Trivia / The Rescuers Down Under

• Actor-Shared Background: Like his character Jake, Tristan Rogers hails from Australia.
• Box Office Bomb: The movie only grossed $5 million in its opening weekend due to Fox's Home Alone opening the same day, which led Jeffrey Katzenberg to believe the film was going to bomb. Katzenberg promptly ended all advertising for the movie, but reassured the producers to try again. The movie fell $10 million short of its $38 million budget.
• Celebrity Voice Actor: John Candy as Wilbur and George C. Scott as McLeach.
• Completely Different Title: "Bernard and Bianca in the Land of Kangaroos" in France, Germany and Brazil.
• Cross-Dressing Voices: Frank Welker voices the female eagle Marahute and McLeach's lizard, Joanna. (It's less surprising that the actor is a man then it is that the voice characterization for both characters was provided by a human).
• Cross-Regional Voice Acting: Canadian Wayne Robson voices Frank the lizard.
• Died During Production: Orville's actor Jim Jordan passed away at 91 right when casting for this film was getting started. Thus, the film gets to complete the Wright Brothers gag with John Candy as his brother Wilbur. Orville is Put on a Bus, written as being retired rather than The Character Died with Him.
• Dueling Movies: A losing battle with the box office juggernaut Home Alone (which, incidentally, also featured John Candy in a minor role). As mentioned above, Jeff Katzenberg basically forfeited the duel by pulling any and all advertising for Down Under when it was clear that they were going to lose.^note This wouldn't even be the first "kid empowerment" film that Disney would lose to in 1990, as Ducktales The Movie Treasure Of The Lost Lamp had been beat out at the box office by Problem Child a few months earlier. Tellingly, both Disney movies received better critical reception than the film they were pitted against.
• Fake Australian:
  • Norwegian child actor Adam Ryen was the voice of Cody in both the Norwegian and English versions.
  • The very American George C. Scott as the voice of the very Australian McLeach^note or, as some have stated, a very American McLeach, hiding from American law officers in Australia.
• Follow the Leader: McLeach's role led to a further increase of the Evil Hunter archetype, such as Gaston, Clayton, Lord Victor Quartermaine, and Rookery. The last two are especially notable as the films they're from aren't even made by Disney.
• Franchise Killer: A third film was tentatively planned, but abandoned after Down Under... er, underperformed. Eva Gabor's 1995 death from respiratory failure and pneumonia closed the book on the idea for good.
• Genre-Killer: The film's failure, which coincided with the runaway success of The Little Mermaid a year earlier, convinced Disney to literally figuratively put all their money exclusively on blockbuster musicals for the rest of the decade. They wouldn't produce another non-musical narrative movie until 2000's Dinosaur and wouldn't attempt action films again until 2001's Atlantis: The Lost Empire.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: There were rumors that a third copy of the 1991 VHS release by Walt Disney Home Video existed^note it featured a preview of Robin Hood and was allegedly the first Disney tape to use the famous "handwriting" Feature Presentation bumper used for the rest of the decade. To this day, it has never ever surfaced the internet.
• Kids' Meal Toy:
  • McDonald's released two different Happy Meal promotions in the US; the first featured a set of four camera-shaped viewfinders. The second featured plush ornaments of Bernard and Miss Bianca for the 1990 holiday season.
  • In Europe, McDonald's released a set of four bendable character figures; Wilbur, Miss Bianca, Bernard, and Frank.
• Multiple Languages, Same Voice Actor: Cody's voice actor Adam Ryen is a native Norwegian, and thus also voiced the character in the Norwegian dub.
• The Other Darrin: In the Japanese dub, Noriko Ohara voices Miss Bianca instead of Noriko Shindo.
• Role Reprise:
  • Both Bob Newhart and Eva Gabor (in her final film role) returned to voice Bernard and Miss Bianca, and also Bernard Fox returns as the Rescue Aid Society Chairmouse.
  • In the Japanese dub, Yasuo Yamada and Gorō Naya respectively reprised their roles as Bernard and the Rescue Aid Society Chairmouse from the 1981 dub of The Rescuers.
• Screwed by the Network: When the opening box office weekend didn't live up to expectations, studio head Jeffrey Katzenberg pulled the plug on the promotional campaign. It also didn't help that the movie competed against Home Alone (that said, Rescuers Down Under ended up getting better reviews than Home Alone).
• Sequel Gap: Released in 1990, a little more than 13 years after the 1977 original.
• Swan Song: Down Under marked Eva Gabor's final appearance as Miss Bianca, as well as her final film role.
• Trend Killer: The box office failure of this film and DuckTales the Movie: Treasure of the Lost Lamp, coupled with the success of both The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast is the reason why almost every animated movie throughout the 1990s was a musical (this was at a time when practically all animation was Disney, and movies by their competitors barely achieved the same level of attention).
• What Could Have Been:
  • Dan Aykroyd, Steve Martin and James Belushi were considered for the role of Wilbur, while Mandy Patinkin was one of the original choices for McLeach.
  • Along with Patinkin, Paul Hogan and Clint Eastwood were considered to voice McLeech. If the former would have accepted it would have been an Actor Allusion to his famous character while in the latter's case, well, it would have been a massive Playing Against Type case.
  • Judging from early storyboard sketches◊, Wilbur was originally going to wear a jacket instead of a scarf.
  • According to this article, Cody was originally meant to be Aboriginal Australian, but Katzenberg insisted Cody be a white kid to make the film more "commercial".
  • Versions of the script exist which have an alternate ending where McLeach survives only to be immediately arrested by the rangers who had been searching for Cody.

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