Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers
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Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers is an animated series made by The Walt Disney Company. It features the chipmunks Chip 'n Dale, with three friends, as detectives.
The concept began life as a two hour standalone television special, Rescue Rangers: To the Rescue. The series itself began airing on March 5, 1989, often paired in an hour-long show with DuckTales. The last episode aired on November 19, 1990, by which time the series was a part of the then-fledgling Disney Afternoon and continued to air for some time thereafter in its lineup.
65 episodes were created in total; To the Rescue was broken up into five half-hour segments (episodes 14-18).
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Characters
Heroes
In this show Chip wears a fedora and a flight jacket, much like Indiana Jones. He serves as the leader of the Rescue Rangers and spends his free time reading detective fiction, his favorite character being Sureluck Jones, apparently a play on the names of Sherlock Holmes and Indiana Jones. He is presented as very dedicated to his duty, and usually somewhat serious and responsible.
Dale wears a red and yellow Hawaiian shirt. Though also dedicated to duty, he is presented as a fun-loving, mischievous prankster and somewhat irresponsible. He spends his free time reading comic books, playing video games, watching Sci-fi and horror movies, mostly B-movies and eating candy.
Monterey Jack is an Australian muscle mouse who has a constant craving for cheese and a pesky fear of cats. Monty first met Chip and Dale on their first case as Rescue Rangers. He joined them along with his companion Zipper and Gadget Hackwrench. Monty is protective over Gadget, having somewhat of a father-daughter relationship with the younger mouse.
Gadget Hackwrench is a young female mouse and the mechanic and inventor of the team. She is the daughter of deceased inventor and aviator Geegaw Hackwrench, an old friend of Monterey Jack. She first met Chip and Dale on their first case as Rescue Rangers and has joined them along with Monterey Jack and his companion Zipper, since she had nowhere else to go after her father's death. Both Chip and Dale are very attracted to Gadget, but she usually does not notice because she is working on her inventions most of the time. The character is arguably the most popular introduced in the series and has a steady fanbase in the Internet. Her sweetness, innocence and unattainability (at least as far as Chip and Dale are concerned) make her a "good girl" pin-up goddess for male viewers of the furry fandom persuasion.
Zipper the Fly appears as Monterey Jack's sidekick and the mascot of the Rescue Rangers. Using his ability to fly, Zipper often handles the little jobs that the rest of the Rescue Rangers cannot handle.
Villains
Fat Cat is a cat crime boss. He has four sidekicks who include an alley cat named Mepps, a lizard named Wart, a mole named Mole, and a rat named Snout. Fat Cat is one of the Rescue Rangers' most frequent enemies. Although he belonged to the human criminal Aldren Klordane in the pilot series, he is shown as a more independent animal in the rest of the series.
Mepps is one of Fat Cat's cronies. An alley cat, he is the only member of his gang who is the same species as his boss.
Professor Norton Nimnul is a mad scientist and also one of the Rescue Rangers' most frequent enemies. Sometimes Professor Nimnul has help from his nephew Normie.
Episode list
- To the Rescue (1)
- To the Rescue (2)
- To the Rescue (3)
- To the Rescue (4)
- To the Rescue (5)
- Catteries Not included
- Three Men and a Booby
- The Carpetsnaggers
- Piratsy Under the Seas
- Adventures in Squirrelsitting
- Flash, the Wonder Dog
- Pound of the Baskervilles
- Parental Discretion Retired
- Risky Beesiness
- Bearing Up Baby
- Out to Launch
- Dale Beside Himself
- Kiwi's Big Adventure
- A Lad in a Lamp
- Battle of the Bulge
- Normie's Science Project
- Ghost of a Chance
- An Elephant Never Suspects
- The Luck Stops Here
- Fake Me to Your Leader
- Last Train to Cashville
- The Case of the Cola Cult
- Throw Mummy From the Train
- A Wolf in Cheap Clothing
- Prehysterical Pet
- Robocat
- Does Pavlov Ring a Bell?
- A Creep in the Deep
- Seer No Evil
- The S.S. Drainpipe
- Chipwrecked Shipmunks
- The Last Leprechaun
- Chocolate Chips
- Song of the Nightindale
- Love is a Many Splintered Thing
- Weather or Not
- Out of Scale
- Gadget Goes Hawaiian
- Double-0 Chipmunk
- Good Times, Bat Times
- Short Order Crooks
- When Mice Were Men
- It's a Bird, It's Insane, It's Dale!
- They Shoot Dogs, Don't They?
- One-Upsman-Chip
- Zipper Come Home
- Shellshocked
- A Case of Stage Blight
- Mind Your Cheese and Q's
- Dirty Rotten Diapers
- Pie in the Sky
- Le Purrfect Crime
- When You Fish Upon a Star
- Rest Home Rangers
- A Lean on the Property
- The Pied Piper Power Play
- Gorilla My Dreams
- Puffed Rangers
- A Fly in the Ointment
- A Chorus Crime
Spin-offs
Two Rescue Rangers platformer video games were produced for the Nintendo Entertainment System by Capcom. A third (this of category "other") was made for the PC. In the video games, the Rescue Rangers fight against villains from the show. Some of the missions even match some of the plots depicted in the cartoon show. For example, in one of the levels, the Rescue Rangers has to stop Professor Nimnul's static electricity robot, which was one of the main episodes of the cartoon series. Also, a lot of the supporting cast appears as characters in the games. For example, the recurring mechanical dog in the cartoon series is a common enemy throughout different levels in the video games.
There has also been a Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers comic book published by The Walt Disney Company when it published the comic books instead of licensing it out to other publishers and it ran for 19 issues.
Fandom
While the show was canceled and replaced by Bonkers in the 1992 Disney Afternoon lineup, its fandom remains strong and loyal, if not as numerically large as more popular franchises. Starting with the creation of the Disney Afternoon mailing list in 1991 and the inception of the D.A.F.T. (Disney Afternoon File Time) zine in 1992, the Rescue Ranger fandom has been noted for its high level of devotion to the series, despite what many "Rangerphiles" (as Ranger fans like to call themselves) perceive as Disney's neglect of the series.
While the Ranger fandom has produced fan work of virtually every sort, one of the most noticeable has been the area of fan fiction. As of 1999, there were at least 128 Rescue Ranger fan-written stories on the Internet and that number has grown to at least one thousand, if not many more. While these works have ranged from crossover and parody to encompass virtually all possibilities of fan fiction, more recent Rescue Ranger fanfiction has sought to achieve a level of depth and maturity beyond what the show's writers had originally provided. Starting with Michael "Questy" Demcio's Rhyme and Reason (http://rrdatabase.dyndns.org/written/michael_demcio/), Rangerphiles have sought to address the areas they believe the official Rescue Ranger canon "left hanging," such as: the unresolved love triangle between Chip, Gadget, and Dale; Gadget's relationship with her father Geegaw (who is mentioned only once in canon, as she apparently mourns his death); the relationships of "one-shot" characters Foxglove, Tammy and Lawhinie to the Rangers; and the like. While there are obviously too many stories to link to even a small percentage here, the reader could do worse than to start with works such as Steve "Indy" Hamrick's "The Untold Ranger Tales," Meghan Brunner's Final Curtain (http://rrdatabase.dyndns.org/written/meghan_brunner/07_fc.html), "Jareth"'s The Return of Winifred (http://rrdatabase.dyndns.org/written/jareth/TheReturnofWinifredPrologue.html), and "The J.A.M."'s Death of a Comedian (http://www.fanfiction.net/s/224653/1/) (itself a sequel to an offshoot (http://www.fanfiction.net/s/223213/1/) of a fanfiction story, namely Roy Neal Grissom's Consummation (http://rrdatabase.dyndns.org/written/roy_grissom/Consum.txt), a Dale+Foxglove work).
Other forms of "fanfic" have emerged as well. In 2003 Chris "Fish" Fischer released the webcomic Of Mice and Mayhem (http://www.ppgworld.com/mice_and_mayhem/001.html), which gained widespread notice in the fan community for its artistic content, story depth, and length; its notoriety has spread outside of the original fans as well, especially to the furry fandom. The author of the story is currently working on a sequel, which should be released (to quote the author directly) "sometime in the next Ice Age."
Fischer's work bridges the gap to the other major form of fan expression: artwork. Pictures by the thousands can be found online with a simple search, or at some of the fan sites linked above. Many of them are of fan favorite Gadget (see for example The Internet Gadget Archive (http://anterras.net/CDRR/gadget_archive.html)), but all save the most minor characters seem to be preserved in their own body of work. (Gadget's popularity is actually a source of some controversy in the fandom. As often occurs with attractive female characters in particular - Dana Scully of the X-Files springs to mind, for example - some of this work is decidedly adult in nature. Due to the G-rated nature of the original show, some fans strongly object to such representations as inappropriate; but they remain among the most common forms of Gadget art, and thus of Ranger art in general, and should be noted here.)
On February 21 1990, a character named Foxglove made her debut in the episode "Good Times, Bat Times". She worked for the villain Winifred Witch to get ingredients to cast an evil spell. The Rescue Rangers saved her, she saved them, and then the bat fell in love with Dale. Many thought she would be a perfect addition to the Rescue Rangers, even though after the end of the episode she simply disappeared, never to be mentioned again on the show. Entire websites were created that were dedicated to Foxglove, based on this single appearance. The voice behind Foxglove - actress Deborah Walley, who played in the fifties teen movies "Beach Blanket Bingo" and "Ski Party", among others - died in May 2001; she was the only cast member of the Rangers known to have had contact with the fandom, and her loss was keenly felt.
External links
- Gadget Hackwrench Webring (http://www.framwinkle.com/rr/webring/index.html) (includes both Gadget Hackwrench-specific and Rescue Ranger websites)
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- Official web page at the Toon Disney Channel (http://psc.disney.go.com/abcnetworks/toondisney/shows/chip_n_dale/)
- TV Tome Episode Guide (http://www.tvtome.com/tvtome/servlet/EpisodeGuideSummary/showid-3236/season-1)
- The Acorn Cafe (http://www.theacorncafe.org/), current home to much of the online fandom
- R.O.A.R. (http://www.juliestudio.com/roar), Rescue Our Animated Rangersbg:Чип и Дейл: спасителен отряд