "...certainly not for adults, but not really for kids, either. More like a show for adults to inspect to approve for their kids".

[BobaMike]

I watched this with my 10 year old. He wasn't impressed, but I think I'm the target audience. I was more of a Ducktales/TailSpin fan, but I did watch Rescue Rangers growing up. I thought it was pretty good, much better than I expected. The mix of animation styles was a delight, even if the fake hand drawn style annoyed me by never having the line weight change. But having puppets, old b&w toons, clamymation...it was interesting.


Never would have expected to see a South Park character in a Disney movie.

Still not a patch on Roger Rabbit though

[Monterey Jack]

The mix of animation styles was a delight, even if the fake hand drawn style annoyed me by never having the line weight change.

This is why Dale getting the "CGI surgery" as a joke falls flat, because Chip is also CGI! Had they drawn him and the other Rangers "old school", a lot of my objections about the film would have been diminished, but it's just so ugly to look at.