episode 29: The Rescuers Down Under
Curiosities
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Mea Culpa
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L’esprit de L’escalier
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Bibliography
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“Movies are our way of telling God what we think about this world and our place in it. . . . Movies can be many things: escapist experiences, historical artifacts, business ventures, and artistic expressions, to name a few. I’d like to suggest that they can also be prayers.”
Josh Larsen puts movies into the categories of: Praise, Yearning, Lament, Anger, Confession, Reconciliation, Obedience, Meditation and Contemplation, and Joy. I make the case for The Rescuers Down Under being a prayer of yearning.
Also, a couple Mea-Culpas: First, Josh Larsen was ” the film critic for the Chicago-based Sun-Times Media for more than ten years” not whatever I said on the show.
Second, I don’t think I actually have mentioned this book on Before They Were Live before. I believe I talked about it during the 2018 Christian Humanist Radio Network Halloween Crossover while discussing Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of A Doubt on Sectarian Review. Fun episode, and great show overall. You should check it out!
Finally, I probably should have mentioned that friend of the show Ethan McCarthy was instrumental in getting the book published. Nice job Ethan!
A poet, playwright, lawyer, and statesman, Archibald MacLeish’s roots were firmly planted in both the new and the old worlds.
McLeach is an evil and eccentric poacher who captures rare animals and sells them, usually for their hides.
From a New York Times Magazine interview in 2003. Emphasis added.
JACK: It’s not counter to us. It’s what our band is about. We’re white people who play the blues, and our problem was how do we do that and not be fake? Our idea was to strip away everything unnecessary, to put ourselves in a box, to make rules for ourselves.
What sort of rules?
JACK: In live shows, we never play from a set list. The last record, we said, no guitar solos, no slide guitar, no covers.
And no bass?
MEG: The last record had no bass. This one has some bass. We’re not against the bass.
Why hem yourself in with restrictions?
JACK: It makes the band what it is. I’m disgusted by artists or songwriters who pretend there are no rules. There’s nothing guiding them in their creativity. We could’ve spent six months making our last album. We could have recorded 600 tracks. Instead, we went and made the whole album, 18 songs, in 10 days.
And, from an editorial written in 2011, Why Meg Matters, after the band broke up. Again, emphasis added.
But just because Jack was the primary creative force in The White Stripes doesn’t mean Meg was inessential. I’ll quote Jack himself, from an interview I did with him just before Icky Thump was released:
AVC: Does a White Stripes song have certain parameters?
JW: Oh yeah, lots of them do. There’s an overall structure of simplicity, and it revolves around Meg’s drumming style. And it can’t be beat. We can’t do those structures in The Raconteurs. We couldn’t do them if we wanted to, and that’s the beauty of Meg. In The Raconteurs, there’s so many more components, so many more personalities involved. If you get another person in the room, you’re dealing with something else. It’s a different kind of collaboration, you know? The parameters of The White Stripes… you know, 70 to 80 percent of what we do is constriction, and the other 20 to 30 percent is us breaking that constriction to see what happens.
Fair warning: I didn’t watch that whole clip, so I have no idea what you might see. Then again, it’s not really my nostalgia as I’d never heard of the television show Camp Candy until Michial mentioned it on the show.
From IMDB, Frank Welker’s Disney Animated Canon roles:
Brother Bear (additional animal vocal effects – uncredited)
Mulan
Khan / Cri-Kee (voice)
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Baby Bird / Djali (voice)
Pocahontas
Flit (voice)
The Lion King
Lion Roars (voice)
Aladdin
Abu / Cave of Wonders / Rajah (voice)
Beauty and the Beast (special vocal effects)
The Rescuers Down Under
Joanna (voice)
The Rescuers Down Under (performer: “Home On The Range (McLeach Version)” – uncredited)
The Little Mermaid
Max (voice, uncredited)
Oliver & Company
Carlo / Louie the Sausage Vendor / Animal Sounds (voice)
The Great Mouse Detective
Toby the Dog / Felicia the Cat (voice, uncredited)
From a soundsnap.com article: 5 Most Identifiable (and Overused) Sound Effects in Cinema
The gorgeous eagle that has awed us on-screen is an imposter. Let me explain: that sound that everyone associates with an eagle as it soars into view in a movie? Yeah, it’s actually not an eagle at all. That screech that the sly eagle has been passing off as his legendary call is actually the screech of a red-tailed hawk.
The sound that the eagle actually makes is…well, let’s just say it’s far more adorable and not nearly as impressive as that of the hawk. Which is why it’s been traded for an eagle call in movie scenes; filmmakers have all agreed that it just sounds cooler and goes with the impressive beauty of the soaring eagle. Poor hawk though.
From TVtropes.org Please click the link to see the caption they have on the picture above. It is *kisses fingers* perfection.
The varied list of things to fall from includes cliffs, over waterfalls, out of trees, and off the tops of buildings. There is at least one case of a Disney villain meeting his end by falling up(off a spaceship and into space), and once sideways (off the Chinese Imperial Palace by the aid of a rocket). A surprising number of Disney villains have also been dragged to their doom by demons (up to three depending on how you’re counting).
This block of syndicated programming, which aired nationwide and in countries across the world, became the touchstone of an entire generation of kids. So entrenched are these adventures in the collective subconscious that today you could approach most people ages 20 to 30-something and—even if they’re not a huge Disney fan—find they can instantly summon up a trademark DuckTales “woo-hoo!” – Brittany Bell
That ‘91-’92 two hour block of afternoon television: Ducktails, Chip ‘n Dale Rescue Rangers, TailSpin, and Darkwing Duck, may have been the peak of civilization. History will be the judge, I guess.
*Update 4/2/2020* Chip ‘n Dale Rescue Rangers was originally meant to be a The Rescuers spin-off television show. This might be part of why The Rescuers Down Under feels closer to Rescue Rangers than The Rescuers, but it could also be that they were both developing in the same era and shared common influences.
Nostalgia junkies click here for historic details, theme songs, ring tones, tee-shirts.
As we converse through the Disney Animated Canon in chronological order sometimes we refer to the Silver Age, or the Dark Age (in the image above more charitably called the Bronze Age). Other than the wartime/package films era being a pretty clear line between the Golden Age and the Silver age, the rest of the eras are more debatable. For example Michial said during our 101 Dalmatians episode that he thought we were entering the First Dark Age, although many people put the start of the Dark Age after Jungle Book and Walt Disney’s death. Although honestly, Walt had definitely lost interest in the animation for several years before his death, and it may be a better delineator to call this the xerography era. Those debates are all part of the fun of looking at these movies. Either way, this graphic from Network 1901 is a pretty good one, and the video I grabbed it out of ain’t bad either if you’re looking for a nice overview of the entire canon. I disagree with a few of the narratives presented in the video, but it’s an overview so there’s not a ton of room for nuance.
And, if you’re just looking for a list of the films in the canon – Wikipedia is your friend : )
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