Fridge / Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers (2022)

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Fridge Brilliance

• If you’re an avid Disney fan, you may find yourself scratching your head at some of the canonicity discrepancies pervading the movie such as Chip and Dale meeting in the 80’s as kids instead of the 40’s, or Sweet Pete ignoring the fact that he had a full blown sequel and several cameo appearances throughout the years, until you realize the continuity this movie takes place in. What other movie had cartoons living with humans and working as actors, a suspicious lack of Chip and Dale, and a slew of non Disney characters appearing as cameos? That’s right, Who Framed Roger Rabbit. It’s perfectly reasonable to view this movie as a direct sequel to Who Framed Roger Rabbit (hell, Roger Rabbit himself is in the movie!) in a continuity where both of these movies are entirely separate from Disney canon. Sweet Pete even has a vial of dip among his torture tools!
• Peter Pan being a selfish adult if he grows up is a popular idea for the character in other medias. In Peter Pan & the Pirates, he’s goaded by Hook into growing up at one point, becoming a bitter man who’d let all of Neverland die around him without any regrets. In Hook, he leaves Neverland behind to grow up, eventually forgetting his past and becoming a workaholic who cares more about his job then his children. And finally, in Once Upon a Time (another Disney produced property), he selfishly abandons his son Rumpelstiltskin in order to stay in Neverland and relive the childhood he lost out on due to being forced to work as a blacksmith’s apprentice from an early age.
  • Not only that, his backstory (a child star once adored by Disney who got unceremoniously cast aside the second he hit puberty, mocked and unable to get serious work due to his past as a “Disney kid star”, culminating in a downward spiral and highly-publicized trouble with the law) is exactly the same as the tragic, real-life story of Bobby Driscoll… the voice actor for Peter in the original movie.
• Ugly Sonic not being played by Ben Schwartz really shows how different he is and how down and out he really became. Like he was an actor who auditioned for the role and ended up being replaced by a younger, more attractive actor.
• The villain is Peter Pan, but no mention is made of Tinker Bell-because the more recent Disney Fairy novels and DVD movies mean she's still relevant and more successful than Peter!
• The reason Peter's a Jaded Washout here may have some more subtext to it. Walt Disney himself didn't like Peter Pan, considered him cold and unlikable. Doesn't really matter much if he's a fictional character, but in a world where he's real...
• Sora exists (er, existed) in this setting, alongside other video game characters like Sonic and Chun-Li, but Chip and Dale never make mention of their role in Kingdom Hearts. They were recast with 3D lookalikes after their falling out with Disney following the cancellation of Rescue Rangers.
• The only method of transforming in this movie relies on unethical mad science that no major studio would want to be associated with. Thus, chances are that in movies like Beauty and the Beast or The Princess and the Frog, the character's human self and their cursed self are played by separate actors. That accounts for Frog Tiana among the bootlegging victims. Human Tiana is a celebrity with a steady gig as part of the Disney Princess lineup, but a little green frog with no such support network can easily slip through the cracks and fall into a compromising situation.
• Overlapping with Fridge Horror, Linda-Flynn Fletcher being one of the toons who operate on Main Street could have some reasoning as we later see Phineas bootlegged near the end.
  • Similarly, we see that Dipper Pines was also one of the bootlegged toons near the end. Considering he's related to the money hungry Grunkle Stan, it would surprisingly be in character for a guy like him to be involved with the mafia.
• A behind the scenes example: it seems odd at first that none of the official entities (Trey and Matt, Comedy Central, Viacom, etc.) behind South Park are credited for the use of Randy Marsh. Until you realise that South Park have been getting away with mocking Disney via clear parodical depictions of their characters for years now. So, it's only fair that Disney gets to jab back in a much smaller way. The fact that Randy just so happened to be the character at the center of the show's then-most recent stab at the company makes it even more delicious.
• Why does Sweet Pete only keep one small bottle of Dip on him when Judge Doom carried oil-drum sized vats? On top of running a smaller, more discreet operation than Doom, as a paint thinning agent, Dip would only work on the older generation of hand-drawn Toons. Digitally illustrated and 3D Toons would be immune!
• Pete (not Sweet Pete, the other one) shows up in one of the bootleg films unaltered, which would mean he presumably volunteered. Well, his original name was Bootleg Pete, so it's natural for him to stay in the business even after it changes.
• The Ponies seem to be about the same size as Chip and Dale. They're called My Little Ponies after all, and in fact they seem to be in the same scale as their toys.
  • Not to mention that their franchise started out as a toyline.
  • Similarly, when he's seen, Patrick Star is pretty small, not just because he's mixed with Wembley (being a Fraggle, he's pretty small too), but because SpongeBob characters are canonically much smaller than all those Nicktoons crossover games make them out to be. Dipper's much smaller too, because he's fused with a smurf.
• It's mentioned that the LAPD raided Nick Jr.'s studios on a false tip that Peppa Pig, presumably another of Sweet Pete's bootleg victims, had been spotted there, only for the toons to attack them. It seems unusual that educational children's characters, who exist solely to teach kids lessons, would be so violent and willing to attack the cops, but there's a dark, Fridge Horror meaning to it. They still "technically" stayed to their roots by teaching the police a lesson: don't mess with their turf.
• Lumiere being strapped for cash seems odd considering he just had a reboot, but you'll notice he never got the CGI surgery like Dale and Baloo did. That means he chose not to participate in the reboot and was recast with someone else entirely, thus not being entitled to any profits from it. Plus, he hasn't had many projects outside of the Theme Parks for quite a while, so conventions are the only way he can scrape by - assuming he doesn't burn every dollar bill he gets handed on accident.
• Sweet Pete's monstrous form takes various aspects from different characters, but they're all appropriately based on his actual personality. To note:
  • His right leg belongs to Woody, a character who initially was very jealous of being replaced and was willing to do whatever it took to retake the spotlight. Pete had fallen into that same pit, but unlike Woody, who grew out of it, he never escaped it and remained jealous for all his life.
  • His left leg comes from the Bumblebee iteration of Optimus Prime. First, Prime is capable of physically changing himself, something Pete has been doing to others by force. Secondly, that Prime faced backlash amongst fans when Peter Cullen revealed he was only brought in for a day to redub scratch dialogue so they wouldn't have to pay him much for it, which made Cullen feel undermined in the part. Pete too feels undermined when Hollywood replaced him with someone more marketable and left him to fend for himself.
  • His left arm hails from the titular lead of Wreck-It Ralph, who was tired of being perceived as someone he wasn't and tried to prove otherwise, not to mention he was incredibly destructive (albeit accidentally). Pete found himself stuck in the role he once played and could never shake it, even after he grew up, and tried to prove he was no longer Pan by becoming a mafia don. As for the "destructive" part, he's destroying innocent lives on purpose.
  • He wears the pants of Mickey Mouse and the coat of Silver from Treasure Planet. Like Mickey, Pete is "The Big Cheese" of his enterprise, though Mickey's is much more legal than Pete's. As for Silver, both sought to seize power for themselves, but unlike Silver, Pete had no room in his heart to care.
  • His right arm mixes the fusion canon of G1 Megatron, the shoulder pad of the 1987 Shredder (and occasionally the voice), the occasional voice of Cruella DeVille, and Bullet Bill ammunition from Super Mario Bros. that Bowser employs. All four are vile villains who seek to earn their way, with Pete sharing Megatron's desire to destroy those who stands in his way, Shredder's role as the leader of a gang of criminals, Cruella's propensity to kidnap innocent animals in order to make money off them, and Bowser's Classic Villain tendencies.
  • As for his head, it mixed Felicia from The Great Mouse Detective, Marie from The Aristocats, and Fat Cat from Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers. Like with Felicia, Pete is single minded in his goals (serving Ratigan for the former, bootlegging toons for the latter), he's a bit more pompous like Marie, and is a mafia don opposing Chip and Dale like Fat Cat.
• Gadget and Zipper having a relationship and children has already been mentioned as confusing, but it's clear they have a good and stable home life with Gadget apparently working on vintage muscle cars and Zipper even able to live as a stay-at-home dad. How? Because even with 42 kids, the family is physically small. It’d be easy to stretch their food dollars when they can feed half the family on one slice of bread.
  • Also when discussing smelling the cologne in the police precinct, it’s implied the Rescue Rangers cast still earns royalties from merchandise.
• It seems kind of stupid for Pete to go after cartoons that are still on the air, like Patrick from Spongebob Square Pants or the titular lead of Peppa Pig, rather than toons who haven't had a project in some time (i.e. Flounder, Samurai Jack). However, doing so offers Pete a golden opportunity: if he snags enough toons, the companies wouldn't be able to air their shows at all, and bankrupt themselves with no programming to air and no advertisers to attract for said programming. With all the money he's making from his mockbusters, he could easily use it to buy out said companies, then take them over to run in any way he pleases. That way, he could obtain his ultimate revenge - being in charge of the very industry that threw him away the second he stopped being marketable. And if any of the stars he commands "object" to his way of running things, it wouldn't take much to throw them in the surgery machine and bootleg them, allowing him to have his cake and eat it too.
  • ...But if "bankrupt the companies and buy them out" was his plan, even if he captured every single toon in existence it probably wouldn't work out too well for him for several reasons. If In-Universe Disney, Viacom, and Warner Bros. are anything like they are in real-life, they'd just shift their focus entirely to live-action productions and run repeats of the cartoon shows while suing Pete to hell and back for copyright infringement for all the bootleg productions.
  • The more practical reason is that the main way bootlegs make money in real-life is by coming out quickly enough after the original that people genuinly mistake the copy for the original, an error that becomes more and more unlikely as time goes on and the original gets distributed widely and well-known. He needs to catch recent/still on-going cartoons if he wants to make a profit.
• One of the reasons Chip suspects that Ellie isn’t a true Rescue Rangers fan (and actually The Mole working with Sweet Pete) is because he doesn’t believe the story she told about how her grandmother taped all the episodes of Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers for her when she was a child. Why? Because grandparents are notoriously bad at using electronics. That’s partially true, but given that Ellie’s a young woman and the movie takes place during modern times, it's completely possible that her grandmother knew how to operate a VCR and thus be able to tape the episodes, which many people were already doing back then.
  • Not only that, it shows a gaping hole in his logic: just because older people can be bad with tech doesn’t mean they’re all bad with it, or can’t learn how to use newer tech properly.
  • And his other reason for suspecting her (when he asked her what her favorite episode was, she couldn’t give him an answer) was built on faulty logic too, because he didn’t take into consideration the possibility that she (like a lot of people) might not be able to pick a single episode on the spot over the others because she loved them all equally.
• Chip and Dale's appearances can be seen as symbolic of their feelings towards the show. Dale has given himself a CGI makeover and completely on board for a reboot of Rescue Rangers. Chip refuses to do either, seeing it as unnecessary and preferring to leave the Glory Days unchanged and untouched. This may be why he's presented with a animated look overlaid on a 3D model - the look shows how out of sync he is with a world that’s moved on to CGI, not to mention filled with the reboots, spinoffs, and crossovers that he hates.
• Out of all the characters in the film, it is Ugly Sonic who ultimately saves Chip N' Dale from Sweet Pete. Both Sweet Pete and Ugly Sonic have the same backstory in that both were main stars who were rejected from their studios because of their looks. While Sweet Pete became lonely, cold and bitter towards Hollywood for what it did to him, Ugly Sonic rolled with the punches and now has an Odd Friendship going with Dale, Lumiere, and Tigra on the convention circuit. They’re both mirrors of what the other could have been, so it is only fitting that it is because Ugly Sonic put in the effort to turn his life around and have a Career Resurrection that he is able to save Chip 'N Dale from Sweet Pete, someone who became a criminal to get back at the industry that wronged him.
• Homer's bootleg appearances resembles his original Tracey Ullman Show incarnation, while Bart's wearing his older blue shirt. What's more, Bootleg Bart resembles Lester, a suspicious Bart lookalike from "The Day the Violence Died".
• Assuming he's as much of The Narcissist as his original counterpart, the fact that Squidward has a star on the Walk of Fame makes sense, doubly so with how much many fans relate to him, seeing as he often goes on about how soul-crushing a normal life can be compared to the more optimistic SpongeBob. Also, if he's like his canon counterpart, SpongeBob might not care as much as Squidward would about getting a star like that.
• It probably isn't the reason she's a criminal here, but the fact that Linda Flynn-Fletcher of all people is among the criminals Dale mentions makes sense when you consider that in the show, she inspired Doofenshmirtz to target the Tri-State Area. In case you're wondering, they dated once. He joked about taking over the world, and she told him he should start small with stuff like that, "Like maybe...the Tri-State Area", and thus an allegedly evil genius was born.
• The reason why Sweet Pete didn’t go after Dumbo is because both of their films have a “Stories Matter” warning for Values Dissonance, meaning Sweet Pete probably felt Dumbo’s pain and spared him a bootleg fate.
• Chip, Gadget, Monty, and Zipper not wearing their usual outfits is not at all odd since they are actors in the real world. It wouldn't make sense for Gadget to wear her binoculars and purple overalls outside the TV show. It would be like Chris Evans wearing his Captain America outfit in the real world.
  • Unless it was an outfit she actually owned and she showed it to the costume team and they approved it for the show.
• Why did Sweet Pete have some of the bootlegged toons just in different styles like Flounder, the Simpsons, and Pooh's friends, while others like Monty and the others in that crate were mixtures of different characters. Capturing so many iconic characters for so many projects while keeping out of the police's eye would be really difficult, even with the police captain in his pocket. So he cut out the middle man and made sure some toons could play multiple roles.
• Some people have griped that bootleg movies aren't supposed to be as well animated as the ones in this film are. That's probably why Sweet Pete's bootleg movies sell so well, he's got better animated ones. That's not even getting into the fact that some people may buy his movies for other reasons, like reviewing them online (As numerous cash-ins and rip-offs have gotten that treatment in real life) or just because the buyers want to see how doofy they are.
• Of all the kidnapped characters, the only one whose appearance isn't altered to circumvent copyright law is Pete (dressing him as Aladdin doesn't make him legally distinct). As of 2022, Pete is actually regarded as a Public Domain Character in the United States, having debuted in a film named Alice Solves the Puzzle, whose copyright expired in 2021.
• Dale doesn't have fully-functioning Toon Physics. The ray converts whatever it hits into whatever art style it's set to. Clearly, the physics are part of being a traditional Toon. CGI beings are closer to being real than traditionally animated beings or CG beings ([Woody is clearly animated but more realistic than he would be if he was traditionally animated).
  • This means Bob and other residents of the Uncanny Valley are among the Toons with the weakest Toon Physics. Their animation style is motion-capture animation, so their Toon Physics would be barely functioning because they are more realistic than most Toons but are still technically animated.

Fridge Horror

• During the Nick Jr raid, one of the PAW Patrol apparently attacked an officer so badly that they rendered him sterile. The law states that if a dog attacks anyone, let alone to that degree, the dog must be put to sleep immediately. This means that the dog’s going to be euthanized.
  • Considering the police went in on false tip and that toons got human rights as well, the dogs might get out from that with good lawyers on their side.
    • Toons that are sapient have human rights and nonsapient Toon animals have the right to be treated like normal animals.
  • They are also sapient, and not made out of the stuff normal dogs are, so it is unlikely laws meant for regular dogs apply to them.
• Considering just how many toons Sweet Pete's bootlegged, what's to say that not all of them were involved with his mafia business. Considering his intentions to bootleg Chip 'n Dale after they try to ask about Monty...
• Assuming the characters even have similar relationships to the ones in their home shows and movies (or at least knew each other on-set), this has some frightening implications. Was Sora just kidnapped by someone he considered a friend? Do Phineas, Dipper, and Jimmy's friends and family (including Linda, who's shown in the film) know that these kids were taken to be bootlegged and can't do anything about it? Seeing as Flounder, Abu, and Patrick are seen, do people like Aladdin, Ariel and SpongeBob know their best friends were kidnapped? Or is SpongeBob's hat being among the stolen parts an indication that he's been bootlegged too. Where's Maggie while her parents and siblings have been bootlegged? Do Sneezy's fellow dwarves, who are pretty much his brothers, know he's been taken? Fred Flintstone is among the bootlegs, and he has a wife and child. How many families were broken up here?
  • One of the bootlegged toons is Bonkers, who's a police officer. The question is, was he just an actor or an officer on this case? Did Captain Putty throw more than just one officer under the bus while working on this operation?
    • Who's to say he isn't a former actor and is now a cop?
• We see that the bootlegging process is a very ugly process. We later see that the bootlegged toons include Dipper Pines, Phineas Flynn, Peppa Pig, Bart Simpson, Lisa Simpson, and possibly Jimmy Neutron, Sora, SpongeBob, and Patrick. Let that sink in.
  • From the kids we see, Phineas gets it the worst. At least Dipper and Bart got to keep all their limbs. Phineas lost both his arms and a good chunk of his head-mass. Poor kid.
  • And that's the kids we see. Dora's legs are among the many pieces found in those bags. Yikes.
  • With this in mind, it makes how violent the Nick Jr. toons apparently were when the police wrongly went after them more understandable. Peppa and Dora were among the Nick Jr. cast, and it can be assumed that they probably had some friends on set, and harming kids is usually a way to make people mad. Imagine if a coworker or friend you knew went missing, especially a small child, and the police raided your workplace, blaming you for it. Yeah, you'd be pissed too. Made worse by the fact that the police chief is the one that instigated that fight.
  • Going on the point above, Sweet Pete, Captain Putty, and their cronies better hope whatever inmates they're sharing a prison with don't learn just how far their operation went. Even incarcerated criminals don't really take kindly to people who target children.
• Not every toon who was shown to have been bootlegged was shown being rescued. Were they perhaps actually sent to China?
  • Probably not, Monty says that Flounder was sent off to China, and yet he can be seen among the bootlegged toons being freed. (It's easy to miss, he's being carried by Sneezy) The rest are likely either in Sweet Pete's studios like Pooh's friends and the Simpsons were, or in other crates. They only found that one because Dale smelled Monty's cologne. Either way, the police will search the place top-to-bottom, so the others that aren't seen will probably be found. They'll likely need therapy, though.
    • Heck, all of them are going to need therapy, both physical and mental.
    • Though if any of them didn't lose anything that would result in needing physical therapy (or were simply semi-converted to another animation style), they wouldn't need physical therapy.
• Sweet Pete is seen carrying The Dip, implying not all of it was destroyed and it is still being used to this day to kill toons.

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