Western Animation / Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers

"Rescue Rangers away!"

"There's no case too big, no case too small!
When you need help, just call!"

Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers was one of several Animated Series on the syndicated Disney Afternoon block of the late 1980s into the 1990s. It continues the block's trend of recasting classic Disney characters in new settings, this time with the chipmunk duo of Chip 'n Dale.

In this series, Chip and Dale are no longer mischievous troublemakers but rather amateur crimefighters. Joining them in their adventures are Monterey "Monty" Jack, a tough but lovable Australian mouse with a weakness for cheese; Monty's friend Zipper, a small fly who can not speak understandably, but has unusual strength for his size; and Gadget Hackwrench, a blonde female mouse who is a skilled inventor and mechanic, and also both chipmunks' unrequited love interest. The team, dubbed the "Rescue Rangers," operate out of a tree in a local park and regularly take on a Rogues Gallery of unusual villains, such as the feline crime lord Fat Cat (whose owner, a human crime lord, was the target of the team's first mission) and megalomaniacal human inventor Norton Nimnul, along with similar one-shot criminals.

The show was animated by five different studios: Walt Disney Japan (22 episodes), Wang, Taiwan (16 episodes), TMS, Japan (13 episodes), Sunwoo, South-Korea (12 episodes) and A1, South-Korea (2 episodes).

Like most of the shows from The Disney Afternoon, it had a couple of well-received video game tie-ins by Capcom.

A comic book continuation by Boom! Kids began in 2010, on the heels of the successful revival of Darkwing Duck as a comic series, the latter of which featured a cameo by Gadget in one issue as a bit of foreshadowing. It ran for eight issues (two arcs) before being unceremoniously discontinued. The Rescue Rangers later made an appearance in the DuckTales (2017) episode "Double-O Duck in You Only Crash Twice!" as test subjects for an intelligence-increasing ray, helping Dewey and Launchpad out during crucial moments.

2020 saw the launch of The Mouse Watch, a Spin-Off young adult novel series from Disney Books set in a possible future where Gadget is the leader of a spy organization defending the world against a Nebulous Evil Organisation named R.A.T.S: Rogue Animal Thieves Society.

A live-action/CGI feature film inspired by the series had been in Development Hell between 2014 and 2020, but was finally released on Disney+ in May 2022.

Completely unrelated to Chippendales Dancers, as well as the 70s Saturday Morning cartoon Lassie's Rescue Rangers.

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Rescue Tropers Away!

Tropes 0 to F

• The '80s: Not as egregious as other examples, to the point that those unfamiliar with the trends of the day may not even notice them at all, but those who are will quickly notice Gadget's volumetric Furry Female Mane and exercise outfit or Dale's Magnum-inspired Hawaiian shirt, as well as passing mention of then-contemporary technology like VCRs and the villain's scheme in "Risky Beesness" involving a Hair Metal band. The henchman's paintings in "Le Purrfect Crime" also have some random, distinctly late '80s/early '90s-looking neon-colored geometric shapes (aka, the "Memphis Group" look). The series itself ran from 1989 to 1991, therefore straddling the line between the two decades and covering the entire period in time when these cultural trends were relevant.
• Accidental Astronaut: In "Out to Launch", the Rescue Rangers are at Cape Canaveral to watch the launch of an experimental new space plane. However, due to a series of circumstances, Chip and Dale end up inside a space suit that is placed aboard the space plane just prior to launch. Initially, Monterey Jack points out to Gadget that they're perfectly fine aboard the ship, and they'll be back when the space plane lands. But then the space suit the two chipmunks are in is accidentally jettisoned into space, and while the crew plan to retrieve it, they don't plan to do so for two weeks, prompting Gadget to quickly build and launch a makeshift rocket to retrieve the boys.
• Accidental Kiss: Chip and Dale at the end of "Gadget Goes Hawaiian", Mole and Wart in "Adventures in Squirrelsitting".
• Accidental Misnaming: In "Gadget Goes Hawaiian", LahWhinie constantly misnames Chip while pretending to be Gadget. She calls him "Chop", "Chirp", and "Chap".
• Accordion Man: Monty in "To the Rescue, Part 3," gets squashed and turned into this for a moment.
• Acme Products: "Gadget Goes Hawaiian" features the ACME Majestic Ultra-light All-Weather Fiberglass Volcano. This is unusual, because Disney productions usually have "AJAX" as the stand-in every-brand.
• Acquired Situational Narcissism: Dale in "It’s a Bird, It’s Insane, It’s Dale" lets having superpowers go straight to his head, calling the other Rangers his sidekicks and then later claiming he doesn't need them. It ends up biting him hard when he ends up framed and has to go back to the team for help. Needless to say, they eagerly jump on the chance to make him beg for help and take shots at him.
• Adaptational Badass: In the Classic Disney Shorts Chip and Dale are mostly portrayed as regular chipmunks, mostly interested in nuts and food and often antagonising either Pluto or Donald. Here, they are part of the Rescue Rangers, a capable team of heroic animals.
• Adaptational Heroism: Chip 'n Dale started out as classical cartoon antagonists to Pluto and Donald Duck. The show however portrays them as straight-out, good-hearted heroes.
• Adventurer Archaeologist: A villainous version appears in "Throw Mummy From the Train".
• Affectionate Nickname:
  • Tammy calls Chip "Chipper". To be fair, so does Dale on occasion.
  • Speaking of Dale, notice how he is the first to call Foxglove "Foxy".
  • Camembert Kate still calls her son Monterey Jack "Cheezer", much to his dismay.
• Air Guitar: Dale plays one in "Risky Beesness" while watching a concert of the fictional band Iron Goose.
• Air-Vent Passageway: Used in a few episodes; justified by the small physical size of the Rangers.
• Alien Abduction: Sort of happens to Dale accidentally in "Dale Beside Himself" when the Fleeblebroxians mistake him for DTZ.
• Alien Invasion: Attempted for real by the Fleeblebroxians in "Dale Beside Himself", faked by Norton Nimnul in "Fake Me to Your Leader", and subject of some of the movies Dale loves to watch.
• Aliens Speaking English:
  • The Fleeblebroxians in "Dale Beside Himself".
  • Steggy in "Prehysterical Pet" (he did spend a while learning it, though).
• All Animals Are Dogs:
  • Zigzagged with Steggy in "Prehysterical Pet". After meeting Dale, who mistakes him for a potential new pet, Steggy starts out acting like a voiceless pet until he breaks the charade once he's able to verbally communicate with the Rangers to ask them for help finding his missing spaceship. He later starts to genuinely act like a giant dog once the Earth's atmosphere and food starts causing him to grow in size and his IQ to drop.
  • The guard shark in "One-Upsman-Chip" is wearing a stereotypical spiked collar, even though sharks don't even have a neck.
• All That Glitters: Darby's pot of gold in "The Last Leprechaun".
• All There in the Manual: The only explanation as to how Chip got his hat that's available anywhere today is an out-of-print comic book. There are rumors that the movie cut of "To the Rescue" has a similar scene in it, but it hasn't been aired anywhere since 1988. Unfortunately those rumors are unfounded; the sequence where Chip first appears wearing his hat is the same in the movie cut as in the mini-series currently available.
• Alliterative Name: Several one-off characters, including Monty's parents, Camembert Kate and Cheddarhead Charlie, plus the regular villain, Professor Norton Nimnul.
• Almost Kiss: "Catteries Not Included" has one of the most explicit Chip/Gadget moments on the show: Chip flirts heavily with Gadget in the Ranger Plane, and she is clearly enjoying and returning his affection. He's just about to kiss her when Dale jumps in and interrupts them. Chip is not amused.
• Always Know a Pilot:
  • Chip and Dale have a pilot as part of the team, Gadget Hackwrench. As suggested by her name, she doubles as an inventor.
  • Monterey Jack's old friend Geegaw Hackwrench, Gadget's father, used to be an Ace Pilot. Since Geegaw is absent, Gadget joins the team instead. That said, Monty was rather looking for Geegaw's plane because he is a pilot himself.
  • At the beginning of "Song of the Night 'n Dale", Gadget mentions that she wants everyone on the team to be able to pilot her aircraft (probably except Zipper who doesn't need them in the first place). This introduces Dale as a pilot. And Chip can be seen piloting the Ranger Plane in "Catteries Not Included", the first episode ever aired. So the Rangers always know at least one pilot.
• Amazing Technicolor Wildlife: Downplayed. While most animals seem to have natural colors, bats, for some reason, are a different story. The Jamaican fruit bats from "Battle of the Bulge" are green, while Foxglove is pink.
  • The mosquitoes from "Chocolate Chips" are red.^note Real mosquitoes sometimes appear to have red abdomen, but this is just blood they happen to be retaining.
• Ambiguous Syntax: Cassandra's prediction for Chip in "Seer No Evil" is this all over. Needless to say, this leads to a Prophecy Twist.
• Amnesia Episode: While not the entire focus of the episode, "Le Purrfect Crime" features Dale temporarily getting amnesia and being tricked into helping Maltese de Sade fight the Rangers. It doesn't take long for him to snap out of it, although he pretends to still have amnesia to help foil de Sade's plot.
• Amusement Park: The setting of "Seer No Evil", complete with requisite fun house, cotton candy, and crooked midway games (one of which jumpstarts the plot).
• Anachronic Order: The fandom has long debated the exact canonical episode order of the show. The one thing everyone agrees on, however, is that it sure as heck isn't the production or aring order. The 5-part pilot is part of Season 2, as is "Good Times, Bat Times" which some consider the chronologically last episode. "The Pied Piper Power Play" came even later, and it shows Nimnul in his dome lair that was destroyed in "Normie's Science Project." Then towards the end of the series, "A Fly in the Ointment" ends with Nimnul willingly going to a mental facility after finding out the Rangers are sentient, while the episode that follows features him doing his usual villainous thing with no mention of what had happened in the previous episode. ^note At the time, Disney Channel, which was a premium cable channel rather than basic, didn't have season-based production schedules for their original shows, rather every single episode of an entire series would be created in one long production and then aired in bulk, with some shows airing new episodes years after production had ceased and with little regard for chronology.
• Anchovies Are Abhorrent: In "To the Rescue Part 2", Fat Cat orders a pizza to be delivered to the Happy Tom Cat Food factory. When no one answers, the delivery guy begrudgingly asks himself as to who would even order a pizza with triple anchovies. Justified in that Fat Cat is, well, a cat.
• Angry Guard Dog: The Doberman who guards the pound in "To the Rescue, Part 4". At least until Monterey Jack clobbers him with trash can lids.
• Animal Gender-Bender:
  • Henrich von Sugarbottom collectively addresses his swarm of biting mosquitoes as "boys". The lead mosquito is named "Fritzy".
  • Irwina Allen addresses her swarm of worker bees as "boys".
• Animal Jingoism: Maltese de Sade's universal dog hatred in particular. Monterey Jack's cat phobia is self-explanatory.
• Animal Religion:
  • "Zipper Come Home" has a group of insects worshipping a frog called Ribbit as their god. Ribbit is of course a big threat to the lives of these insects because he sees them as food, and it seems like the whole cult is all about them begging him to not eat them.
  • In "Kiwi's Big Adventure", a tribe of kiwi birds see the Ranger Plane as a god that will make them regain their ability to fly.
  • In "The Case of the Cola Cult", Gadget joins a cult with religious overtones (she has to give up all her tools to be able to join).
• Animal Superheroes:
  • Debatable, considering that none of the characters on the show have anything that could be called a super power, with one exception: in the Superhero Episode "It's a Bird, It's Insane, It's Dale!", Dale and a human villain both get temporary Rubber Man powers from an alien meteor.
  • Some Shows Within A Show give us Flash the Wonder Dog and his sidekick Conrad Cockatoo, and the Red Badger of Courage.
• Animal Talk:
  • Almost all animal species seem to be able to talk with one another, including insects. Even Zipper seems to be understood by other animals with ease. Almost all because there is probably one exception: Homo sapiens are clearly not able to understand chipmunks (but has no problems understanding dogs and alligators. Since these are bigger, and for that reason, sound deeper, might it be a question of pitch?) See Fridge Logic for more information on this matter.
  • Supernatural beings can communicate with animals. This includes the genie from "A Lad in a Lamp", Winifred the witch from "Good Times, Bat Times", the leprechauns and the banshee from "The Last Leprechaun", and Hiram (a mummy) from "Throw Mummy from the Train".
  • The same goes for aliens, such as the Fleeblebroxians in "Dale Beside Himself" and Steggy in "Prehysterical Pet".
  • Harry from "A Wolf in Cheap Clothing" is a wolf who gets transformed into a human. As a human, he is able to converse with other humans and animals. It is unclear if Nimnul, when transformed into a wolf, is able to understand animals.
  • In "A Fly in the Ointment", Nimnul becomes capable of understanding animals when he switches bodies with Zipper. For what it's worth, Chip states that this is due to Nimnul having become part bug.
• Animation Bump: Look at "To the Rescue" (done by Walt Disney Animation Japan) or "The Carpetsnaggers" (done by TMS Entertainment), then look at "The Case of the Cola Cult" (done by Wang Film Productions) or any of Sunwoo Entertainment or A-1 Productions' episodes.
• Animorphism:
  • In "A Fly in the Ointment", several characters exchange bodies. And ONLY their bodies... their heads stay the same.◊ Hilarity Ensues.
  • All over "A Wolf in Cheap Clothing".
  • Dale being turned into a frog in "Good Times, Bat Times".
• Anti-Villain: The Pi-Rats, who, other than an obsessive need to guard their treasure, are actually likable Friendly Pirates.
• Anything but That!:
  • "Prehysterical Pet": A museum security guard's reaction when the curator threatens to put him in charge of... "the children's group tours!"
  • "Throw Mummy From the Train": evil archaeologist Wexler sneers that he's not afraid of going to prison... then his superior informs him that he'll continue to catalog the expedition's artifacts in precise, excruciating detail while serving his time, and Wexler breaks down completely, delivering the line.
• Appropriated Appellation: When Plato said the fate of the Global Gold Reserve rested with the group, he called them 'Rescue Rangers'. Chip liked the name and it became official.
• Arboreal Abode: The Rescue Ranger's Headquarters is one.
• Artistic License – Geography: In "It's a Bird, It's Insane, It's Dale", a news report shows that the Statue of Liberty is missing from Ellis Island. The statue's island is named Liberty Island; Ellis Island is another island entirely.
• Artistic License – Paleontology: Everything about "Prehysterical Pet". For starters, Steggy's anatomy is completely wrong for a Stegosaurus, alien or not. And then there's the concept of dinosaurs (or maybe some like stegosaurs and sauropods at least) being originally small and intelligent aliens that grew big and turned animalistic thanks to the Earth atmosphere and food. The episode's plot appears to be based on the old notion that dinosaurs became oversized and unintelligent, a belief that was still going strong in the general public at the time of the show (before being put to rest by Jurassic Park).
• Artistic License – Space: Whenever Rangers travel through space, and this happens twice. It ranges from Fleeblebroxian shuttles moving much like aircraft (at least, Gadget's spaceship has got fire extinguishers for maneuver rockets) to Gadget's elastic spacesuit that's good enough for a space walk even though it's elastic and filled with air.
• Aside Glance: Occurs frequently as a result of the insane goings on the Rangers often find themselves dealing with. Most prominently from Chip and Monterey.
• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: Both Nimnul's scheme, and the overall plot of "Fake Me to Your Leader".
• At the Opera Tonight: "A Case of Stage Blight". Slightly subverted in that Gadget's idea of dressing up is to wear a flower in her hair.
• Babies Make Everything Better: Actually subverted almost whenever possible. The most egregious example is the criminal mastermind Thaddeus who disguises himself as a baby.
• Bad Boss: A staple of the Rangers' rogue's gallery. Nine times out of ten, this will also be a major part of their downfall either from said abused henchmen turning on them or via said abused henchmen trying to help and screwing something up.
• Badly Battered Babysitter: Whenever kids are involved, both humans and animals.
• Bag of Kidnapping: In "Mind Your Cheese and Q's" when Gadget tries to escape from Rat Capone's hideout after she rejects his advances, his henchman Sugar Ray captures her with this method.
• Bald of Evil: Ignatz Ratskiwatski is an example all right, as is the Greatest Spy in the World.
• Bamboo Technology: Much of the Mouse World technology on the show. There are rare exceptions like the Screaming Eagle, which is a much more professional-looking aircraft than the Ranger Plane and Ranger Wing.
• Bankruptcy Barrel: Percy in "To the Rescue, Part 1", although he was wearing a box.
• Batman Cold Open: Used in "Gadget Goes Hawaiian". The episode opens with half of the Rangers being captured by an octopus, and the others are trying to rescue them.
• Beach Episode:
  • "Shell Shocked" does feature Gadget in a (modest one-piece) swimsuit, yes.
  • "Gadget Goes Hawaiian" and "Chipwrecked Shipmunks" both have their beach scenes, too, but no swimsuits. The former does feature Gadget in a midriff-baring t-shirt and shorts, though.
• Beat Them at Their Own Game:
  • When trying to counter Professor Nimnul in "Weather or Not".
  • "Normie's Science Project".
  • When confronting Su Lin.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: "A Lad in a Lamp", complete with the Reset Button at the end.
• Bears Are Bad News:
  • Humphrey the Bear (yes, that Humphrey from the Donald Duck shorts) from "Bearing Up Baby". Averted due to the fact that despite the chaos he accidentally caused, in the end he saves the baby's life.
  • Played straight with the polar bear in "A Chorus Crime".
• Bee Afraid: "Risky Beesness" uses standard elements of this. Justified since the main villain of the episode can mind-control bees.
• Bee-Bee Gun: There's one in "Risky Beesness". Justified since the main villain of the episode can mind-control bees.
• Been There, Shaped History: In "When You Fish Upon A Star", Fat Cat is furious when his incompetent Mooks mistakenly sink the RMS Lusitania instead of his intended target.
• Belated Child Discipline: In the episode "Out of Scale," Dale and Chip are captured and given to Buffy, the very spoiled daughter of a gangster named Ratso. At the very end of the episode as Ratso, his goons, Professor Nimnul, and Buffy are being taken to jail, Ratso laments that his house, criminal enterprise, and fortune are gone. When Buffy whines that she wants a new toy, Ratso yells at her to "shut UP!", causing his goons to cheer for him.
• Beneath the Earth: Where Darby Spree from "The Last Leprechaun" lives, as do the other leprechauns.
• Berserk Button: Don't call the cleaning witch from "Good Times, Bat Times" "Freddie". Of course, only the nice Foxglove calls her Winnifred.
• Bewitched Amphibians: Dale is turned into a frog by Winifred in "Good Times, Bat Times". He even catches Zipper with his elastic tongue.
• Be Yourself: Dale in "The S.S. Drainpipe" who eventually ditches Red Badger of Courage methods in favor of a plan of his own. Also Tammy who tries to impress Chip by being like him.
• Big Applesauce: Chrysler Building in "The Carpetsnaggers", Twin Towers in "Robocat", Rat Capone's Brooklyn accent, and so forth, and still there's no rock solid proof the show takes place in New York City. (There's also quite a bit of evidence that it doesn't — see Geographic Flexibility.)
• Big Bad: The show has two main villains for the Rangers.
  • For one, there's the Mad Scientist Professor Norton Nimnul. He starts out with several designs of alternative electricity sources which are as questionable as hazardous, and after they've all been rejected, he goes full criminal. Some of his plans involve revenge, the rest is just about getting rich with science and technology.
  • Then there is Fat Cat, a feline kingpin like straight from a Film Noir who is constantly looking for more bling and riches. Unlike Nimnul, he has got his own Mooks, and he has got a steady homebase and his own animal casino.
  • Not to mention lots of one-shot villains.
  • The biggest one has to be Aldrin Klordane, both Nimnul's "boss" and Fat Cat's "keeper" (if only he knew), from "To the Rescue".
• Big Ball of Violence: In "Love Is a Many Splintered Thing", Monty ends up in a Big Ball of Violence, crawls out of it, picks it up and tosses it away as a whole.
• Big Creepy-Crawlies: In "Fake Me to Your Leader", Nimnul enlarged a bunch of pill bugs to six feet and made everyone believe they're Insectoid Aliens.
• Big Fancy House: The Clutchcoin house in "The Carpetsnaggers", for example.
• Bird Caged: Chip, Dale and Gadget are trapped in a bird cage placed in rising water by a tribe of beetles in "Zipper Come Home".
• Bizarre Alien Biology: In "Prehysterical Pet", the animals we know as dinosaurs are discovered by the Rangers to actually be intelligent alien reptiles from a distant planet who attempted to make a settlement on Earth, only for the planet's atmosphere and food to cause the colony of fairly small alien reptiles to grow into large hulking monsters and turn their brains to mush (since their brains didn't grow with the rest of their bodies) and never returned to their home planet. This ends up happening to the visiting stegosaurus Steggy when he arrives on Earth trying to solve the mystery of what happened to his home planet's "Lost Colony", but it's reversed once the Rescue Rangers are able to give him food from his home planet.
• Blown Upward by a Blowhole: In the episode "A Creep in the Deep", a whale shoots the Rangers out of his blowhole to enable them to get over a high wall.
• Bond Villain Stupidity: In "Ghost of a Chance", Fat Cat ties Chip, Dale and Gadget onto a guillotine, the blade of which is designed to come down very slowly. Rather than stay around and ensure they get killed, Fat Cat leaves them to go after the Crown Jewels, even though he wasn't in any hurry.
• Bottomless Magazines: Percy's revolver during the shoot-out in "To the Rescue, Part 1", up to the point of acting like a submachine gun, but always far from being limited to five or six rounds.
• Bound and Gagged: The primary method of handling prisoners among the animal population seems to be tying them up.
• Bragging Theme Tune: The show's theme somewhat exaggerates Chip and Dale's role in the series as detectives (with the extended version of the theme comparing them to "Watson and Mr. Holmes". This is especially odd in Dale's case, as he doesn't really have many "detective" attributes at all. The theme making it seem like the show is a mystery series starring a duo (as the other Rangers are not even mentioned) rather then an adventure series starring a whole team, with some mystery elements tied in. The short clips shown during the intro do a better job of selling what the show is actually like.
• Brainwashed: In "Parental Discretion Retired", using a home made looking device, Fat Cat has his henchmen hypnotize sturgeons into thinking they're unintelligent chickens who lay eggs every day instead of once a year to corner the caviar market.
• Brainwashed and Crazy: Has happened to all the main characters at some point. Happens to Monty anytime he smells or sees cheese.
• Brand X: Coo-Koo Cola. On the other hand, Shell and Studebaker are mentioned in the show.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall:
  • Professor Nimnul's rants tend to have him acting as if he really does have an audience.
  • A number of episode endings use this trope.
  • There are several in-story occurrences throughout the series.
• Break Them by Talking: Gadget manages to pull off an epic one in "Bearing Up Baby." After Humphrey the Bear saves baby Jeremy and decides to adopt him as his own, the rest of the Rangers are stumped figuring out just how to get the baby away from the Gentle Giant, when Monterey proposes an ambush. Gadget's solution? Just walk right up to Humphrey and explain the situation, reminding him that Jeremy has a mother who must be very worried about him. And it works, reducing the bear to tears and convincing him to return Jeremy right on the spot.
• Broken Echo: Dale looks into a cave and yells "Hello down there!" The echo repeats this. He then says "Say, you're handsome!" The echo says "Thanks!"
• Building Swing: Rubber Bando, Dale's superhero alter ego with the power to stretch himself out, does this sometimes to move about the city.
• Bull Seeing Red: Was impossible to avoid in "When Mice Were Men".
• Buried Alive: Gadget suggests the Pi-Rats bury them in the sand and wait for the tide to come. When Chip expresses his shock, she apologizes and says she couldn't resist the intellectual challenge.
• Busman's Holiday: Whenever the Rangers go on one of their many vacations, they will inevitably have to solve at least one case. A few examples: "Gadget Goes Hawaiian", "Shell Shocked", "Kiwi's Big Adventure", "When Mice Were Men", "Chocolate Chips".
• Butt Biter: A common occurance that happens with the villians.
• …But He Sounds Handsome: When pranking Dale in "One-Upsman-Chip", Chip refers to himself as "your incredibly handsome friend Chip".
• The Cameo: The crocodile from Peter Pan chases Chip 'n Dale in "Kiwi's Big Adventure".
• Cannot Spit It Out: Chip in "Good Times, Bat Times", mostly because he is being constantly interrupted. Also in many fanfics he is portrayed this way.
• The Capital of Brazil Is Buenos Aires: "Chocolate Chips", an episode which supposedly takes place in a Brazilian cocoa forest, fits most of these stereotypes to a T, right down to the Brazilian parrots and Latino tour bus driver.
• Captain Ersatz: Each of the five main characters is based on a well known 1980s live-action character:
  • Chip, with the bomber jacket and fedora, is based on Indiana Jones.
  • Dale, with the Hawaiian shirt, is based on Thomas Magnum.
  • Monterey Jack is based on "Crocodile" Dundee.
  • Gadget is an almost direct port of Jordan from Real Genius.
  • Zipper is based on Rin Tin Tin (who had an 80s revival).
  • The Red Badger of Courage from "The S. S. Drainpipe" is a copy of Batman, specifically the incarnation Adam West played in the 1960's.
• Caretaking is Feminine: Subverted in "Adventures in Squirrelsitting". The Rangers babysit a teenage and toddler squirrel duo for the day, and while Token Girl Gadget is the one who suggests that they do as a way to make up for accidentally wrecking their mother's room, she has almost no moments of caring for them. Instead, it's the guys who primarily care for the squirrels.
• Cargo Cult:
  • In "Kiwi's Big Adventure", the Ranger Plane becomes the object of one. A bunch of kiwis regard it as a deity that can and shall give them back the ability of flight.
  • "The Case of the Cola Cult" revolves around the eponymous beverage cult.
• Cartoon Cheese:
  • Halfway averted with the slices of cheese Monty steals out of burgers and sandwiches and the melted cheese from pizzas.
  • Monty's favorite cheese is the Brie '86 (though it was established in "To The Rescue, Part 3" that he likes cheese regardless of what kind it is). Of course, no cheese in the show ever looks remotely like a brie.
• The Cassandra: Played with in "Seer No Evil". When the predictions of the fortune teller (who's actually named Cassandra) start to come true, the whole team (except Chip) gets very worried, since her last prediction was apparently of Chip's demise.
• Catchphrase: The show is full of them.
  • The heroes' battle cry, "Rescue Rangers Away!"
  • Dale has his catch phrase, "Wowie Zowie".
  • Gadget has several catch phrases: "Golly!", "Should", "No problems". The joke on those last two is that whenever Gadget says 'em, something always goes wrong with her latest invention.
  • Monterey Jack's Australian slang including "Crikey!", "Blimey!" and "Too-ra-loo!" It should be noted that few, if any, Real Life Australians speak like Monty. He does sound somewhat like the Crocodile Hunter, however.
  • Recurring character Canina LaFur (played by Carol Channing): "Star of stage, screen and the occasional dog food commercial."
• Cats Are Mean:
  • Fat Cat, Maltese de Sade, the Siamese Twins, Kismet... Averted with most of the kittens though.
  • Also averted with Tom from the episode "Robocat".
• Centrifugal Farce: Poor Chip and Dale get subjected to the centrifuge with Gadget and Jack at the controls, the latter of whom goes overboard by sending the thing to 12Gs. They are Squashed Flat when the centrifuge finally stops.
• Chained to a Railway: Twice. ("Out of Scale" has Dale in garb Chained to a Railway by Buffy and in "Last Train to Cashville" the whole gang, bar Dale, gets this treatment from Fat Cat). In "To the Rescue, Part 5" Plato is chained to a train, although not the railway itself.
• Chain of People: "To the Rescue, Part 5". What's remarkable about the use this time is that Gadget at the top of the chain is able to yank the next in the chain (Chip) up to shout into his face - dragging Dale and Monterey along with him! (This could be the Square-Cube Law becoming an advantage for such small creatures... or it could simply be Rule of Funny.)
• Changed My Mind, Kid: Monterey Jack clashes with Chip and leaves in "To the Rescue pt. 4", only to show up less than ten minutes later to save the rest of the team from an Angry Guard Dog.
• Character Name and the Noun Phrase: Irweena and the Stingers (a band formed by a woman in a bee suit and a bunch of bees) in "Risky Beesness". Justified since the main villain of the episode can mind-control bees.
• Chaste Toons: Subverted by Gadget (who had a father), Monty (who still has both parents), Tammy (who has a mother), and Ignatz Ratskiwatski (who has a daughter), just to name a few. Played straight by Nimnul, though, who only has a nephew.
• Chick Magnet: All the male Rangers have had Ship Tease or other female attention - Tammy, Foxglove, Desiree D'allure, and Queenie among others.
• Children Are Innocent: Or so Gadget believes in most of "Dirty Rotten Diapers".
• Chinese Launderer: The main location in "To the Rescue, Part 2." It's run by a pair of "Siamese Twins" and involves incredibly racist Oriental cats running fish fighting rings.
• City of Adventure: While the Rangers often travel to other lands, most of the episodes take place right in their home city (see City with No Name below).
• City with No Name: The show's setting. Although there are hints that it's supposed to be either Burbank or New York City, and even a few references to San Francisco, it's just as likely a case of Geographic Flexibility.
• Clear Their Name:
  • What Chip and Dale have to do for Detective Drake in "To the Rescue".
  • What the Rangers have to do for themselves in "An Elephant Never Suspects".
  • When Dale becomes Rubber Bando and is framed for crimes he didn't commit in the episode "It's A Bird, It's Insane, It's Dale!".
• Close-Call Haircut: The Rangers manage to save Monty from being beheaded by a circular saw in "Mind Your Cheese & Q's". It was so close that he got the back of his head shaved.
• Clothing Damage: Parodied. Whose dress is ripped in an action scene? Dale's.
• Clue, Evidence, and a Smoking Gun: In "It's A Bird, It's Insane, It's Dale", the clue is a brochure from a travel agency. Gadget performs a chemical test on a scrap of the brochure, and triumphantly announces, "it's made out of paper!", then adds the name and address of the agency.
  Monty: Wow, that's some test, Gadget luv!
  Gadget: Well, actually, the name and address are printed on the bottom of the brochure.
• Coincidental Dodge: Dale in "Chocolate Chips". It's how he miraculously avoided getting stung by the mosquitoes that zombified everyone else around him.
• Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: Most of the villains wear purple: Fat Cat, Rat Capone, Errol, Mr. Gribbish. (Gadget wears purple too, but it's a different shade, more like lavender.)
• The Comedy Drop: "Kiwi's Big Adventure", Chip, in an effort to prove that Dale is engaging in a Malingering Romance Ploy, after Gadget confirms he shouldn't be able to swim, unceremoniously dumps his fellow chipmunk into a river. This proves unfortunate, as it draws the attention of a hungry crocodile.
• Comic-Book Adaptation:
  • An official series of 19 comic books, the first two of which retell "To the Rescue", and several stand-alone comics in various Disney publications, including quite a few in Disney Adventures and a compilation collection called "The Secret Casebook". Sadly, Disney has never reprinted any of these, so good luck finding 'em.
  • The Boom! Kids comic.
• Confidence Sabotage:
  • In "The Case of the Cola Cult", Gadget once fell apart emotionally after one of her inventions, the Gyro-Mobile, literally fell apart and the Rangers were almost killed as a result. She quits the Rangers as a result and joins the Cola Cult, which the Rangers were investigating. After the other Rangers try to rescue her, the episode's villain, the cult's second-in-command, reveals he had sabotaged the Gyro-Mobile, which ends up restoring her confidence and enabling her to defeat him.
  • In "The Luck Stops Here", a downtrodden inventor felt like he was having a bad luck streak due to being unable to get any of his recent inventions to work. It turns out that the inventor's cat, who was acting as his good luck charm, had been sabotaging the inventions in order to keep her livelihood. Gadget points out the impracticality of this, as at some point, the inventor's boss would get fed up with his failures and give him the pink slip, and she'd be out on the street with him. Upon realizing this point, the cat allows Gadget to help on the condition she leave once she helps get the inventions working.
• Conservation of Ninjutsu: Gadget vs. Bubbles' Ninja Mooks in "The Case of the Cola Cult". Granted, she is heavily armed and doesn't know Ninjutsu, but the principle is the same.
• Conspicuous Trenchcoat: Myron disguises in one in "The Case of the Cola Cult" when he comes to alert the Rangers.
• Construction Zone Calamity: In "Last Train to Cashville", Dale is sleep-deprived and sleepwalks right into a construction zone, narrowly avoiding death several times thanks to his friends chasing after him and some conveniently placed girders.
• Context-Sensitive Button: Many controls of the Ranger Plane and the Ranger Wing.
• Contrived Coincidence: The Rangers get involved in many cases simply due to being in the right place at the right time. For example, in "Battle of the Bulge", the Rangers are out jogging, and Chip and Dale stumble onto Fat Cat's scheme only because they happened to be on the same street where Fat Cat's goons were stealing a fruit basket from a truck. The only exceptions to this rule are usually when someone comes to Ranger Headquarters to seek their assistance, or the Rangers are eavesdropping on the police.
• Convection, Schmonvection: It's apparently not the slightest bit hot a pair of tongs' length above a barbecue grill ("Gadget Goes Hawaiian").
• Conveyor Belt o' Doom: Used in "Adventures in Squirrelsitting", "Pie in the Sky", "Love is a Splintered Thing", and "Mind Your Cheese and Q's".
• Cooking the Live Meal: In "Pie in the Sky", an owner of a pie factory aims to make chicken pot pies cheaply by tricking live migratory birds into flying into her factory where they are trapped, dropped into pie tins, covered in dough, and sent off to the ovens, with the birds still alive. Naturally the Rescue Rangers end up running afoul of this process at one point.
• Cool Plane:
  • Geegaw Hackwrench's "Screaming Eagle", especially after the modifications obviously applied by Gadget. Unlike the Ranger Plane and Ranger Wing, the Eagle also looks like a professionally-designed and built machine, whereas the others were built from scavenged parts.
  • The Ranger Plane pretty nicely sums up Gadget's inventions: Not necessarily pretty, but still effective. Made even more impressive by the fact it was built entirely from whatever trash and wreckage she was able to scrounge from the Screaming Eagle's wreck site.
  • The Ranger Wing shares some of the same scavenged aesthetic as the Ranger Plane, however is considerably more refined than the Ranger Plane, since Gadget had more time to plan it in advance. What makes it more impressive is that it's a tilt-rotor pusher, which is a remarkable feat of aeronautical engineering in of itself.^note Because of how tilt-rotor aircraft generate lift, such an aircraft using pusher rather than conventional tractor engines are extraordinarily complex, as the "lift" position requires the propellers to be rotating in the opposite direction of the "thrust" position.
  • This has to be taken literally with Nimnul's flying iceberg in "To the Rescue". It's so cool that it doesn't even melt on its several-thousand-mile flight.
• Crash Course Landing: The Rangers manage to pull off not a "simple" landing, but a freaking planetfall and touchdown with a NASA experimental space plane. After about five minutes in a simulator (and crashing twice there). And this might have happened before Gadget gave Dale his piloting lessons.
• Crash-Into Hello: Tammy and Bink's mother gets to know Chip and Dale when they crash into her place.
• Creator Provincialism: Ever noticed how much of Los Angeles and particularly Hollywood and Burbank appears in the Rangers' hometown, although neither are ever named? LAPD uniforms and car livery, Los Angeles city hall, Burbank Bob Hope Airport, Lankershim and Cahuenga are mentioned twice and so forth.
• Creator's Culture Carryover: While it is not explicitly stated that "The Pound of the Baskervilles" takes place in Britain, the setting is clearly meant to evoke a classic Campbell Country manor house, with its inhabitant using the title "lord" and the previous, late master having been a mystery author whose protagonist was a blatant Sherlock Holmes expy. Yet all the characters speak with American accents and the sheriff (which is not an LEO title in Britain) drives his truck on the right.
• Crossdresser:
  • Chip and Dale do this for "The Fat Cat Stomp". In fact, it can be seen in the full opening for the show.
  • Dale again as "Tootsie" in "S.S. Drainpipe". He's good enough to almost make Gadget jealous.
  • Zipper in "When You Fish Upon a Star". This leaves Monty as the only male Ranger who never crossdresses.
• Cult:
  • The Cola Cult in "The Case of the Cola Cult".
  • The Ranger Plane-worshipping kiwis in "Kiwi's Big Adventure".
• Cut Lex Luthor a Check: Done all over the place with the human villians, as might be expected in a show like this. Might be Hand Waved by things like Nimnul complaining that he tried to sell his invention of the week but he was rejected instead.
  • Chow Li, the Hong Konger villain from "Puffed Rangers", has a machine that can shrink or enlarge seemingly anything. Chow Li's big scheme? Shrink cars to the size of toys and hide them in cereal boxes, so that they can be smuggled into America without having to pay import taxes. The potential value for such an invention for legitimate shipping ought to have made him wealthy many times over.
  • Risky Beesness: Even if Irwina Allen was a lousy musician, her device can reliably control bees to a precise degree, and it's implied she also had a device for controlling ants. Instead of hijacking another band's concert, she could have sold this device and made millions, and then spent the rest of her life and her fortune trying to develop a music career.
• Cute Kitten: The cat-napped pet kitten Spunky in "Catteries Not Included" and Kookoo's feline friend Boots (based on All Ball, but not a tailless Manx) in "Gorilla My Dreams" are the only exceptions to Monterey Jack's (and mostly this show's) rule that Cats Are Mean.
• Cutting the Knot: When the Rangers get trapped in a ventilation shaft with the heater turned on, Gadget tries and fails to turn off the valve for the heater. Monty offers to help, and simply breaks the circuit, stopping the heater.
• Damsel in Distress: A standard plot element in Flash the Wonder Dog. Additionally, a number of the Rangers' cases have involved females in need of aid.
• Dark Fic: Many of the most famous Fan Fiction creations in the Rescue Rangers fandom fall into this category. Rhyme and Reason, Gadget In Chains, The Nowakverse stories including Under The Bridge, the Chip Noir Dale series, in fact, also Of Mice and Mayhem.
• Dead Hat Shot: Subverted. When the Rangers believe Chip has been killed in "Seer No Evil," all they can find of him is his hat, partly trapped underneath the treasure chest that fell on him. Fortunately, Chip managed to squeeze into a hole in the floorboards before it hit.
• Defrosting Ice Queen: Appropriately Queenie, after Zipper helps her save her swarm and she acknowledges his feelings for her.
• Deserted Island: In "Chipwrecked Shipmunks", the Rangers end up landing on one. It doesn't stay that deserted when the Pi-Rats reappear.
• Detail-Hogging Cover: Done with a lot of CDRR artwork.
• Diagonal Cut: Performed by Juice Lee in the pilot.
• Didn't Think This Through: At the end of "The Carpetsnaggers", Professor Nimnul has accidently picked up an entire mansion he was planning to rob due to the Rangers nailing down the rugs. He ultimately heads right back to his lair, resulting in the mansion falling on it when he cuts the power as well as leading the police straight to all the stolen loot.
• Digging to China: What the two pandas try to do in "An Elephant Never Suspects".
• Dinky Drivers:
  • In "To The Rescue, Part 2", Chip and Dale hijack a limousine when chasing another vehicle carrying Fat Cat.
  • In "Out to Launch" the Rangers are trying to land a Lawyer-Friendly Cameo of the Space Shuttle after a small meteor ruptures the oxygen line and knocks the pilots into unconsciousness.
• Disinherited Child: The episode "Pound of the Baskervilles" has elder brother Howard Bask residing in the manor house, while the younger brother Roger lives in a servants' shanty. At the time, their father was believed to have died intestate, which would normally apportion equal shares of the Bask estate. Howard, however, levers his elder brother status and bullish girth to accord himself the lion's share. When the Rescue Rangers discover the hidden will, it specifies that Roger should be the sole inheritor, leaving nothing to the oafish, pompous Howard.
• Disney Death:
  • In "To the Rescue, Part 2", the chest that Monty traveled in is thrown overboard by Fat Cat with Monty inside. For a moment, Chip and Dale believe that he drowned, but he resurfaces with a grudge on Fat Cat for sinking his home.
  • In "Seer No Evil", it looks like Chip is squashed by a falling chest. What makes this worse is that Cassandra predicted his death involving a chest, and all her other predictions for Chip have come true so far. Turns out that there's a hole in the floor through which Chip could save himself.
• Distracted by the Sexy:
  • This is played straight in "Adventures in Squirrelsitting"... by Chip and Dale in drag.
  • Works in "The S.S. Drainpipe"... with Dale in drag.
  • Gadget's famous "red dress" scene in the episode "Double O'Chipmunk".
  • In "When You Fish Upon a Star", a flock of fireflies is successfully distracted... by Zipper in drag.
• Distressed Dude: The show features almost as many males in distress and need of aid as it does females, including the Rangers themselves.
• Dodge by Braking: This is how Gadget avoids the hawks in "Three Men and a Booby".
• Dog Stereotype:
  • The Doberman and Frenchie in "To the Rescue, Part 4", for instance.
  • "Le Purrfect Crime" implies that all dogs in France (or at least in Paris) are poodles because Maltese de Sade has a city-wide countermeasure against them specifically.
• The Dragon: In "The Carpetsnaggers", Nimnul has one of his carpets act as his main henchman.
• Dreadful Musician: Irwina Allen and the Stingers. She is an exterminator gone bee-napper with a dreadful singing voice, and her band, the Stingers, are mind-controlled bees. Their music is unbearable for the audience who originally came to see the metal band Iron Goose. The latter, being locked away but able to hear her, somehow don't find her that dreadful.
• Drive-In Theater: The opening scene of "Good Times, Bat Times" takes place at a human drive-in. That is, the Rangers themselves fly in with the Ranger Wing.
• Driving Up a Wall: The Rangers field test a vehicle built by Gadget that's a monocycle with suction cups on its outer surface in "The Case of the Cola Cult." This vehicle can roll up walls, and even traverse a ceiling joist.
• Drowning Pit:
  • In "Shell Shocked", the Rangers are trapped inside a boot on a beach that is supposed to be flooded by the rising tide.
  • In "The Case of the Cola Cult", they end up in a soda can that is to be sunk into a bucket of soda.
• Dub Name Change: More often than not, apparently, and usually not even sparing the Rangers themselves. Check them here.
• Dumb Dinos: Zig-zagged. Steggy is normally an aversion of this trope, being intelligent and advanced, but he plays this trope straight when his body starts growing bigger while his brain stays small.
• Dumb Muscle: Subverted when Desiree DeLure treats Monterey Jack like this, only to find that he was smarter than she thought.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: "Catteries Not Included", which was the first made episode, has Monterey's first cheese attack where his moustache only puffs and not curl up like in later episodes.
• Edible Ammunition:
  • Squeezed-out bananas in "To the Rescue, Part 1".
    Chip and Dale: Banana! Banana! Banana!
  • Small Easter eggs on a catapult in "Three Men and a Booby".
  • RamDale's Decaffeinator machine gun from "Le Purrfect Crime" shoots coffee beans.
• Eek, a Mouse!!:
  • Usually Monty, especially when he attempts to steal cheese or anything cheese-flavored from the police officers. In this case, it's less "Eek! A Mouse!" and more "Get that mouse!" or "Hey, it's that mouse!"
  • Eek, a Mouse!! is played particularly straight in "The Carpetsnaggers", used by Monty to his advantage.
• Einstein Hair: Dr. Hibbleman from "It's a Bird, It's Insane, It's Dale!", Dr. Whitebread from "Double 'O Dale".
• Ejection Seat: Gadget built one into the Screaming Eagle.
• Embarrassing Nickname:
  • Monty strongly disapproves of his mother calling him "Cheezer".
  • Also, don't call Winifred "Freddie"!
• Endangered Soufflé: In "Flash the Wonder Dog", there is a scene in a TV studio where a television chef is saying: "Today on 'Looking at Cooking', we will be preparing ze soufflé. Remember: de soufflé must be done just right or it will be ze..." Cue Flash the Wonder Dog being chased by a crowd; passing through, he crashes into the chef's ingredients and they spill all over the latter... "...disaster!" In this case, though, the chef didn't even get to the stage of preparing the soufflé for the oven.
• Enemy Mine: In "Does Pavlov Ring A Bell", Chip and Dale set aside their feud over Gadget's heart in order to ensure that Sparky doesn't manage to beat both of them too it.
• Enfant Terrible: Buffy Ratskiwatski from "Out of Scale" is so absolutely that.
• Epic Fail: When Dale tries to hypnotize the mice in "The Pied Piper Power Play", he ends up hypnotizing himself.
• Epunymous Title: "Song of the Night 'n Dale".
• Eskimo Land: "A Chorus Crime" sends Nimnul to the Arctic, together with penguins trained in tap-dancing in order to break off an iceberg. That was years before Happy Feet.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Chip and Dale were once kidnapped by two thugs who have kidnapped and forced Professor Nimnul to use his shrink ray to shrink the city's monuments so their crime boss's daughter can have new toys. When told to shrink a museum, one of them was worried if there were people inside. They also congratulate their boss when he finally dissented his Spoiled Brat of a daughter after their arrest.
• Everybody Cries: Chip inadvertently causes this to happen in "Pie In The Sky" when he angrily refuses to help Midge reunite with her family in Capistrano (since he doesn't consider it a "big" case), which makes Midge cry. Gadget, Zipper and Monty, feeling bad for her and shocked by Chip's coldness, are soon crying along with her. Enter Dale, who has no idea what's going on and bursts into tears just so he doesn't feel left out, then asks "Why are we crying, anyhow?" Chip snarks that they're tears of joy because they're going to bring Midge to Capistrano.
• "Everybody Laughs" Ending: A few episodes end this way.
• Everyone Looks Sexier if French: Désirée D'Allure from "Love Is a Many-Splintered Thing".
• Everything's Louder with Bagpipes: The Bagpipe Express in "Good Times, Bat Times".
• Evil Redhead: Winifred the cleaning woman-turned-criminal witch from "Good Times, Bat Times" is a redhead, too. This gives her a striking resemblance to another witch named Winifred, namely the lead character in Hocus Pocus that came out three years later.
• Exact Words: Works with Prophecy Twist in "Seer No Evil." Cassandra never actually says Chip will die when she falls into her trance and gives her prediction. All she sees after the trunk falls is "darkness." It's the Rangers themselves who interpret this as death, which Cassandra acknowledges with a Throat-Slitting Gesture (by which time she was no longer in her trance). Sure enough, in the climax Chip survives by squeezing into a dark hole in the floorboards before the falling treasure chest the other Rangers are trapped in crushes him. Even the Throat-Slitting Gesture qualifies, as when the trunk falls on Chip, a villain who witnessed it does the gesture in response.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin: The title of Professor Nimnul's record album that he plans to use with his ultrasonic weapon in "Normie's Science Project":
  Nimnul: Here it is! "Music To Devastate the Globe By". In Stereo.
• Expository Theme Tune: It sums up everything you need to know about the Rangers, such as what they do and how nothing can stop them from helping someone in need.
• Express Lane Limit: In "Rest Home Rangers", Professor Nimnul tries to get a colossal stockpile of prunes out through an express lane, with predictable results (apart from Nimnul's retort: "I've only got one item - prunes!").
• Expy: All five of the Rescue Rangers are designed to represent a different 80s character:
  • Chip is Indiana Jones
  • Dale is Magnum, P.I.
  • Gadget is Jordan, from Real Genius
  • Monterey Jack is "Crocodile" Dundee
  • Zipper is Rin-Tin-Tin
• Eye Pop: Of all characters, Bubbles does this before falling into the soda pool.
  • Chip and Dale also do it when Su Lin points a musket at them.
• Fake Band: The obviously British Hair Metal band Iron Goose in "Risky Beesness". Dale is a big fan of theirs (says a lot about his taste in music), and since this is Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers, they fall victim to a crime that the Rangers have to solve.
• Fake-Out Make-Out: Lahwhinie with Dale (once) and Chip (twice) in "Gadget Goes Hawaiian", Gadget in disguise with Dale in "Double 'O Chipmunk".
• Fake Rabies: In the pilot arc, Fat Cat gets Plato out of the way at one point by spraying his mouth with whipped cream and stuffing a visitor's lapdog into the middle of the mess.
• Family-Unfriendly Violence: In "It's a Bird, It's Insane, It's Dale!", a crook shoots bullets directly at Dale, who's cowering in fear. It gets downplayed, as the bullets bounce off of Dale without harming him due to his newfound elastic powers.
• Fan Disservice: Monty totally naked in the mini-bath. Chip and Dale in drag varies between this and Fanservice.
• Fan Verse: Most Fan Fic writers create their own universe with whole series of stories, to which sometimes stories are added by other writers, for example The Nowakverse by John Nowak or the Chip Noir Dale's Rescue Rangers universe by Matt Plotecher.
• Fan Web Comics: There are several creations that may count as Fan Web Comics. None of them are comic strips published regularly, though.
  • Chris Fischer's Of Mice and Mayhem was published all at once when the author gave the link to the story; besides, it's a graphic novel rather than a comic strip.
  • There are several more graphic novels which are works in progress and updated very irregularly; the latter also applies to the Sprite Comic Ranger Days.
  • Cheer Up, Gadget.
  • Angry Murine Catharsis, the first comic to feature John Nowak's famous original character Widget Hackwrench.
• Fear Is the Appropriate Response: In "Puffed Rangers", Monty wants to avoid travelling through Cat Street at all costs, even though the other Rangers don't seem to be all that scared and ignore Monty's anxiety. Turns out that Cat Street is full of cats who are eager to hunt down any small enough creature that enters their territory. It's not just the name of the street that scares Monty; he nearly got killed there years ago.
• Femme Fatale: Désirée D'Allure is Monterey Jack's ex-fiancée whom he left for a cheese truck. She eventually shows up in the Rangers' hometown, already with criminal intentions together with her new partner Erol, and while she is at it, she tries to lure Monty back to her and kill him out of revenge.
• Fiery Redhead: Queenie wants her hive back, period. And she lets nothing get in her way as she takes on the case with the Rangers, royalty or not.
• Fishbowl Helmet: In episode "Out to Launch", Gadget constructs a spacesuit from a rubber glove and a glass jar. Plausible, in that Gadget spent less than a minute outside a pressurized spacecraft. Less so in that the glove is filled with air, thus due to Boyle's Law should have expanded due to the pressure differential until the glove failed and burst.^note This is the same reason you should exhale if you're exposed to vacuum.
• Five-Episode Pilot: The show's pilot "To the Rescue" is a five-parter, recut from a now probably lost film. It is unusual, however, in that it aired as the episodes 41 through 45 in the second season.
• Flight: "Kiwi's Big Adventure" takes place in New Zealand where the Ranger Plane ends up with a tribe of kiwis. They worship it as a deity that shall give back the flightless birds the ability to fly.
• Flying Broomstick: It's a vacuum cleaner that Winifred rides in "Good Times, Bat Times", but she's a cleaning woman from around 1990 after all.
• Flying Carpet: Nimnul makes carpets with hidden, remote-controllable hover drives in "The Carpetsnaggers" in order to steal valuables down to entire safes out of the mansions of rich people to whom he sold the carpets. They're powerful enough that when the Rangers nail one to the floor, it rips the entire house out of the ground.
• Fluffy the Terrible: The Big Bad from "The Case of the Cola Cult" is a tall, muscular mouse and commander over an army of ninja mice. His name is Bubbles. Then again, he is one of the head figures of a soda-based cult.
• Foreshadowing: When Sparky is having Buzz run the maze in "Does Pavlov Ring A Bell?", notice that the "go" sound sounds very similar to a bank alarm. Almost like the one that went off in the beginning of the episode when the robot, which additionally happens to bare a heavy psychical resemblance to Buzz, appeared in the bank...
• Fortune Teller: Cassandra. She's a Gypsy all right, and a light bulb serves as her crystal ball.
• Four-Fingered Hands: Most characters, but a few have five-fingered hands. This is used to comedic effect in "The Pied Piper Power Play" when Chip has to use both hands to indicate the number five.
• Four-Temperament Ensemble: Chip is choleric, Dale is phlegmatic, Gadget is melancholic, Monty is sanguine.
• Friendly Local Chinatown: "To the Rescue, Part 2", and "Adventures in Squirrelsitting".
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: In "Catteries Not Included", Monterey Jack has realistic mouse ears for a splitsecond.
• Funetik Aksent: Monterey Jack to a lesser extent in the official comics and to the extreme in Fan Fic.
• Furry Female Mane: Most of the anthropomorphic female cast actually, including Gadget, Lahwhinie (naturally), Tammy, Bink, their mother, Cassandra (an insect), Queenie (another insect), Camembert Kate, Désirée D'Allure, and so forth. Foxglove and Ming-Ting are comparatively rare exceptions.
• Furry Reminder:
  • Anthropomorphic as the Rangers may be, the rodents among them can still occasionally be seen scampering on all fours, usually if they want to cover a great distance in a hurry, as they are able to run faster that way.
  • Fat Cat shows quite a number of typical feline behavioral traits in "To the Rescue" when he is still Klordane's pet. However, we don't even see him on his four paws in any of the other episodes.
  • Cassandra, the Gypsy moth in "Seer No Evil", flies around the light bulb that serves as her crystal ball much like a real moth would. And this happens in a show in which she replaces the bulb hanging down from the ceiling herself moments earlier.
  • In episode "A Lean on the Property" Camembert Kate gnaws the rope with her teeth like a real mouse.

Tropes G to L

• Garnishing the Story: The Pi-Rats don't really fit into the Rangers' era and setting, do they?
• Gasp!: Because you can't have Gadget do a Wild Take.
• Gaslighting: In "Song of the Night'N Dale", Emperor Dim Sum's scheming sister does this to her brother with the aid of a clockwork toy bird that emits hallucinogenic gas, causing him to think he's going insane. Dale gets a whiff as well, prompting the others to fear that he's gone crazy as well, until they discover her evil plan.
• Gay Paree:
  • "Le Purrfect Crime" is largely set in Paris, with the Rangers having to deal with Fat Cat's cousin Maltese de Sade.
  • The Flashback in "Love Is a Many Splintered Thing".
• Gelatinous Encasement: The 5 Parter features a giant gelatin mold being used to create an earthquake and rob a bank. Monty throws Fat Cat into the mold, causing it to shake and destabilize.
• Genie in a Bottle: "A Lad in a Lamp" has an oriental genie who tricks Monterey Jack into taking his place. For a change, this goes without intentionally backfiring wishes, but the Rangers have to free their friend and get the original genie back into the lamp. Worse yet, Fat Cat gets his greedy paws on the lamp with Monty inside.
• Geographic Flexibility: What the heck is the Chrysler Building ("The Carpetsnaggers"), the World Trade Center ("Robocat"), the Bob Hope Airport ("To the Rescue"), the Los Angeles Town Hall ("To the Rescue"), and LAPD police uniforms doing in one and the same city? This is probably what Tad Stones meant with a "West Coast city with an East Coast flair", only that the city can impossibly be located on the East Coast when the moon rises above the sea.
• Giant Animal Worship: In "Zipper Come Home", Zipper becomes king of a tribe of insects, who try to sacrifice him to a frog called The Great Ribbit.
• Giant Enemy Crab: The lobsters in "Gadget Goes Hawaiian" are indeed giants in comparison to mice.
• Giant Spider: The tarantula baddie Lou is large if compared with the Rangers, too. Not that he's really scary, though, as he's quite the idiot.
• The Glomp: Chip is on the receiving end of a platonic one from Dale in "Seer No Evil," after he survives Cassandra's prediction of his death. Gadget has given him one once or twice, as well, with the Ship Tease played up for all it's worth.
• Glowing Eyes of Doom: The sphinx demon in "Throw Mummy From the Train".
• Go-Go Enslavement: In "A Case of Stage Blight", after the team is captured by Sewernose, he dresses them up like Wild West people, ties strings on them like marionettes, and puts on a dinner theater with them before choosing to eat them.
• Go Mad from the Revelation: Happens to the spy at the end of "Double O'Chipmunk" when he realizes he's been defeated by a group of rodents.
• Good is Not Nice: The Rangers tend to completely humiliate the villains before getting them carted off. In "Dirty Diapers", Gadget notices this and tries to encourage non-violent means to resolving crimes since they're supposed to be the good guys. After a humiliating defeat, Gadget finally decides to hell with non-violent solutions and embraces this trope fully.
• A Good Name for a Rock Band: Irweena and the Stingers. In fact, also Iron Goose.
• GPS Evidence: Subverted in "It's a Bird, It's Insane, It's Dale!" in how Gadget finds where Seymour's hiding the monuments he's stealing. She takes a flyer from his travel agency, analyzes it chemically, and then tells the Rangers the exact address... which she read on the flyer.
• G-Rated Drug and I Can't Believe It's Not Heroin!: The episode "Mind Your Cheese and Q's" where Monterey Jack tries to give up his cheese addiction is a perfect example of both of these. Actually, Monty's cheese addiction in general counts.
• Gratuitous Ninja: Bubbles' Mooks in "The Case of the Cola Cult" just had to be Ninja mice so that Gadget had some worthy opponents to fight.
• Gravity Is a Harsh Mistress: Lots of instances. The most famous example would be Dale and Foxglove's first scene together in "Good Times, Bat Times".
• Gray Rain of Depression: In "The Case of the Cola Cult", it rains as Gadget sadly wanders through alleys and stares at her reflection in the puddles, after "quitting" the Rescue Rangers as a result of losing confidence in her inventions.
• Greasy Spoon: Ma's Diner in "Short Order Crooks" is a diner next to a bank from where two crooks try to dig into the bank's basement. However, it's also opposite a police station and frequented by a lot of people in uniform. The fact that Ma lets the likes of Spud and Fry work in her kitchen shows that she isn't too picky about that.
• Guilt by Association Gag: Professor Nimnul is actually innocent of the main conflict in "Out Of Scale"; Ignatz Ratskiwatski has him kidnapped and his shrink ray stolen for his own ends. At the end of the episode, the police arrest Nimnul alongside Ratskiwatski.
• Guns Are Worthless: The police officers and many human criminals carry guns. In the rare instances where guns are actually fired, their targets are either impervious to bullets, or the bullets miss their mark.
• Hair Metal: Iron Goose from "Risky Beesness" take this to an extreme with their colorful manes. They're kind of Iron Maiden meets Mötley Crüe.
• Hair Reboot: Queenie can do that within a second or so. Unless the plot requires otherwise.
• Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow: Sort of parodied and quoted by Winifred when she steals the police chief's wig with her flying hoover.
• Half-Dressed Cartoon Animal: The male part of the cast and many incidental non-human characters (Foxglove is one of the only female characters, regular or otherwise, to be completely unclothed). Lampshaded in "A Fly in the Ointment" when Gadget and Dale switch bodies and Gadget dons a small paper cup to cover her (that is, Dale's) lower half.^note Robot Chicken would satirize this in a skit where Gadget tries to break this Double Standard by going bottomless. Cue every other member of the team freaking out at the sight of her naked bottom half and suddenly retreating to his respective room.
• Handy Remote Control: Gadget's remote control for the Gyrotank in "The Case of the Cola Cult".
• Harmless Villain: The Fleeblebroxians, one-shot villains from "Dale Beside Himself" were, compared to other villains, rather klutzy and had no grand plan, their only real villainy, if it could be considered that was, Shapeshifting, and they were easily defeated via Bluff the Impostor and The Tell revealing that the identical Dale was one of them (it involved an alien dish, which was squicky to the protagonists, a sort of marine creature that's not on Earth). They could have been Lethal Joke Villains but were too incompetent to pull off any villainous scheme, and as such were never seen or mentioned again.
• Have a Gay Old Time: One episode is called "Three Men and a Booby". The "booby" in this case is a booby bird.
• Heart Symbol:
  • That one scene on the Headquarters platform in "Adventures in Squirrelsitting".
  • At the end of "Risky Beesness", Queenie sends a few of her bees to make a double Heart Symbol for Zipper.
• Hellhound: MacDuff's disguise, type Guardian.
• High-Speed Train Reroute: This is done to foil Klordane's escape at the end of "To the Rescue". As if the scene wasn't Just Train Wrong enough, the Rangers operate a switch on the underground track by putting a screw nut on Dale's head and throwing him head first at the switch signal where he even leaves a dent. Apparently, the switch operates so lightly that Queenie could have pulled the lever.
• Hollywood Acid: In a nod towards the proven corrosiveness of drinks like Coca-Cola, "The Case of the Cola Cult" seems to imply that Coo-Koo Cola can dissolve anything except for its container within less than a minute if used in large enough quantities. The members of the Cola Cult believe they've "fizzed away" their worldly possessions prior to starting a new life with the Cola Cult. Gadget proves them otherwise: It was a ruse set up by Bubbles to get their riches into his greedy fingers.
• Honor Before Reason: In "Shell Shocked" the Rangers make Dale the leader for the day, as they expect him to not be in charge of anything except their beach vacation. However, they stumble upon an actual case and still let Dale be in charge of it per the original agreement, even when his obviously lackluster plan to infiltrate Fat Cat's hideout lands them in a literal death trap. They then look at Dale to come up with a way out of it until he finally admits that he's out of his depth and hands the reins back to Chip.
• Hula and Luaus: "Gadget Goes Hawaiian", only little hula, but a big luau scene and tourists and surfing and volcanoes. Justified in that the episode takes place behind a hotel, and the volcano is fake, a deliberate tourist attraction.
• Humanity Ensues: When Harry the wolf is turned into a human and Nimnul almost pulls a Wolf Man in "A Wolf in Cheap Clothing".
• Human Ladder: Although not done with humans but animals instead, this is the subject of merchandise such as the Electric Tiki statue. Of course, it also appears in the show on several occasions, for example, in "Fake Me to Your Leader" when the Rangers sans Zipper have to press an elevator button.
• Hypno Fool:
  • Everyone exposed to the hypnosis device in "Parental Discretion Retired" believes they're chicken. It was originally targeted at sturgeons so that they lay eggs as often as chicken.
  • Queenie's swarm in "Risky Beesness".
  • The jungle animals and the Rangers (sans Dale) in "Chocolate Chips". Dale refers to them as zombies.
  • All the mice in town (including Monty and Gadget) in "The Pied Piper Power Play". Dale also accidentally hypnotizes himself.
• If My Calculations Are Correct: Said by both Dale and Gadget in "The S.S. Drainpipe". It's Gadget's calculations that turn out to be correct.
• Imperial China: Lives on in a valley in the Himalaya which has even got its own emperor ("Song of the Night 'n Dale").
• Informed Species:
  • Zipper is supposed to be a housefly, but the only indications of this is that he has wings and makes buzzing sounds.
  • In "Puffed Rangers", Monterey Jack goes to a Pekinese restaurant to drown his sorrows. The bartender and patrons there don't look like Pekinese dogs, but more like Shih Tzus.
• Ink-Suit Actor:
  • "Gadget Goes Hawaiian" stars Gidget herself (well, invokedone of them) Deborah Walley as Lahwhinie, who bears more than a passing resemblance to Walley's character in Gidget Goes Hawaiian, which the episode's title is a pun on.
  • Dev Ross stars as herself in a mini cameo as an aerobics trainer in "Battle of the Bulge".
• Insectoid Aliens: Nimnul sells gigantic pill bugs as just that in "Fake Me to Your Leader". Little does he know that the very same city is visited twice by actual aliens, none of whom are insectoid, by the way (Steggy is a dinosaur, and the Fleeblebroxians are shapeshifters that vaguely resemble amphibians).
• Insect Queen: Queenie is a cartoon queen bee of a happy hive in the episode "Risky Beesness", complete with a crown on her head. Her subjects are drawn away by the hypnotic music of Irwina Allen, an entomologist who would turn the worker bees into her personal mindless minions. Queenie rules her hive by consensus, fulfilling this trope, while Irwina is a usurper befitting the Hive Queen trope.
• Insistent Terminology:
  • "Chipmunks!" whenever someone refers to Chip and Dale as squirrels.
  • Winifred does NOT want to be called "Freddie".
• Instant A.I.: Just Add Water!: "Robocat". The titular robot even has different personalities according to what game cartridge is inserted. Yes, its AI runs on arcade game code. That said, it's a good advice to keep Tom away from water.
• Instant Ice: Just Add Cold!: For example, Nimnul's weather machine works that way. It certainly doesn't carry enough water to produce that much ice.
• Interspecies Friendship: The Rangers themselves: two chipmunks, two mice, and a fly. Gadget has one with a human inventor in "The Luck Stops Here".
• Interspecies Romance: All over the place:
  • Chip and Dale (chipmunks) are both attracted to Gadget (a mouse), who shows varying degrees of interest in them as well.
  • Dale and Foxglove - A chipmunk and a bat.
  • Zipper and Queenie - A housefly and a bee.
  • Tammy hearts Chipper - A squirrel and a chipmunk.
• Involuntary Shapeshifting: At least when Winifred turns Dale into a frog in "Good Times, Bat Times".
• It's Always Mardi Gras in New Orleans: "When Mice Were Men" has the Rangers travel to Spain, or "Tramplonia", to be more precise. And what do you know, it's time for the Running of the Bulls.
• It's Always Spring: Unless stated otherwise or deliberately manipulated by Norton Nimnul, for example in "Weather or Not".
• Jerkass Genie:
  • The genie in "A Lad In a Lamp" tricks Monterey into taking his place, thereby being able to leave the lamp. He doesn't even get to the point of lots of backfiring wish fulfillments.
  • It could be argued that Monterey then filled this role when he was captured by Fat Cat and his minions, as he then managed to trick the minions into making wishes that would benefit the other Rescue Rangers rather than Fat Cat; he was just being a Jerkass in favour of the good guys.
• Jerkass Has a Point:
  • Captain Finn from "A Creep in the Deep" wants to flood cities around the world. While he has no right to do this, Finn's reasoning is that he wants to avenge the countless sea creatures that humans have purposely hunted and eaten.
  • Averted with the sea creatures that humans have put in captivity. Finn wants to liberate them, but of the ones the Rangers encounter, two pet store goldfish state that they're content living in an aquarium, while a killer whale at an oceanarium doesn't want to leave, as he enjoys performing for humans.
• Just a Stupid Accent: Applies to just about every foreign character in the show. Most prominently Monterey Jack.
• Kent Brockman News: Stan Blather.
  Stan: In a tragic development, the space plane is plunging directly toward the control tower. Wait a minute. I'm in the control tower! WAAAUGH!
• "King Kong" Climb:
  • Performed by Kookoo in "Gorilla My Dreams".
  • An enlarged Zipper does this with Professor Nimnul in "Fake Me to Your Leader".
• Kitchen Chase: An episode has a chase scene in a TV studio - they bump into a TV show chef, just as he is in the middle of explaining how much care today's dish requires.
• Knight Templar: The fish captain and his crew of marine life steal a military submarine to use to wipe out humanity in revenge for being used as a food source as well as to make fish kind the dominant species.
• Lampshade Hanging: Happens in "A Creep in the Deep". After Gadget pulls out a larger-than-herself glass cutter seemingly out of nowhere:
  Monty: Do you always carry a glass cutter around with 'ya?
  Gadget: No. Just when I want to cut glass.
  • Donald Drake bursts out laughing when Aldrin Klordane first unveils his 'earthquake via giant gelatin mold' plan.
  • In "Flash the Wonder Dog" Monterey Jack can't believe that the humans can't see that the disguised Fat Cat isn't Flash.
• Land Down Under: Monty (and his parents) come from Australia.
• Land of Dragons: Main location of "Song of the Night 'n Dale" and hinted at in the first few minutes of "Adventures in Squirrelsitting".
• La Résistance: Parodied with The Pound Underground in the pilot. The leader is a French poodle, aptly named Frenchie, who's a self-proclaimed freedom fighter. By his side is his trusty friend, a small Spanish dog named K. Sera. Mind you, "freedom" refers to freedom from the dog pound, and "underground" refers to the tunnel K. Sera is digging.
• Left Hanging: While the episodic nature of the series naturally leads to many plot points being ignored at each episode's conclusion, "Good Times, Bat Times" especially leads to this. Unlike most One-Shot Character appearances — especially when dealing with love interests for Chip, Dale, or Gadget — Foxglove's presence was not resolved by the end of the episode, and the ending implied she would be staying around. This could have substantially altered the character dynamics, and came in an episode in which Dale gets a new love interest, while Chip made several attempts (inadvertently interrupted by Dale) to openly tell Gadget how he felt. However Foxglove made no further appearances and went unmentioned for the rest of the show's run, and Chip never does spit it out. It has become popular Fanon to interpret this as the true finale of the series for this reason, and much fanfiction is built on that premise.
• Limited Wardrobe: This applies to pretty much every recurring character in the show. Actually makes sense if you think about how many chipmunk-sized shirts could be cut out of one human-sized one.
• Living Dinosaurs: Steggy, whose appearance in the late 20th century is justified in that he's an alien dinosaur from another planet.
• A Lizard Named "Liz":
  • Chip the chipmunk, obviously.
  • Elliott the elephant from "An Elephant Never Suspects".
• Loophole Abuse: In "Good Times, Bat Times" Foxglove gets the final ingredient for Winifred on the condition that she not hurt Dale. Winifred does not hurt Dale; she turns Dale into a frog and turns him over to her other familiars so they can eat him.
• Love Floats: Happens to Chip after he gets a big smooch from Lahwhinie (who's posing as Gadget) in "Gadget Goes Hawaiian".
• Love Triangle:
  • Chip/Gadget/Dale. Then again, there is also the Love Triangle Tammy/Chip/Gadget, and to a lesser extent Foxglove/Dale/Gadget. Add Sparky, whom Gadget admires a bit too much, making both Chip and Dale jealous, and you've got a borderline Love Dodecahedron.
  • Technically speaking, Cassandra/Zipper/Queenie even though the gypsy moth and the queen bee never meet.
  • Monty/Désirée/Errol. The latter doesn't even see Monty as competition, and Désirée uses Monty's jealousy to her advantage.
• Luke Nounverber: The Clutchcoin family.

Tropes M to R

• Mad Scientist: Irweena from "Risky Beesness". What do you do if you want to sing in a band, but you can't get one? You invent a bee mind control device and make an almost entire beehive your band.
• Magic Music: What Irweena Allen uses on Queenie's bees in "Risky Beesness". Also, what Queenie sings to save her bees in the same episode.
• Magic Pants:
  • Zipper in "Fake Me to Your Leader".
  • All the Rangers in "Puffed Rangers".
• Malingering Romance Ploy: Dale hurts his foot kicking the Ranger Plane, and spends the rest of the episode playing it up because Gadget is doting on him. Monterrey notes that a pretty face could drive a person to do strange things. When Chip proves to Gadget that Dale is faking, she is absolutely livid (which, if other examples of her getting mad are any indication, would not have ended well for Dale, had the Rangers not been captured by the Kiwis). After he legitimately breaks his foot kicking a crocodile, Gadget tells him that it's no fun being truly injured.
• Man of a Thousand Voices:
  • Corey Burton, Peter Cullen, Rob Paulsen, and most of all, Jim Cummings.
  • Tress MacNeille. For starters, she voiced both Chip and Gadget.
• McNinja: Bubbles' team of henchmen in "The Case of the Cola Cult" are all ninjas for some inexplicable reason.
• Mechanical Animals: "Robocat" has peculiar inventor Ignatz Stanislavsky build a robot cat out of household junk. He sets the robot loose in his workshop, whereupon it targets the Rescue Rangers. Monterrey Jack terms this feline mechanism a "clockwork kitty."
• Meet Cute: Dale meets Foxy for the first time when she catches him as he falls in "Good Times, Bat Times". This is cute already, but it gets even cuter when he wonders how she can carry him, she remembers she can't, and they both fall into a dumpster — while hugging.
• Message Board: The biggest and oldest one is the Acorn Cafe; it is here where the Fandom VIPs meet. The Chip 'n Dale (both classic and Rescue Rangers) fan portal Chip 'n' Dale Online has its own large forum.
• Message in a Bottle: All Hands tries to contact Captain Finn this way in "A Creep in the Deep".
• Mickey Mousing: Not often used, due to use of stock music. However, a rare instance was when "La Marseillaise" plays to represent "The Pound Underground", since Frenchie spoke with a French accent. Also, "Asleep in the Deep" ("Loudly, the bell in the old tower ring...") is usually heard if water is seen.
• Midair Bobbing:
  • If a character or a contraption can fly, it can hover in mid-air (exceptions: Cruiser and Bruiser, the Screaming Eagle.) If it does so, it almost always bobs up and down. Justified mostly in the case of the Ranger Plane which is constantly propelled up and down by its wings and actually carried by a gas balloon. Not justified for the Ranger Wing which is held aloft by propellers and Zipper whose wings are too fast for bobbing.
  • Among the few exceptions is the Bagpipe Express which should technically bob, too, as it is kept afloat by pumping air into a bagpipe with a bellows. Its battle opponent, Winifred's hoover, doesn't bob either, probably because it's magical. Foxglove the bat does bob, however.
• Midair Repair: Overdone by Gadget in "Bearing Up Baby" when she rebuilds the plumbing of an RV into a sort of rigid lanyard to rescue it after it falls from a cliff. Within seconds.
• Mind Control:
  • Heinrich von Sugarbottom uses trained mosquitos to drug jungle animals (and the Rangers except for Dale) into zombie-like slaves in "Chocolate Chips".
  • Irweena Allen uses a portable electronic device that hypnotizes bees with sounds in "Risky Beesness". That said, technically speaking, what Queenie does when she sings to her hive isn't that much different.
  • Fat Cat has a chicken-shaped hypnosis spiral in "Parental Discretion Retired" that he uses to make sturgeons lay eggs like chicken and then make a fortune with the caviar. It even works on Dale, and later on Fat Cat's goons as well.
  • Professor Nimnul has a tone generator with a high-pitched sound in "The Pied Piper Power Play" that hypnotizes mice (including Gadget and Monty) into running on exercises wheels to produce electricity.
• Minor Crime Reveals Major Plot: Many, if not all, of the cases the Rangers go on begin this way. This even becomes a plot point: in "Pie in the Sky" Chip is frustrated by how minor all their cases have been, leading to a Jerkass Ball moment when the starling Midge asks the Rangers to help her get to Capistrano. And then the case turns out to be much more sinister than he anticipated.
• Misplaced Wildlife: The crocodile from Peter Pan in New Zealand in "Kiwi's Big Adventure".
• Mistaken for Insane: During the episode "Weather or Not", Monterey Jack encounters Professor Nimnul using a weather machine to commit crimes. However, every time he tries to show the other Rangers, there is nothing there, causing them to think that Monty has lost it until he leads them right to the bank Nimnul is robbing.
• Missing Child: Mentioned by Gadget in "Bearing Up Baby." She reminds Humphrey the Bear that baby Jeremy has a human mother who must be scared witless by his disappearance, in order to convince him to return him. It's also played straight in the same episode when the humans automatically assume Humphrey intends to harm the child.
• Mixed Animal Species Team: The main group are a Five-Man Band of heroes composed of two chipmunks, namely Chip The Leader and Dale The Lancer; two mice, namely Monterey Jack The Big Guy and Gadget Hackwrench The Smart Girl, and one housefly, Zipper The Heart, who's also their primary intelligence gatherer. Their arch-nemesis is Fat Cat, whose cronies are Mole (a mole), Wart (a lizard), Snout (a rat) and Mepps (a sickly cat).
• The "Mom" Voice: Gadget once pulls out the "Mom" Voice to convince Humphrey the Bear to return a lost child to his own family by reminding him how worried and scared his family must be, and then comparing it to how Humphrey's own mother would feel if it were him missing. When the others ask how she did it, she Lampshades her use of the "Mom" voice by saying:
  Gadget: I probably just remind him of his mother.
• Moment Killer: Dale in "Good Times, Bat Times" when Chip tries to express his feelings to Gadget. Twice. Early in the episode the Rangers are sitting in the Ranger Wing at the Drive-In Theater, and Dale pops a bubblegum bubble while Chip is trying to talk to her. Then near the end when the Rangers are back at the Headquarters, and Dale picks Chip up with his new hang glider right as he's about to tell her how he feels (which crashes when Foxglove reminds him it can't support two passengers).
• Monster of the Week: Aside from Fat Cat, Professor Nimnul, and Aldrin Klordane who is limited to the Five-Episode Pilot, there are very few recurring villains. Two examples of the show's one-shot antagonists are eccentric egg collector Mr. Dumpty from "Three Men and a Booby" and a con man named Seymour from the episode "It's a Bird, It's Insane, It's Dale".
• Monumental Theft: Chip and Dale were once kidnapped by two thugs who have kidnapped and forced Professor Nimnul to use his shrink ray to shrink the city's monuments so their crime boss's daughter can have new toys.
• More Dakka: The shoot-out between Winifred's flying hoover and the Bagpipe Express in "Good Times, Bat Times" once the 'munks go full auto.
• Mouse World: Explored in the show, but used to a much higher extent in Fan Fic.
• The Movie:
  • Actually planned, but nixed after DuckTales the Movie: Treasure of the Lost Lamp bombed. Although the story is believed to have been written, nothing is known about it among the fans.
  • A half-live action, half-CGI movie, originally planned for the second half of the 2010s, was announced to be a Disney+ exclusive in 2020.
• Mummy: Subverted in "Throw Mummy from the Train", Hiram is on the Rangers' side.
• Mundane Fantastic: Apart from the rodent societies we have Gnomes, malevolent spirits and aliens on vacation. Yet, nobody (beside Dale) seems to make much fuss about them. Of course the humans are always oblivious to everything.
• My Little Panzer: In "Puffed Rangers", firearms are shrunk and smuggled as action toy accessories while remaining in full working condition. Gadget manages to blast a large part out of the rear door of a van with a toy-sized bazooka.
• My Nayme Is: Whatever you expect the name of Gadget's Evil Twin in "Gadget Goes Hawaiian" to be spelled like, chances are good it's really spelled differently. The first officially established canonical spelling is Lahwhinie, by the way, but even this isn't accepted by everyone because it isn't even the only "official" spelling — there are two more "official" spellings from different sources. This has led to the Rangerphiles coming up with even more spellings.
• Mythology Gag:
  • In "To the Rescue", the detective and his dog are named Donald Drake and Plato, obviously a nod to Chip 'n Dale's old co-stars Donald Duck and Pluto; also in that episode, the villain's thug mistakes Dale for his gun, reusing a gag from the 1950s short "The Lone Chipmunks".
  • In another episode, the Rangers are going to a movie, and Dale hopes to see some cartoons before the main feature:
    Dale: I hope they show the one with the big dumb duck!
  • Humphrey the Bear in "Bearing Up Baby". Louie the Mountain Lion appears in the same episode.
  • The friendly rivalry over between Chip and Dale over Gadget is also a nod to the classic cartoon "Two Chips and a Miss", with Gadget replacing Clarice.
  • One episode ("Out of Scale") shares a title with a classic cartoon, and borrows a few plot elements from it as well, such as a toy train set and the 'munks living in a toy house.
  • Occasionally, when Chip 'n Dale argue, their speech becomes incomprehensible, similar to how they sounded in the original shorts.
• Name and Name: Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers.
• The Napoleon: Baby Thaddeus from the episode "Dirty Rotten Diapers", someone Gadget was all too pleased to rough up at the end of the episode.
• Nested Mouths: A scene from an obvious Alien parody which takes Nested Mouths up to three. The alien in question has three mouths nested in one another, the last one is just big enough to pinch the Ripley look-alike's nose.
• Never Say "Die":
  • Played so straight that some fans believe Geegaw Hackwrench is still alive because he couldn't be undoubtedly pronounced dead.
  • Zigzagged in other instances. In those same episodes, Aldrin Klordane is explicitly presumed dead by the police (he's still alive).
  • This also comes into effect in "Seer No Evil," combined with Exact Words and Prophecy Twist. Cassandra never actually says Chip will die when she's in her predictive trance. All she says is the falling trunk is followed by darkness. It's the Rangers themselves (who also never actually say he will die) who come to that conclusion, which Cassandra acknowledges with a Throat-Slitting Gesture...after she's left her trance. In the climax, Chip dodges a falling treasure chest by ducking into a dark hole in the floorboards.
  • The trope is completely averted in the French dub, in particular in "Seer No Evil". Words like "die", "kill" and "murdered" are all over the place.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
  • Chip literally does this to Tammy's heart when he yells at her in "Adventures In Squirrelsitting" causing her and her sister Bink to try to retrieve the Maltese Mouse from Fat Cat by themselves.
  • Played for Laughs in "Chipwrecked Shipmunks", Chip and Gadget are held in a net as their pi-rat captors decide how to kill them. Make them walk the plank (that's already been done and is boring)? Keelhaul them (it's been newly painted, so no go)? Dress them up as bunnies and dip them in chocolate (that kind of death isn't "pirate-y enough)? Gadget then offers they could bury them in the sand and wait for the tide to come in, much to Chip's shock. The captain and his crew happily accept the suggestion while Chip gets angry at Gadget for giving them the idea. She realized her error too late and said she couldn't help taking up a challenge.
• Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: Steggy once more; a super-intelligent, high-tech-equipped dinosaur from outer space meets crimefighting rodents, one of whom is an Australian bush fighter.
• Nobody Here but Us Statues: Chip and Dale in "Song of the Night 'n Dale", Steggy in "Prehysterical Pet".
• No Antagonist: The are a few episodes that do not have anyone either commiting crimes or deliberately working against the Rangers.
  • "Bearing Up Baby": Hubert is a Jerkass, and he and the other hunters do threaten to shoot Humphrey. However, if you saw a wild bear carrying your two-year old son in his arms, wouldn't you be terrified? They later forgive Humphrey after he saves Jeremy, anyway. There is a hostile mountain lion that appears briefly, but it comes off as being more of a feral creature than one acting out of malice.
  • "Out to Launch": Anything that went wrong in this episode was either the result of an accident or bad luck.
  • "An Elephant Never Suspects": The pandas only stole the other animals' peanuts to power their digging machine, as they were desparate to return home to China.
  • "Prehysterical Pet": Steggy's egg/ship gets seized by the millitary, but they don't know what it really is and just wanted to study it.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: The best example may be the TV news anchorman Stan Blather, named after Dan Rather but modeled after Walter Cronkite.
  • Jim Cummings once again does his Andy Devine impression for Barnacle Bill the Barnacle in "A Creep in the Deep".
• Non-Indicative Name: The focus of the Cola Cult, Coo-Koo Cola, appears to be a line of fruit-flavored beverages and does not seem to sell a cola variety. Although "Cola" is probably used in place of "Soda".
• Non-Mammal Mammaries: Queenie has a pretty ample bust for a bee.
• Non-Fatal Explosions:
  • The blowing up of the kitchen door in "Zipper Come Home" is only one example.
  • The sheer amount of TNT that Gadget uses to launch her spaceship probably takes the cake. It's a wonder that the ship stays in one piece, what with being a modified trashcan.
• No Romantic Resolution:
  • The 'munks never really quit fawning over Gadget. Yet, the show ends with her being single, no matter which one is actually the chronologically last episode.
  • In a series that puts the first part of its Five-Episode Pilot on number 41 and thereby at the beginning of the second season, there is hardly anything resembling a chronological order, so "Good Times, Bat Times" (season 2, no. 46 of 65 in production order, no. 52 of 65 in airing order) may pretty well be the real last episode, and Dale and Foxglove may pretty well end the show as a loving couple. Since "Good Times, Bat Times" is not the last episode aired, this is left unclear.
• No OSHA Compliance: Part of the funhouse in "Seer No Evil" seems to involve flinging people around with nothing but the hard floor to stop their fall. The Rangers even use this against the episode's villain.
• Now You Tell Me: Monty mentions to Gadget that her father used to mount skis on the Screaming Eagle when he had to land on ice after she landed on Glacier Bay's icy ground.
• Obfuscating Disability: "Kiwi's Big Adventure" had Dale fake a broken toe to get out of doing work, and get spoiled by Gadget. Later in the episode Dale saved the day, breaking his toe for real, and got his comeuppance when he had to miss a party because of it.
• Octopoid Aliens: The urfburgles from the episode "Dale Beside Himself" are small, have four or five tentacles and a single eye. They're Too Dumb to Live, and both look and act like living jelly. The spacefaring aliens that come to Earth consume them alive and whole as a snack, though DTZ tends to make a meal of these junk food critters.
• Oddly Small Organization: Fat Cat only has a maximum of four henchmen (Mepps, Mole, Wart and occasionally Snout) and Rat Capone only has two (Arnold Mousenegger and Sugar Ray Lizard).
• Oh, Crap!:
  • The general reaction of the other Rangers when Gadget uses the words "Should" or "No Problems" in regards to whether one of her inventions will work. Usually immediately after it fails spectacularly.
  • In the end of "Good Times, Bat Times", Dale tries out a new flying contraption Foxglove helped make. He then impulsively scoops up Chip to fly with him. Unfortunately, Foxglove reminded him the contraption can't hold two passengers. The two chipmunks audibly gulp before dropping like a rock.
  • Nimnul in "The Carpetsnaggers" when he gave the carpets too much power it caused the mansion to fly towards him, because they haven't return to him with the stolen goods due to the Rescue Rangers nailing each carpet to the floor. And again when his controls malfunctioned, unable to shut them off.
    • Also the Rangers, when the mansion is about to drop on Nimnul's hideout when he turned off the main power.
• Oh Wait, This Is My Grocery List: Most notably, "Good Times, Bat Times" when Winifred pulls this out instead of the list of magical items she needs for her brew.
• Oireland: "The Last Leprechaun" takes place there, complete with the green-clad, mischievous leprechaun Darby Spree.
• Oktoberfest: Heinrich von Sugarbottom's choice of clothes.
• Ominous Pipe Organ: Not only does Captain Nemo's pipe organ (complete with ribbon and "N" seal) appear in "A Creep in the Deep", it is even played in that episode. Twice even: once by All Hands, once while misused by the Rangers as a pump. The same music is used as BGM in other episodes.
• The One Who Wears Shoes: Gadget's occasional disguises almost always include high-heels.
• Only Six Faces:
  • Rat Capone ("S.S. Drainpipe", "Mind Your Cheese and Q's") and Francis ("Double 'O Dale") look exactly the same except for the clothes. Some fans believe they're brothers.
  • Ignatz Ratskiwatski from "Out of Scale" resembles a bald version of Aldrin Klordane and one of his minions is identical to Klordane's henchman Percy.
• Our Banshees Are Louder: The villain of "The Last Leprechaun" is a banshee who has enslaved all the leprechauns.
• Our Sphinxes Are Different: In "Throw Mummy From the Train", the Rangers encounter an Egyptian sphinx statue that can be brought to life by placing a magical ring into its forehead.
• Our Werewolves Are Different: Nimnul in "A Wolf in Cheap Clothing", for he uses the Metamorphosizer to exchange species with a wolf who then turns into a human.
• Overclocking Attack: In "The Pied Piper Power Play", the team destroys Nimnul's rodent-powered generator by convincing the mice to run the on the exercise wheels as fast as they can, overloading the generator and causing a meltdown. They manage to escape before it explodes.
• Packed Hero: One episode has Fat Cat using a canning machine as a Death Trap for the Rescue Rangers, with every implication that the process would result in a bunch of finely-minced Rangers in a cat food can. Not only do the Rangers escape, but they also trick Fat Cat and his goons into throwing themselves into the machine: the end result is Fat Cat and his goons improbably stuffed into tiny cans, humiliated but apparently no worse for the wear.
• Paper-Thin Disguise: Gadget and Lahwhinie only exchange the goggles and the flower. Being Doppelgangers, such a minor change is really all that's needed to make them look like each other; the "paper thin" part is that they have very different voices and personalities.
• Paperwork Punishment: In the episode "Throw Mummy from the Train", Dr. Crockery's assistant Wexler hates, above everything, having to catalogue, write down and label the Doctor's antiques collection, so in order to become a noted archaeologist in his own right (and become stinking rich) he revives the Sphinx. When the police arrests him, Wexler is in utter despair when Dr. Crockery makes clear that Wexler will continue doing the Doctor's cataloguing even in jail.
• Parental Bonus: The many, many movie and literature references in the show, some of which border on Genius Bonus. Also, Gadget in her red dress provides another sort of Parental Bonus.
• Parental Neglect: Jeremy's parents from "Bearing Up Baby". Their inability to keep an eye on their toddler son nearly gets him killed.
• Parent Service: Gadget's infamous appearance in that red dress and with make-up in "Double 'O Chipmunk" was certainly not designed for the Disney Afternoon's original target audience. That said, it worked pretty well on the very same target audience once it had grown older.
• Parody Names: Almost often enough for its own page.
  • Jolly Roger (on the skull & bones flag)
  • Billy the Squid (on Billy the Kid)
  • Stan Blather (on the news anchorman Dan Rather)
  • Joy Rider (on the astronaut Sally Ride)
  • Sureluck Jones (on Sherlock Holmes)
  • Lord Howard, Lord Howie and Roger Baskerville (all on The Hound of the Baskervilles)
  • Iron Goose (probably on Iron Maiden)
  • Irweena Allen (on Irwin Allen a.k.a. "Master of Disaster", maker of The Swarm (1978))
  • Mr. Dumpty (on Humpty Dumpty)
  • Cruiser & Bruiser (on Tom Cruise of Top Gun fame)
  • Detective Donald Drake (on Donald Duck) and his dog Plato (on Pluto)
  • Juice Lee (on Bruce Lee)
  • Sewernose de Bergerac (on Cyrano de Bergerac)
  • Wexler (on the layout artist Ed Wexler)
  • Nemo (on Captain Nemo of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea whose submarine appears in this episode in its Disney appearance)
  • Rat Capone (on Al Capone)
  • The Fleeblebroxians (on Zaphod Beeblebrox from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)
  • Sugar Ray Lizard (on the boxer Sugar Ray Leonard)
  • Arnold Mausenegger (on Arnold Schwarzenegger)
  • Ma Sweeney and her son Todd (on Sweeney Todd)
  • Maltese de Sade (on Marquis de Sade)
  • Kookoo (on Koko, the gorilla who was trained to communicate with humans and had a pet kitten)
  • The Red Badger of Courage (on The Red Badge of Courage)
  • Genghis Khat (on Genghis Khan)
  • Zsa Zsa Labrador (on Zsa Zsa Gabor)
  • Wild Bill Hiccup (on Wild Bill Hickok)
• Passing the Torch: In the Five-Episode Pilot "To the Rescue", we learn that Detective Donald Drake and his police dog Plato will soon retire. By helping them first become crime-fighters and then take down Aldrin Klordane, Plato passes the torch on to Chip and Dale who, however, will continue his legacy of crime-fighting without human assistance.
• Pendulum of Death: "A Lad In a Lamp" had the villain's henchman Mole attain possession of a magic lamp, complete with obedient genie. When the Rangers attempt to confiscate the lamp, Fat Cat roars at Mole to "wish for something, you ninny!" The next instant shows the captured Rangers affixed beneath an oscillating blade, watching its slow descent. In a Pet the Dog moment, Fat Cat declares, "Why, Mole, you surprise me."
• Perpetual Motion Machine: Gadget claims she once found a perpetual motion machine in the garbage can after a school science fair; of course, by then, it had stopped moving.
• Phlebotinum Killed the Dinosaurs: Inverted in "Prehysterical Pet", where it's shown that dinosaurs (or at least some of them) were small, intelligent aliens that came to colonize Earth millions of years ago. However, the Earth's food and atmosphere caused them to grow large and revert to animal instincts, which made them unable to do anything about whatever that caused their extinction on Earth.
• Phrase Catcher: Canina LaFur's fans always tell her that they've admired her for years and years. And years...
• Pimped-Out Dress: The princess at the opera in "A Case of Stage Blight". Chip somehow finds one that fits him later on, and distracts the villain by singing a duet with him.
• Pirate Booty: There is one on the Deserted Island in "Chipwrecked Shipmunks" that both the Pi-Rats and the Rangers want to retrieve. And in the earlier Pi-Rat episode "Piratsy Under the Sea", there is the one the Pi-Rats have had on their own ship for centuries that they go search for whenever they feel like nonetheless.
• Polar Bears and Penguins: Both of them show up in "A Chorus Crime". Most of this episode takes place near Baffin Island, although the penguins were likely brought there by Nimnul.
• Police Are Useless: The reason why the Rangers have so much to do. The police usually show up when the Rangers have solved the case.
  • Their best man, Detective Donald Drake, would not have been useless, hadn't his colleagues put him in jail for obviously false accusations.
• Posthumous Character: Gadget's father Geegaw Hackwrench. He doesn't appear anywhere outside a framed picture, we learn just enough about him to be Canon Fodder, and he is supposed to be but not officially pronounced dead.
• Pounds Are Animal Prisons: The dog pound in "To the Rescue, Part 4". Frenchie and K. Sera, the Pound Underground, even try (and eventually succeed) to break out by digging a tunnel.
• The Power of Friendship: The Rangers manage to solve any case for a good reason — and that's how tight-knit friends they've become.
• Previously on…: The syndicated version of "To the Rescue".
• Private Detective: Sureluck Jones, a fictional sleuth and Sherlock Holmes parody.
• Prophecy Twist: "Seer No Evil" is about this. The Rangers visit an old friend of Monty's, the gypsy moth Cassandra, at a local fairground and ask her to predict the truth. Of course, nothing of what she says can be taken literally. The coat that Monty shall get is cotton candy. The dark-haired stranger she predicts for Gadget is a thievous chimpanzee. It gets even more complicated with Chip's lengthy prophecy that ends with his presumed death.
• Pun-Based Title: More or less every episode of the series has one, as is largely the norm for a Disney Afternoon show.
• Punny Name:
  • News anchor Stan Blather is an Expy of both Dan Rather and Walter Cronkite.
  • Next, we have the astronauts Roger Houston, Buzz Airfields and Joy Rider, the latter being an Expy of the Real Life NASA astronaut Sally Ride.
  • Sureluck Jones, Private Detective and protagonist of the eponymous novels, is a Shout-Out to Sherlock Holmes.
  • Cruiser and Bruiser are hawks who fly like they've watched Top Gun once too often. Cruiser in particular is a play on Tom Cruise.
  • From the Five-Episode Pilot, the little furry dog K. Sera and the martial arts-savvy fish Juice Lee.
    K. Sera: Sera!
  • Evil travel agent Seymour's name can also be understood as "see more". He exploits this pun for advertising purposes.
  • Even vessels get punny names in this show: the "Lucitetania".
  • "When Mice Were Men" goes wild with its punny names: Monty's Spanish friend is named Don Quijole (pronounced "keyhole"), and their nemesis bull is named El Emenopio (from "L-M-N-O-P").
  • Sugar Ray Lizard is a play on Sugar Ray Leonard and a lizard. And guess where the name Arnold Mousenegger comes from. Not to mention the comic character Red Badger of Courage.
  • "Pie in the Sky" has Ma Sweeney and her son Todd.
  • Not bad enough? Try Fat Cat's French cousin Maltese de Sade.
  • "Puffed Rangers" has Hong Kong-based Hu Yu ("Who? You?") and Genghis Khat.
  • The final episodes bring us Canina LaFur, Zsa Zsa Labrador (who isn't even one) and Wild Bill Hiccup.
• Ranger: The Rescue Rangers don't carry that title for nothing. They might be small animals, but they will whoop your poop deck if need be.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: Played straight with Tom when Fat Cat switches his game cartridge about making friends to a violent war game, and changes his eye color from yellow to red.
• Red Herring: In "The Case of the Cola Cult", it seems pretty obvious to the viewer that Pop Top's cult is a fraud, meant to fleece its members of their valuables. It does later turn out that the cult is a fraud—but not because of its leader, Pop Top, who did seriously believe the cult's message. The con artist is actually Bubbles, Pop Top's right-hand mouse, who figured out how to profit by the cult.
• Red Live Lobster: The episode "Gadget Goes Hawaiian" sees Gadget attempt to pass a series of queenship tests. The first of the tests is to swim across the lobster tank in the resort hotel's restaurant. The tank's lobsters are all crimson red, have unbanded pinchers, and are fiercely territorial. Despite their adversity, Gadget succeeds in making the crossing.
• Replaced the Theme Tune: Downplayed example. Certain airings of the series used different variations of the main theme during the closing credits.
• Reptiles Are Abhorrent: Sewernose de Bergerac, and the Mooks Wart and Sugar Ray Lizard, are reptiles.
• Requisite Royal Regalia: Queenie, the queen bee in "Risky Beesness", wears a crown.
• Reset Button: At the end of "A Lad in a Lamp", the last wish that Monterey Jack as the genie has to fulfill is to revert everything to how it was at the beginning of the episode.
• Resourceful Rodent: Gadget Hackwrench is the smartest member of the team as she's created all of the Rangers' vehicles and weapons out of garbage. The most notable example is the Ranger plane, which is a small dirigible made out of a bottle of bleach, a balloon, and plungers as landing gear.
• Resurrect the Wreck: Many of Gadget's vehicles and inventions are built from broken toys that have been thrown out or lost by their human owners. There are also a few specific examples:
  • This is how the Ranger Plane came to be in "To the Rescue": After the Screaming Eagle is destroyed in a crash-landing in part 3, Gadget uses the wreckage to build both the sled the others use to catch up with Klordane, and the Ranger Plane itself (combined with other garbage from the local airfield/camp).
  • The Gyrotank in "The Case of the Cola Cult" was built from the Gyromobile, which virtually fell apart after Bubbles sabotaged it.
  • On several occasions both the Ranger Plane and Ranger Wing were rebuilt into another vehicle suiting the Rangers' immediate needs after being destroyed or damaged earlier in the episode. Because Status Quo Is God they're back to their original condition by the next episode.
• Reused Character Design: The designs of Freddy and Mr. Stanislavsky from "Robocat" are reused (albeit with different voices) in "The S.S. Drainpipe".
• RevengeSVP: The bull who wasn't invited to a festival.
• Reverse Polarity: Downplayed in "The S.S. Drainpipe". Gadget mentions that one of the features that her new DustBuster-based vehicle has is reversed polarity.
• Role Called: Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers.
• Royals Who Actually Do Something: In the episode "Risky Beesness", Queenie is able to overpower Irweena's hypnosis over her swarm and help Zipper save the other Rangers in the process.
• Rubber Man: When someone wears one of the meteorite fragments that appear in "It's a Bird, It's Insane, It's Dale!", they turn into rubber. Seymour uses it for criminal purposes, and Dale uses it first for his personal fun and then in order to battle Seymour.
• Rule of Three: In "Gadget Goes Hawaiian", LahWhinie must pass three tests in order to be crowned Queen of the Volcano Gods. The first is to swim across a tank filled with live lobsters, the second is to walk across a tightrope over a bed of hot coals, and the third is to ride a wave in shark-infested waters.
• Running Gag:
  • Monty's cheese attacks, some of Gadget's quirks, Chip and Dale fighting over Gadget (or just fighting in general).
  • In "The Carpetsnaggers", rich lady Wanda Clutchcoin is always seen with her hairdresser, and doesn't like the styles he gives her.
• Running on the Spot: Especially (but not only) Chip and Dale do this a lot. Rather unusual and justified examples can be found during the casino chase in "To the Rescue, Part 1", for example, when they jump onto a pile of cards, and while they try to run, they fling the cards underneath their paws behind themselves instead of propelling themselves forward. Or they try to escape while running on a spinning roulette wheel.

Tropes S to Z

• Scam Religion: Although the Cola Cult wasn't founded as one, it ends up being used in this way.
• Science Fair: There is one at "Normie's Science Project" for which Norton Nimnul's nephew Normie steals the Molecular Audio Empathizer that his uncle had just invented to attack the city. Gadget mentions she loves science fairs because she often finds interesting inventions in the junk.
• Scooby Stack: A little more justified than usual, since all the Rangers can go on all fours at need.
• The Scottish Trope:
  • Many Rangerphiles refuse to say or write the name of a certain bobcat cop whose name shall not be mentioned because the premiere of his show meant the end of the Rangers in American free TV.
  • In fact, sometimes they refuse to spell out Lah... Law... Lou... the name of Gadget's Evil Twin from "Gadget Goes Hawaiian" due to the unclear spelling.
• Screw Destiny: Chip's attitude towards Cassandra's prophecy in "Seer No Evil", no matter how much of it comes true.
• Secret Room: Episode "Pound of the Baskervilles" has the intrepid rodents go snooping through Baskerville Hall in search of mystery writer Howard Bask's last will. As Chip is an avid fan of Bask's stories, he's able to deduce clues about various hidden latches in the manor house that ultimately lead to a secret workroom where Bask penned most of his stories. It is in this room that the will found.
• Seers: Cassandra from "Seer No Evil". She is a moth, and her crystal ball is whichever light bulb is nearby.
• Sexophone: If there's an attractive woman involved in the case, this will come up. Gadget herself gets it several times, especially during the infamous "Red Dress" scenes in "Double-O Chipmunk," but also when she shows off her very 80s spandex leotard in "Battle of the Bulge."
• Shadow Discretion Shot: Dale vs. Su Lin in "Song of the Night 'n Dale".
• Shapeshifter Baggage: The Fleeblebroxians in "Dale Beside Himself" can shapeshift into anything, no matter how big or small. DTZ, for instance, transforms into both a dragon a dozen times as tall as Dale as well as into Dale.
• Ship Tease:
  • Done on many occasions, both for Chip+Gadget and for Dale+Gadget, but also for potential 'ships involving one-shot characters.
  • "Good Times, Bat Times" has quite intense Chip+Gadget and Dale+Foxglove Ship Tease, so much actually that it caused Dale+Gadget to be replaced by Chip+Gadget as the preferred shipping in the fledgling fandom. The comics heavily hint at Dale+Foxglove being an Official Couple.
• Shout-Out: So many, the show is practically Reference Overdosed. Go here for specifics.
• Show Some Leg: Gadget's red dress in "Double-Oh Chipmunk" is tailored for this very purpose. She used this in the episode at Chip's direction to cause a thug who was controlling a tank with a neural interface helmet to lose control and allow them to escape the villains death trap. The best part is, all it took was a coy roll of her shoulder. Also Played for Laughs because she initially objected not because of any distaste with taking advantage of her looks, but simply because she didn't know the mook.
• Show Within a Show: "Red Badger of Courage", "Flash the Wonder Dog", the "Dirk Suave" movie series, several comic book series such as "Kablammo Man".
• Sixth Ranger: The original show didn't have a character joining for more than a single episode. In Fan Fic the two most common examples are Foxglove and Tammy. There seems to be more Fan Fiction with Foxy as the Sixth Ranger than not. Mind you that this show makes a literal Sixth Ranger possible. We already have a team of exactly five, and they're Rangers.
• 65-Episode Cartoon: Although the numbers of episodes in each of the three seasons are not multiples of 13, the show still ended after exactly 65 episodes.
• Skewed Priorities: Surprisingly, the team was like this in the Five-Episode Pilot when they were only focused on getting the ruby, disregarding Fat Cat's plan to rob fishing boats and ending up foiling him by accident, why Klordane wanted a giant glacier, and even when the federal gold reserve was about to be robbed. Lampshaded when they admit to Plato they failed to get the ruby and he told them it wasn't as important as they thought. Of course it's justified both by following Plato's advice to get the ruby and escape and that they felt that the humans could handle the problem. The experience is what convinced them that there are things they are the only ones can handle.
• Smooch of Victory:
  • At the beginning of "Dirty Rotten Diapers" Gadget gives one to Chip.
  • At the end of "Adventures In Squirrelsitting", Tammy gives one to Chip. He's pretty popular with the ladies.
• Smuggling with Dolls: A variant appears in "Seer No Evil" where a guy running a dart booth rigs it for rich kids to win, so that he can give them a teddy bear with his monkey sidekick hidden inside for burglary purposes.
• Snap Back: In "A Lean on the Property", a group of moles do a ton of damage to the city by digging underneath the foundations of buildings, causing them to tilt. Everything's back to normal by the next episode. This may have been averted by the fact that this was actually the last episode in production order, but not the final episode to air. The comic continuation disregards the destruction entirely.
• The Song Remains the Same: "You're the Best Bee for Me" by Irweena & the Stingers isn't translated into German whereas all other songs including the theme song are.
• Speaks Fluent Animal: There are a few humans in the show having conversations with animals, that is, both speaking to them and understanding their talk. Winifred from "Good Times, Bat Times" is the most famous example. There are discussions occurring from time to time, though, whether these are special cases of humans who can understand Animal Talk or whether all humans would understand it if animals actually talked to them because other situations in the show indicate the latter.
• Species Surname: Mole, Rat Capone, Sugar Ray Lizard, Arnold Mousenegger, Conrad Cockatoo, Mr. Starfish. Now if Zsa Zsa Labrador were a Labrador Retriever...
• Speech-Impaired Animal: Kookoo from "Gorilla My Dreams". Strangely, she is it even to other animals instead of being fluent in Animal Talk.
• Spell My Name with a "The": "When Mice Were Men" has El Emenopio, El Monty Grande, and at the end also El Dale Grande.
• Spoiled Brat: Buffy Ratskiwatski. Her being the daughter of a crime boss doesn't really make things any better.
• Start of Darkness: Winifred used to be a cleaning woman until she discovered books about witchcraft in the library.
• Stationary Wings: Cruiser and Bruiser from "Three Men and a Booby". They're too cool to flap, in fact, they're so cool that it's the Rule of Cool that moves them forward and makes them appear as if they had jet engines.
• Steam Never Dies: Klordane's train is pulled by a steam locomotive. In The '80s. Through subway tunnels, no less (steam traction has been abandoned on underground rapid transit for very good and obvious reasons). It's possible it was simply what he had available at the time.
• Stock Epileptic Trees: At least CDRR and The Rescuers share the same universe.
• Superheroes Wear Capes: Flash the Wonder Dog and the Red Badger of Courage.
• Superpowers For A Day: Dale becomes the superhero "Rubber Bando" in "It's a Bird, It's Insane, It's Dale!" Sadly, his source of super powers is smashed before the episode ends.
• Super-Speed: The Ranger Plane in "Dale Beside Himself", thanks to DTZ.
• Super-Strength: A side effect of wearing one of the red meteorite crystals from "It's a Bird, It's Insane, It's Dale!"
• Surfer Dude: Shaka Baka from "Gadget Goes Hawaiian" is, like, way too Californian for Hawaii.
• Surprisingly Functional Toys:
  • Buffy from "Out of Scale" owns several toy vehicles that the Rangers are able to operate as though they were real ones.
  • Subverted in "The S.S. Drainpipe". The characters utilize toy boats to get around, but need to use remotes control to do so. Arnold Mousenegger utilizes a windup toy boat, which repeatedly needs to be rewound in order to keep moving.
  • Justified in "Puffed Rangers". The "toy" cars and weapons that the Rangers discover are actually real ones that had been shrunken down in size.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: "Adventures in Squirrelstting" has the We Need a Distraction Bavarian Fire Drill subverted. The squad's babysitting charges, Tammy and her younger sister Bink, end up at Fat Cat's casino. To rescue them, Monterey Jack brings in a piano and asks Chip and Dale, who are Disguised in Drag, to start a musical number, announcing them as a surprise for the bighead. Fat Cat notes that he didn't order any entertainment but watches as a Crowd Song starts about how awesome "Big Fat Daddy C" is. It almost seems to work, especially when he and his henchmen join in for the last verse as Gadget hides in the piano with Tammy and Bink. Before the squad can sneak out of the music hall, Fat Cat busts them with a Slasher Smile and a spotlight. It turns out he wasn't fooled at all by the disguises, and just wanted to see where their spontaneous show was going.
  Fat Cat: Leaving? We hoped we'd get another song. But your piano seems just the teensiest bit out of tune. Right about... here!
  [He bangs his fist on the keys. The piano opens, and Gadget, Tammy, and Bink fly out of it.]
  Fat Cat: There's the problem. You had squirrel minors in your C major!
• Surrounded by Idiots: Like so many shows of the time, Fat Cat and several other villians have to put up with a bunch of dimwitted mooks.
• Sword Fight: "A Case of Stage Blight" has several unusual variations of this including one between a chipmunk and an alligator.
• Synchronized Swarming: "Risky Beesness" has a swarm of bees who not only form flying hearts on behalf of the queen, but also steal musical instruments while hypnotized by a thief playing a mind-controlling tune.
• "Take That!" Kiss: In "Love Is a Many Splintered Thing" Desiree gives one to Monty after revealing she had been manipulating him the whole time, mockingly kissing him goodbye before leaving him for dead on a Conveyor Belt o' Doom.
• Tank Goodness:
  • The "Gyrotank" in "The Case of the Cola Cult", though it is more along the lines of an APC.
  • The easter-basket-turned-tank in "Three Men and a Booby", on the other hand, is armed, but in such a way that it'd rather count as self-propelled artillery.
  • Buffy's toy tank driven by Dale in "Out of Scale".
  • The raygun tank prototype in "Double 'O Dale".
  • Also, tanks are used to try and fight Nimnul's giant bugs mistaken as aliens in "Fake Me to Your Leader".
• Team Switzerland: The so-called Neutrals (as opposed to Pros and Antis).
• Telephone Teleport: In the episode "A Fly in the Ointment" Dr. Nimnul invents a "modemizer" helmet that allows him to travel through telephone lines so he can escape after committing burglaries.
• Temple of Doom: Where Heinrich von Sugarbottom has his secret base in "Chocolate Chips".
• That Makes Me Feel Angry: After wrecking the Screaming Eagle in "To The Rescue Part 3," Gadget tells Monterey he should know she's "extraordinarily depressed," in her usual upbeat tone.
• Thememobile: The famous Ranger Plane, maybe also the Ranger Mobile and the Ranger Wing to a much lesser extent.
• Theme Naming: Monterey Jack's parents are named Cheddarhead Charlie and Camembert Kate.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: The many death traps Gadget set up in the old bomber where she lived before the Rescue Rangers. Subverted by the other Rangers-to-be in that they trigger them all and survive.
• Thing-O-Matic: Clyde Cosgrove's Meal-O-Matic from "The Luck Stops Here".
• Three Wishes: "A Lad in a Lamp" comes with just about all genie clichés including the three wishes rule. Fat Cat tries to get around this by having his minions make wishes once he's used up his own, but fortunately the Rangers (particularly Monterey, who is the new genie of the lamp) are able to trick the minions into making wishes that benefit them until they can get the lamp themselves and Chip and Dale wish none of these events had ever happened.
• Through a Face Full of Fur: Chip, Dale, Gadget, and Monty, among others, have been shown blushing despite being covered in fur.
• Too Unhappy to Be Hungry: In "Love Is A Many Splintered Thing" has the Rangers battle with a group of thieves at the start. Afterwards, Monterey Jack is upset about something to the point where he even refuses to eat cheese. It turns out it's because he smelled his former girlfriend's perfume during the battle.
• Top-Heavy Guy: The animators seemed to love this trope.
• Toros y Flamenco: "When Mice Were Men" is built around this.
• Trap Door: There's one in the secret passage of the Baskerville mansion in "Pound of the Baskervilles". Fat Cat also has one in his office.
• Treasure Map: Used in both Pi-Rats episodes. In "Chipwrecked Shipmunks", they've got an actual treasure stashed away on an island. In "Piratsy Under the Seas", however, it is revealed that they've been hunting the same treasure on their stuck ship for hundreds of years, using the same map over and over again since the treasure has always been in the same place.
• Trojan Horse:
  • The Easter basket with an integrated tank in "Three Men and a Booby".
  • The pineapple in "Battle of the Bulge".
• Tropey, Come Home: Played not so very straight in "Zipper Come Home". Zipper doesn't really want to return to the Rangers after he has been made king of a bug tribe.
• Truck Driver's Gear Change: The theme song does this twice. The full-length version additionally changes gears once per chorus.
• Tunnel King: Ming-Ting and Ting-a-Ling, the pandas from "An Elephant Never Suspects" with their dragon-shaped tunnel digging machine. The moles from "A Lean on the Property" also count.
• Tummy Cushion: Occancionally Zipper sleeps on Monty's belly.
• Unanthropomorphic Transformation: Steggy, introduced in the episode "Prehisterical Pet," is actually an alien stegosaurus who's come to Earth to learn the fate of a previous expedition. He's horrified to learn that exposure to Earth's atmosphere and plant life causes the normally tiny aliens to grow to humongous size as well as degrade to primitive animal intelligence, ultimately becoming what we would know as dinosaurs (or at least some of the dinosaurs we know, like stegosaurs and sauropods). Worse, as the episode progresses, Steggy himself suffers a similar fate, necessitating the Rangers to get him back to his ship and feed him his planet's food to reverse the effects.
• Undisclosed Funds: In "Gorilla My Dreams", Mrs. Clutchcoin claimed that her huge diamond was so expensive, that her husband was "still writing zeroes on the check" to pay for it, and had been at it for three weeks.
• Ungrateful Bastard: Nimnul in "Fly in the Ointment". Once he get his body back, he decides to kill all the Rangers even though they helped him all the time.
• Unhand Them, Villain!: Fat Cat does it to Tammy and Bink in "Adventures in Squirrelsitting".
• Universally Beloved Leader: Queenie, albeit only for her own swarm.
• Unnamed Parent: Tammy and Bink's mother in "Adventures in Squirrelsitting" doesn't have any name in the show.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: A lot of the cats, dogs, mice, chipmunks, birds, etc. wear clothes, but none of the humans seem to notice.
  • In "A Lad in a Lamp" the humans don't notice that the now-human genie has purple skin.
  • "It's a Bird, It's Insane, It's Dale!" No one in the city seems to care that their new superhero is a chipmunk.
• Unwilling Suspension: Happens to Dale and Foxglove in "Good Times, Bat Times" and again to Dale in "Gorilla My Dreams".
• Vague Age: The protagonists themselves, particularly Gadget. The closest we get to age verification is that Monty is the oldest.
• Vaporwear:
  • Tammy's mom as revealed by hardly more than one frame in "Adventures in Squirrelsitting". She's covered in fur, though.
  • Even Gadget while lying upside-down in a skimpy dress in "Double 'O Chipmunk". Yes, she's covered in fur, too, and the next scene with Gadget in that dress in that episode has her suddenly wear her coveralls under the dress, but still.
• Villain Song: Irweena Allen from "Risky Beesness" had her own song, namely "You're the Best Bee for Me".
• Villainous Breakdown:
  • Fat Cat has a hilarious one in "Gorilla My Dreams", after the kitten he ordered kidnapped turns out to be Dale, disguised in a ball of yarn. Fat Cat gives vent to a whole series' worth of frustration:
    Fat Cat: You idiots! Oh... why must all my brilliant plans be ruined by those rinketing Rangers?! Why? (falls on his stomach and beats the ground with his fists) TELL ME! TELL ME WHY! WHY, WHY?!
  • In "Song of the Night 'n Dale", Su Lin, who plotted to use clockwork tricks to drive away her brother starts to crack when the Rescue Rangers, aided by Chirp-Sing, engineer a plan to expose her by using her own spray against her, installing a mechanism that slams her bed into the ceiling, moving around under the guise of gold figures she created, etc. As she continues to get a taste of her own medicine, she starts to get eratic and shoot at Chip and Dale with a shotgun. After seeing gold-colred fish, she sprints back to her brother's, the emperor's, bed room only to find it upside-down and assumes her brother was just a dummy only for him to wake up and send her plummeting to the floor, leading to her admitting to her brother and his ministers that she was behind the tricks intended to drive her off which leads to the emperor ordering his ministers to take his sister away.
• Villain with Good Publicity: Su Lin. She wants to take over her peaceful Asian homeland from her bother, Emperor Dim Sun, to turn it into a tourist trap. And she has already got glossy advertising material.
• Villains Out Shopping: Near the beginning of "A Lean on the Property", Fat Cat's goons are carrying him down the sidewalk on a cat bed. They don't appear to be causing any trouble, although that all changes once a bunch of dogs start chasing them, which sets Fat Cat's latest scheme into motion. Fat Cat and his goons didn't even do anything to provoke the dogs.
• Voluntary Shapeshifting: The Fleeblebroxian aliens can shapeshift into whatever they want to whenever they want to. They use this ability as camouflage for their holiday on Earth.
• The Von Trope Family: Heinrich von Sugarbottom from "Chocolate Chips". His English last name doesn't really fit his otherwise Oktoberfest theme.
• Walk the Plank: The Pi-Rats make the Rangers walk a human saber in lieu of a plank in "Piratsy Under the Seas".
• What Does This Button Do?: Toggle the hover mode on the Ranger Wing ("Song of the Night 'n Dale").
• Whole-Plot Reference: "A Fly in the Ointment" is one big reference to the then-recently remade movie The Fly (1986).
• Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: Flash the Wonder Dog has a fear of heights in which he needed a stunt dog.
• Wicked Witch: Why, Winifred from "Good Times, Bat Times" of course. Originally a cleaning woman, she spent more time at the library reading books about witchcraft than cleaning. She decided that she can do that witchcraft, too. She got herself three stereotypical familiars, the python Bud, the tarantula Lou (Abbott and Costello as animals, essentially) and the bat Foxglove, and she began to work on some brew that shall give her unsurpassed magical powers.
• Wig, Dress, Accent: Used in several episodes. Not always with an accent, though. Dale is particularly famous for this.
• Wild Take: Even villains do them, see Bubbles at the end of "The Case of the Cola Cult" when Gadget causes him to fall into the dreaded fizz bucket.
• Wingding Eyes: A variation in "To The Rescue, Part 3": The first time Chip and Dale meet Gadget, Gadget herself is reflected in their eyes.
• Wishplosion: "A Lad in a Lamp" ends with a wish for a Reset Button. That was just about the only possible way to undo all that mayhem.
• World of Pun:
  • Many of the episode titles and a couple of lines.
  • The most important character names in "When Mice Were Men", Don Quijole (pun on "key hole") and El Emenopio ("LMNOP").
• World of Weirdness: Talking animals aside, there's plenty of bizarre stuff going on in the Rangers' otherwise ordinary world, but it never seems to impress anyone very much. This includes Nimnul's inventions, aliens, a genie, a ghost, a mummy and a living sphinx, a witch, characters with elastic powers and more.
• Wrench Wench:
  • Su Lin uses advanced mechanical gadgetry in "Song of the Night 'n Dale" to convince her brother, Emperor Dim Sun, of being insane.
  • Ming-Ting from "An Elephant Never Suspects". She and her brother Ting-a-Ling have built the peanut-fueled Dragon Digger to dig their way back from the local zoo to their old home China.
• Wunza Plot: To put the show in a nutshell...
  • Wunzan Amateur Sleuth.
  • Wunza Cloudcuckoolander.
  • Wunza Wrench Wench.
  • Wunza Boisterous Bruiser.
  • Wunz the loyal Team Pet.
  • Together, of course, they fight crime.
• X-Ray Sparks: Has happened to all the Rangers at least once. One of the main causes is the lab rat and living capacitor Sparky in "Does Pavlov Ring a Bell?" whose hand you'd better not shake without rubber gloves. Gadget falls victim to this when she accidentally shocks herself with the electromagnet she built to take down Nimnul's flying carpets in "The Carpetsnaggers".
• Yodel Land: Where Heinrich von Sugarbottom comes from, judging by his cliché outfit. This kind of made dubbing him in German easier, seeing as he couldn't speak German with a German accent. He still ended up with a hodge-podge of roughly "Alpine" dialect elements.
• You Can't Fight Fate: "Seer No Evil". Chip thinks Cassandra's prophecies about the Rangers are non-sense, especially the one that ends with his death, and that causes the other Rangers to urge him to stay at home safely while they go on their newest case without him. Of course, he goes after them — just to discover that everything Cassandra has predicted somehow comes true.
• You Dirty Rat!: Rat Capone, Snout, Francis and his henchrats on the one side, pretty much all mice on the other side. The sole exception would be Sparky the lab rat.
• You Do Not Want To Know: In "When You Fish Upon A Star", while Fat Cat is furiously pursuing the Rescue Rangers down a jungle river:
  Meps: Hey boss, what’s that?
  Fat Cat: I don’t want to hear it!
  Meps: There, in the water?
  Fat Cat: Keep paddling, I don’t want to hear it!
  (CRASH! Their boat stops dead in the water and starts to sink)
  Fat Cat: Wh... what happened?!
  Mole: You don't want to hear it.
• You Don't Look Like You:
  • Mrs. Clutchcoin changes a bit between her two appearances in "To the Rescue" and "Gorilla My Dreams", mainly her nose and hairstyle. This could just be Hand Waved by her changing her hairstyle and getting a nose job. However, she does sound a bit different between appearances, despite being voiced by Tress MacNeille in both. However they could just be two members of the same family, as "The Carpetsnaggers" featured "Wanda Clutchcoin", who looks considerably different than "Mrs. Clutchcoin", and is likely just a different member of the same family altogether.
• Your Size May Vary:
  • The best—but certainly not sole—example would be Queenie from "Risky Beesness". She is meant to be about twice as tall as Zipper,◊ but she is depicted so inconsistently that she seems to have temporarily grown taller than Gadget◊ in a scene near the end of the episode.
  • An inverse example from Queenie would be Mrs. Booby from "Three Men and a Booby". In her introductory scene, she comes across as almost human-sized, while Chip and Dale are small enough to easily hide inside an empty egg carton. Yet, just a short while later she can comfortably fit inside the Ranger HQ, and for the rest of the episode the Rangers appear to be about one third of her height.
  • "Bearing Up Baby". The size dissonance is so extreme that Monty is about three quarters as tall as Jeremy.◊This◊ would be more realistic.
  • Winifred's list in "Good Times, Bat Times" which varies from handy size for rodents to way larger than Foxglove. This is particularly obvious because Foxy gets to hold the same list in several different sizes.
  • The astronaut training equipment in "Out to Launch" is surprisingly tailored for rodents, even though it was meant for humans.
• Youth Is Wasted on the Dumb: Tammy. Chasing after Fat Cat who has just tried to kill her and trying to retrieve the Maltese Mouse from him just to impress Chipper and draw his attention away from that Gadget sounds like a mighty good idea.

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