Headscratchers / The Rescuers Down Under

• So McLeach is a wanted man, as evidenced by the WANTED poster we see at the beginning. Given that his truck leaves a trail a blind imbecile could follow, you'd think he'd be easier to find.
  • Who says he's the only one with that kind of truck? It could easily be a common model that a lot of people living in the outback have. Plus, I got the impression that they live in quite a sparsely populated area. While McLeach isn't book smart, he's street-smart enough to know to poach in areas that the Park Rangers usually don't look. (The sad thing is, that's actually Truth in Television...Park Rangers have other duties besides looking out for poachers, and there likely aren't enough to be constantly on the lookout for McLeach. That and park rangers aren't the police.)
  • But there's one other thing. It always bothered me that the Rangers, who are wildlife officers and presumably know a thing or two about tracking, managed to follow Cody's trail to Crocodile Falls, but not the two sets of footprints leading away from it to the big truck tracks, and they didn't find the big manmade hole in the ground. And furthermore since the Rangers managed to trace Cody to the falls which seems really difficult seeing as how he dropped from the sky, they must have some idea how he got there (i.e. giant bird), so the idea that they wouldn't have an agent monitoring the eagle's nest is really surprising considering how valuable it and the eggs are.
• There's a strange moment towards the end when Bernard gets McCleach's truck shut off, and steals the keys. McCleach starts looking for the keys, while Bernard hides behind the pedal. Bernard then looks down at something on the floor of the truck, then has this look on his face like he just got an idea, and then.... we just see him jumping out of the truck with the keys, and running into Joanna. What was that all about?
  • Presumably, he saw a way out of the truck, taking the keys with him to hinder McLeach further; realistically, he would look in the truck until he had exhausted every conceivable place they could have fallen into before it occurred to him that they may not be in the truck anymore. That and McLeach isn't very smart to begin with.
  • Bernard was looking at the opening in the floor of the truck created by the anchor of the gas pedal. He figured out a way to get out of the truck, by going through the hole, that didn't involve McLeach seeing him. In the next scene, you can see he drops to a spot underneath the truck and in front of one of the front treads.
• About Croc Falls... is that water flowing uphill before it gets to the crest of it and goes down to the river?
  • It's possible for water to be appearing to flow uphill depending on the grade of the area. Alternately, even if there is a slight uphill portion in the rivier, the current of the river is probably strong enough to overcome it (especially considering there's a huge honking waterfall at the end).
• A website cataloging various Disney mistakes and plotholes brought up a good point: McCleach keeps boasting that Marahute will make him rich, but he already got Marahute's mate; why didn't he get rich from THAT bird?
  • McLeach specifically wants her eggs, which male eagles can't lay.
    • If he wanted the eggs, he would have told Joanna to bring them back up as opposed to eating them. And don't try and tell me she couldn't, she could lift the rocks they were replaced with easy enough.
  • McLeach had already killed Marahute's mate, likely leaving Marahute as the last great golden eagle let in the wild. By taking her alive and destroying her eggs, he would ensure she would be the last great golden eagle, period, thus skyrocketing her value to anyone McLeach wanted to sell her to.
    • Except McLeach tells Joanna that by eating the eggs, she will be helping keep the eagle rare. This strongly suggests that Marahute cannot be the last of her species, because if that had been the case, McLeach would've surely wanted to get the eggs too; having the very last eggs of the species destroyed would've been a waste of money in his mind. It would seem then that the eagle is extremely rare but not quite extinct.
  • Also, keep in mind that female eagles grow bigger than males. Even if he did get a lot of money for the male eagle, the female, being bigger and more spectacular, would be worth even more in his mind. Finally, there's the fact that he implies he has killed the male, whereas the female was captured alive; again, this would've made her more valuable.
  • Mc Leach killed Marahute's mate, but makes an effort to capture Marahute themself alive - probably, whatever they got for a giant golden eagle corpse is peanuts compared to what a live giant golden eagle can fetch.
• During the climax, Bernard causes McLeach to fall into the water first, and the crocodiles give chase as the poacher is dragged toward the waterfall. Once they are gone, Cody also falls into the water, followed by Bernard. Then, when the crocodiles notice they are getting too close to the waterfall, they turn around and swim away. Which means they are swimming towards Cody and Bernard again. How come they didn't notice and attack the two?
  • Maybe they did, but they just didn't wanna f*** with Bernard. Consider this is the same movie where Jake and Bernard both, at one point, scare a much larger animal into working for them.
  • Probably they were just too focused on getting away from the waterfall to worry about food at that particular moment.
• The above makes me wonder... throughout the movie Cody is shown as being able to talk to animals and get their understanding/sympathy. Why then can't Cody simply explain his plight to the Crocodiles and ask them not to eat him? Presumably (with how well-regarded he seems to be by the wildlife) he'd have enough pull to beg at least that much.
  • Not all animals in this movie's universe can talk (Marahute and Joanna being the main examples), so perhaps not all of them can understand the human tongue either. Plus, the crocodiles are obviously very ferocious so Predators Are Mean may be in effect.
  • You ever tried to talk to someone while submerged in a rapidly-flowing river? Not easy.
• What does that "Come with a whimper, leave with a grin" remark imply?
  • It's pretty much a poetic way of saying that the doctor mouse's patients come in with injuries (hence the whimper), and will most certainly leave with their impairments fixed and dealt with.
• Did Bianca not notice that Jake was flirting with her? She kisses Bernard to wake him up during the flight to Australia and immediately accepts when Bernard proposes to her at the end of the movie, suggesting she knew the relationship had shifted to romantic and was happy with it. Did she not realize Jake was trying to put the moves on her, and if she did, why didn't she tell him she's "taken" already?
  • Because they're in the Australian outback and if she insults their guide to the point he no longer wants to work with them, they're stranded? Or she doesn't want to risk souring relations between the US and Australia for the R.A.S. in case they have to work together in the future?
  • The events between the landing in Mugwamp Flats and the end of the movie only seem to take up a couple of days, and Bianca spends all that period in the company of Bernard or Cody + Marahute as well as Jake. Maybe she wanted to tell him in private to spare his embarrassment, but just never got the opportunity until Bernard's proposal and her acceptance rendered the whole issue moot anyway.
• Just realised something, McLeach would have had to get Cody out of the cage in order to tie him to the crane as I am quite sure he would have been smart enough not to tie Cody up in the cage where Bianca, Jake and Marahute could have tried to protect Cody unless McLeach threatened to shoot them or (at least, in the mice's case) feed them to Joanna and Cody had to tell them not to intervene?
  • I think you overestimate McLeach's competence here. This is a man who did not finish the third grade. He has his clever moments, but McLeach is several bangers short of a barby. He doesn't seem to see Bernard and Bianca, although he does "smell" Bernard at one point. Also, Marahute is probably too traumatized to put up a fight.
• It makes you wonder how mice manage to encode a message in what is presumably the Pacific Fleet Headquarters at Pearl Harbor during the "Message Montage" scene.
  • The R.A.S. has had hackers infiltrating human-computer systems for a while. The Internet will likely make their work more uncomplicated if a third Rescuers film ever gets made. On the Internet, nobody knows you're a mouse.
• The encoded message (that you see in Hawaii) just said that the boy had been kidnapped in Australia. Australia is a large continent. How did they know where to go?
  • That seems to have been a preliminary message. The Hawaii affiliate may have been assigned to screen out spam messages, but they determined that Cody's case warranted the R.A.S.'s full attention, so they referred it to headquarters in New York. More details were probably sent along after that, perhaps even direct from Australia to New York. In any event, the story was already common knowledge by the time Bernard and Bianca landed in the Outback.
• When Bernard tries to keep their mission hush-hush, Jake immediately reveals he knows all about the kidnapped boy, proclaiming that it's hard to keep secrets in the Outback. But when they get to McLeach's place and hear him taunting Cody about Marahute and the eggs, Jake has no idea what he's talking about, nor does he recognize where they're headed or that Marahute has a nest there. So apparently Jake doesn't know everything going on in the Outback.
  • Fridge Brilliance: Jake is just trying to impress the tourists.
• Those other animals McLeach captured do have a good chance of escaping or being rescued for the following reasons:
  • Frank was able to pick the lock on his cage door once, and with McLeach dead (or severely badly injured) and Joanna being far away, there's nothing preventing him from doing it again and successfully getting the keys this time. Admittedly, it took him a while to pick the lock, but again, no one is around to stop him now.
  • Cody, whom surely knows where McLeach's hideout is, could just call the Rangers after he gets home and tell them about it. They would then raid the hideout and rescue the animals themselves since McLeach is a wanted criminal.
• Even if McLeach did survive his plunge down the waterfall by tucking himself into a ball, he's going to suffer serious injuries that would either cause him to die of blood loss or leave him vulnerable to death by heat exposure or dehydration since he's stuck in the Australian Outback without any food or water. Or a predator could get him. And even if, by some miracle, he manages to evade all of that, Cody knows where his hideout is and will no doubt tell the Rangers about it, so he's going to have a hard time evading the law now.

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