Chip ’n Dale: Rescue Rangers almost had a different beloved cartoon villain

Disney’s new Chip ’n Dale movie is like a modern-day Roger Rabbit: Who is the Framer?, full of cameos and Easter eggs from the scene-stealing “Ugly Sonic” to a small homage to one of the original Rescue Rangers creators. The main villain, however, is the familiar Disney face.

The chipmunks meet that villain after learning that their old castmate, Monterey Jack, owed him money due to Jack’s expensive addiction to illegal super-stinky cheese. So they trek to an unsettling part of Hollywood — the Uncanny Valley — where they encounter a series of the animated characters who just don’t look right (such as the Jellicle cats, as seen in 2019’s cinematic masterpiece CatsScrounging in the trash? Among the other animated misfits are the villain’s CG animated henchmen, a Viking named Bob (Seth Rogen) and a polar bear named Jimmy (Da’Vone McDonald). Although the villain can be identified as a Disney character, their identities and source of the henchmen are not.

“Is it the Coca-Cola bear? I don’t know, that’s up for you to decide,” says director Akiva Schaffer. “But it’s clearly from a world of that [Uncanny Valley]. Then you will have the Beowulfmo-cap, a kind of Polar Express style. So it’s clearly people that maybe can’t get jobs in movies anymore, because [their animation styles] become outdated or whatever.”

[Ed. note: Spoilers ahead for the villain’s identity in Chip ’n Dale: Rescue Rangers.]

Image: Disney

Bob, Jimmy and their Big Bad characters have their own connections to the idea of being old. Initially called “Sweet Pete” by people who have encountered him, their employer turns out to be a middle-aged version of Disney’s Peter Pan, voiced by Arrested Development And Bojack Horseman’s Will Arnett. As he explains to Chip and Dale, once he hit puberty and started growing facial hair, he couldn’t exactly play “the boy who never grows up” anymore, and he had to drop out of show business.

Schaffer says the film’s creative team didn’t want to make fun of child actors, but that they were keying off the ways former young stars are sometimes unable to continue their acting careers as adults. It is one of Hollywood’s saddest things, he says.

“So we were like, What if this is used to make a cartoon of the character?” he says.

Peter Pan was chosen by the writers as a suitable choice for their storyline when they were looking at child cartoon characters. The fact that he’s a Disney character also made things easier, since the filmmakers didn’t need to go through lawyers to license his appearance in the movie. But another very popular character was strongly in the running for the film’s Big Bad.

“I will be honest, we also had a version that we played with that we did not have the rights to yet and never attempted to [get],” Schaffer says. “That was a grown-up Charlie Brown.”

Fan comics have occasionally imagined what adult Charlie Brown might look like, and some believe that the character’s creator, Charles M. Schulz, briefly experimented with a strip that might have featured adult characters from his Peanuts comic. There’s also a Jimmy Fallon sketch turning the Peanuts characters into edgy Riverdale-esque teens. But it’s hard to imagine what Chip ’n Dale: Rescue RangersWhat it might have looked like without him in the middle. Maybe we’ll eventually find out in a sequel.

Chip ’n Dale: Rescue RangersDisney Plus is now available