The Rescuers

In an abandoned riverboat in Devil's Bayou, Louisiana, a young orphan named Penny drops a message in a bottle, containing a plea for help, into the river. The Rescue Aid Society, an international mouse organization inside the United Nations, finds the bottle when it washes up in New York City. The Hungarian representative, Miss Bianca, volunteers to accept the case. She chooses Bernard, a stammering janitor, as her co-agent. The two visit Morningside Orphanage, where Penny lived, and meet an old cat named Rufus. He tells them about a woman named Madame Medusa who once tried to lure Penny into her car, prompting the mice to investigate her pawn shop for clues.

At the pawn shop, Bianca and Bernard discover that Medusa and her partner, Mr. Snoops, are searching for the world's largest diamond, the Devil's Eye. The mice learn that Medusa and Snoops are currently at the Devil's Bayou with Penny, whom they have kidnapped and placed under the guard of two trained crocodiles, Brutus and Nero. With the help of an albatross named Orville and a dragonfly named Evinrude, the mice follow Medusa to the bayou. There, they learn that Medusa plans to force Penny to enter a small blowhole that leads down into a blocked-off pirates' cave where the Devil's Eye is located.

Bernard and Bianca find Penny and devise a plan of escape. They send Evinrude to alert the local animals, who loathe Medusa, but Evinrude is delayed when he is forced to take shelter from a cloud of bats. The following morning, Medusa and Snoops send Penny down into the cave to find the gem. Unbeknownst to Medusa, Bianca and Bernard are hiding in Penny's dress pocket. The three soon find the Devil's Eye within a pirate skull. As Penny pries the mouth open with a sword, the mice push the gem through it, but soon the oceanic tide rises and floods the cave. The three barely manage to escape with the diamond.

Medusa betrays Snoops and hides the diamond in Penny's teddy bear, while holding Penny and Snoops at gunpoint. When she trips over a cable set as a trap by Bernard and Bianca, Medusa loses the bear and the diamond to Penny, who runs away with them. The local animals arrive at the riverboat and aid Bernard and Bianca in trapping Brutus and Nero, then set off Mr. Snoops's fireworks to create more chaos. Meanwhile, Penny and the mice commandeer Medusa's swamp-mobile, a makeshift airboat. Medusa unsuccessfully pursues them, using Brutus and Nero as water-skis. As the riverboat sinks from the fireworks' damage, Medusa crashes and is left clinging to the boat's smoke stacks. Mr. Snoops escapes on a raft and laughs at her, while the irritated Brutus and Nero turn on her and circle below.

Back in New York City, the Rescue Aid Society watch a news report of how Penny found the Devil's Eye, which has been given to the Smithsonian Institution. It also mentions she has been adopted. The meeting is interrupted when Evinrude arrives with a call for help, sending Bernard and Bianca on a new adventure.

• Bob Newhart as Bernard, Rescue Aid Society's timid janitor, who reluctantly tags along with Miss Bianca on her journey to the Devil's Bayou to rescue Penny. He is highly superstitious about the number 13 and dislikes flying (the latter being a personality trait of Newhart).
• Eva Gabor as Miss Bianca, the Hungarian representative of the Rescue Aid Society. She is sophisticated and adventurous, and fond of Bernard, choosing him as her co-agent as she sets out to rescue Penny. Her Hungarian nationality was derived from that of her voice actress.
• Geraldine Page as Madame Medusa, a greedy, redheaded, wicked pawn-shop owner. Upon discovering the Devil's Eye diamond hidden in a blowhole, she kidnaps the small orphan, Penny, to retrieve it for her, as Penny is the only one small enough to fit in it. She has two pet crocodiles, who turn on her after she is thwarted by Bernard, Bianca, and Penny.
• Joe Flynn as Mr. Snoops, Medusa's clumsy and incompetent business partner, who obeys his boss's orders to steal the Devil's Eye in exchange for half of it. Upon being betrayed by Medusa, however, he turns on her and flees by raft, laughing at her. This was Flynn's final role, with the film being released after his death in 1974.
• Jeanette Nolan as Ellie Mae and Pat Buttram as Luke, two muskrats who reside in a Southern-style home on a patch of land in Devil's Bayou. Luke drinks very strong, homemade liquor, which is used to help Bernard and Evinrude regain energy when they need it. Its most important usage is for fuel for powering Medusa's swamp-mobile in the film's climax.
• Jim Jordan as Orville (named after Orville Wright of the Wright brothers, the inventors of the airplane; most likely influenced from Bob Newhart's stand-up sketch "Merchandising the Wright Brothers"), an albatross who gives Bernard and Bianca a ride to Devil's Bayou. Jordan, 80 years old by the time the film was completed, had been lured out of retirement and had not performed since the death of his wife and comic partner Marian in 1961; it would serve as Jordan's last public performance.
• John McIntire as Rufus, an elderly cat who resides at Morningside Orphanage and comforts Penny when she is sad. Although his time onscreen is rather brief, he provides the film's most important theme, faith. He was designed by animator Ollie Johnston, who retired after the film following a 40-year career with Disney.
• Michelle Stacy as Penny, a lonely six-year-old orphan girl, residing at Morningside Orphanage in New York City. She is kidnapped by Medusa in an attempt to retrieve the world's largest diamond, the Devil's Eye.
• Bernard Fox as Mr. Chairman, the chairman to the Rescue Aid Society.
• Larry Clemmons as Gramps, a grumpy, yet kind old turtle who carries a brown cane.
• James MacDonald as Evinrude (named after a brand of outboard motors), a dragonfly who mans a leaf boat across Devil's Bayou, giving Bernard and Miss Bianca a ride across the swamp waters.
• George Lindsey as Deadeye, a fisher rabbit who is one of Luke and Ellie Mae's friends.
• Bill McMillian as TV Announcer
• Dub Taylor as Digger, a mole.
• John Fiedler as Deacon Owl

In 1959, the book The Rescuers by Margery Sharp had been published to considerable success. In 1962, Sharp followed up with a sequel titled Miss Bianca. That same year, the books were optioned by Walt Disney, who began developing an animated film adaptation. In January 1963, story artist Otto Englander wrote a treatment based on the first book, centering on a Norwegian poet unfairly imprisoned in a Siberia-like stronghold known as the Black Castle. The story was revised with the location changed to Cuba, in which the mice would help the poet escape into the United States. However, as the story became overtly involved in international intrigue, Disney shelved the project as he was unhappy with the political overtones.[2] In August 1968, Englander wrote another treatment featuring Bernard and Bianca rescuing Richard the Lionheart during the Middle Ages.[3]

A total of four years were spent working on The Rescuers, which was made on a budget of $7.5 million.[4] After being revived during the early 1970s as a project for the young animators, led by Don Bluth, the studio would alternate between full-scale "A pictures" and smaller, scaled-back "B pictures" with simpler animation. The animators had selected the most recent book, Miss Bianca in the Antarctic, to adapt from. The new story involved a King penguin deceiving a captured polar bear into performing in shows aboard a schooner, causing the unsatisfied bear to place a bottle that would reach the mice.[5] This version of the story was later dropped because Fred Lucky, a storyboard artist, explained that the Arctic setting "was too stark a background for the animators."[5] Mattinson later explained, "Our problem was that the penguin wasn't formidable or evil enough for the audience to believe he would dominate the big bear. We struggled with that for a year or so. We changed the locale to somewhere in America and it was now a regular zoo and we tried to come up with something with the bear in the zoo and needing to be rescued but that didn't work either."

In that version, the bear character was still retained, but was renamed Louie the Bear. Jazz singer Louis Prima was cast in the role and had recorded most of the dialogue and multiple songs that were composed by Floyd Huddleston.[6] The writers also expanded the role of his best friend, Gus the Lion.[7] Huddleston had stated, "It's about two animals. One is Louis Prima — he's the polar bear — and Redd Foxx is the lion ...Louis gets cornered into leaving and going to the South Pole where he can make himself a bigger star. But he gets homesick; he feels fooled. They send out little mice as 'rescuers'."[8] According to storyboard artist Vance Gerry, director Wolfgang Reitherman had stated, "'It's too complicated. I want a simple story: A little girl gets kidnapped and the mice try to get her back, period.'"[9] By November 1973, the role of Louie the Bear had been heavily scaled back and then eliminated.[7] In one version, the bear was meant to be Bernard and Bianca's connection to Penny. Gerry explained, "We developed the sequence where, while the two mice are searching for clues as to where Penny has been taken, they come across this bear who she had been friends with because the orphanage where Penny was living was near the zoo." In the final film, the idea was reduced to a simple scene where Bernard enters a zoo and hears a lion's roar that scares him away.

Penny struggles to free the Devil's Eye diamond from a pirate's skull; the filmmakers carefully designed every shot of the scene to raise the tension.[10]

In Europe, while promoting the release of Robin Hood (1973), Reitherman stated: "I took Margery Sharp's books along and there was in there a mean woman in a crystal palace. When I got back I called some of the guys together and I said, 'We've got to get a villain in this thing.'"[3] The villainess and her motive to steal a diamond was adapted from the Diamond Duchess in Miss Bianca. The setting was then changed to the bayous found in the Southern United States.[11] By August 1973, the villainess was named the Grand Duchess with Phyllis Diller cast in the role.[7] A month later, conceptual artist Ken Anderson began depicting Cruella de Vil, the villainess from One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961), as the main antagonist of the film.[7][12] Anderson had drawn several sketches of Cruella de Vil sporting alligator-leathered chic attire and sunglasses; one sketch depicted her wearing bell-bottom pants and platform shoes.[13] However, several staff members such as animator Ollie Johnston stated it felt wrong to attempt a sequel for the character.[14] Furthermore, Mattinson explained that Milt Kahl did not want to animate Cruella de Vil. "Milt, of course, was very strong against that, 'Oh, no no. We're gonna have a new character. I'm not gonna do Cruella'," Mattinson recalled, "Because he felt that Marc [Davis had animated] Cruella beautifully. He was not gonna go and take his character."[12]

The new version of the character was renamed Madame Medusa, and her appearance was based on Kahl's then-wife, Phyllis Bounds (who was the niece of Lillian Disney), whom he divorced in 1978.[15] This was Kahl's last film for the studio, and he wanted his final character to be his best. He was so insistent on perfecting Madame Medusa that he ended up doing almost all the animation for the character himself.[16] The kidnapped child Penny was inspired by Patience, the orphan in the novel. The alligator characters Brutus and Nero was based on the two bloodhounds, Tyrant and Torment, in the novels. For the henchman, the filmmakers adapted the character, Mandrake, into Mr. Snoops. His appearance was caricatured from John Culhane, a journalist, who had been interviewing animators at the Disney studios.[14][17] Culhane claimed he was practically tricked into posing for various reactions, and his movements were imitated on Mr. Snoops's model sheet. However, he stated, "Becoming a Disney character was beyond my wildest dreams of glory."[18]

Also, the writers had considered developing Bernard and Bianca into married professional detectives, though they decided that leaving the characters as unmarried novices was more romantic.[11] For the supporting characters, a pint-sized swamp mobile for the mice—a leaf powered by a dragonfly—was created. As they developed the comedic potential of displaying his exhaustion through buzzing, the dragonfly grew from an incidental into a major character.[5] Veteran sound effects artist and voice actor Jimmy MacDonald came out of retirement to provide the effects.[19] Additionally, the local swamp creatures were originally written as a dedicated home guard that drilled and marched incessantly. However, the writers rewrote them into a volunteer group of helpful little bayou creatures. Their leader, a singing bullfrog, voiced by Phil Harris, was deleted from the film.[20] A pigeon was originally proposed to serve as transportation for Bernard and Bianca until Johnston remembered a True-Life Adventures episode that featured albatrosses and their clumsy take-offs and landings. He then suggested the ungainly bird instead.[21]

On February 13, 1976, co-director John Lounsbery died of a heart attack during production. Art Stevens, an animator, was then selected as the new co-director.[22]

The songwriting team of Carol Connors and Ayn Robbins first met in 1973 on a double date. Before then, Connors had co-composed and sang successful songs such as "To Know Him Is to Love Him" and "Hey Little Cobra" with the Teddy Bears. Meanwhile, Robbins worked as a personal secretary to actors George Kennedy and Eva Gabor and wrote unpublished poetry. On their first collaboration, they composed eleven songs for a Christmas show for an unproduced animated film. In spite of this, they were offered an interview from Walt Disney Productions to compose songs for The Rescuers. Describing their collaborative process, Robbins noted "...Carol plays the piano and I play the pencil."[28] During production, both women were nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song for "Gonna Fly Now" from Rocky (1976) with Bill Conti.[29]

Additionally, Connors and Robbins collaborated with composer Sammy Fain on the song, "Someone's Waiting for You". Most of the songs they had written for the film were performed by Shelby Flint.[29] Also, for the first time since Bambi (1942), all the most prominent songs were sung as part of a narrative, as opposed to by the film's characters as in most Disney animated films.

On June 19, 1977, The Rescuers premiered at the AFI Silver Theatre in Washington, D.C.[30] During the film's initial theatrical run, the film was released as a double feature with the live-action nature documentary film, A Tale of Two Critters.[31] On December 16, 1983, The Rescuers was re-released to theaters accompanied with the new Mickey Mouse featurette, Mickey's Christmas Carol, which marked the character's first theatrical appearance after a 30-year absence. In anticipation of its upcoming theatrically released sequel in 1990, The Rescuers Down Under, The Rescuers saw another successful theatrical run on March 17, 1989.

Nudity scandal

One of the frozen frames containing a picture of a topless woman in the window

On January 8, 1999, three days after the film's second release on home video, The Walt Disney Company announced a recall of about 3.4 million copies of the videotapes because there was an objectionable image in one of the film's backgrounds.[38][39][40][41]

The image in question is a blurry image of a topless woman with breasts and nipples showing. The image appears twice in non-consecutive frames during the scene in which Miss Bianca and Bernard are flying on Orville's back through New York City. The two images could not be seen in ordinary viewing because the film runs too fast—at 24 frames per second.[42]

On January 10, 1999, two days after the recall was announced, the London newspaper The Independent reported:

A Disney spokeswoman said that the images in The Rescuers were placed in the film during post-production, but she declined to say what they were or who placed them... The company said the aim of the recall was to keep its promise to families that they can trust and rely on the Disney brand to provide the best in family entertainment.[43]

The Rescuers home video was reissued on March 23, 1999, with the inappropriate nudity edited and blocked out.

Bernard and Bianca made appearances as meet-and-greet characters at Walt Disney World and Disneyland in the years following the original film's release. While they currently do not make regular appearances at the American parks, both continue to appear regularly at Tokyo Disney Resort. In 2024 both characters are set to appear as figures in the upcoming Tiana's Bayou Adventure ride (based on the 2009 film The Princess and the Frog) in Critter Country at Disneyland and Frontierland at Walt Disney World. [66]

Like other Disney animated characters, the characters of the film have recurring cameo appearances in the television series House of Mouse.

In the Disney Infinity video games, Medusa's Swamp Mobile was introduced as a vehicle in Disney Infinity 2.0.[67]

In the world builder video game Disney Magic Kingdoms, Bernard, Miss Bianca, Penny, Madame Medusa, and Orville appear as playable characters in the main storyline of the game, along with The Rescue Aid Society and Madame Medusa's Riverboat as attractions.[68][69][70]

Along with other Walt Disney Animation Studios characters, the main characters of the film have cameo appearances in the short film Once Upon a Studio.[71]

The Rescuers was the first Disney animated film to have a sequel. After three successful theatrical releases of the original film, The Rescuers Down Under was released theatrically on November 16, 1990.

The Rescuers Down Under takes place in the Australian Outback, and involves Bernard and Bianca trying to rescue a boy named Cody and a giant golden eagle called Marahute from a greedy poacher named Percival C. McLeach. Both Bob Newhart and Eva Gabor reprised their lead roles. Since Jim Jordan, who had voiced Orville, had since died, a new character, Wilbur (Orville's brother, another albatross), was created and voiced by John Candy.

• 1977 in film
• List of American films of 1977
• List of animated feature films of 1977
• List of highest-grossing animated films
• List of highest-grossing films in France
• List of Walt Disney Pictures films
• List of Disney theatrical animated feature films

• Korkis, Jim (January 19, 2022). "Remembering the Rescuers". Mouse Planet.

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