Chip'n Dale, Rescue Rangers ("The Case of Cola Cult" and "Risky Beesness")

This review was commissioned by @ArlequineLunaire


Chip and Dale (named after the furniture manufacture, not the male striptease group; the latter postdates these characters by multiple decades) are a pair of cartoon chipmunks who have been helping fill out Walt Disney's steel donut shelf since the 1940's. They've been cast in various roles, usually as supporting characters for Mickey Mouse and Pluto and such. In the late eighties, they got their own show recasting them as a crimefighting superteam, because every American cartoon character in the late eighties had to be part of a crimefighting superteam. Thus, "Chip'n Dale, Rescue Rangers" was a thing, and a few years later "Gargoyles" was designed from the ground up to be a better version of that thing.

Those fucking turtles really remodeled the place, didn't they?

"Rescue Rangers" does present an interesting picture of Disney's televised animation in a transitional state. Both visually and tonally, this show harkens back to the chipmunk duo's origins. Like, this swarm of angry bees here. Do these not look distinctly Early Disney? Even moreso than the 1980's versions of Chip and Dale themselves' character designs?

Tonally, we're still kind of getting out of WB and Fred Wolf Films' shadows, while also still keeping a foot in the door of Chip and Dale's original, mouse-adjacent provenance. Hell, we even literalize the latter by having nearly all of the supporting original characters in "Rescue Rangers" be mice (although apparently, this is also partly recycled character design from an aborted "The Rescuers" series). Of the three other members of the rescue ranger superteam besides Chip and Dale themselves, two are mice.

I might be making this show sound worse than it is. From what I've seen it manages to be a pretty decent show of its kind, even if it has an awkward transitional sort of feel to it. Regardless of anything else about the series, its theme song is also a bop.

Anyway, the two episodes I'm looking at today are called "Risky Bees-ness" and "The Case of the Cola Cult." I suspect that both of them were chosen because of the way they handle some fairly adult subject matter that kids' shows of the time usually shied away from, even in their Very Special Episodes. How well they handle that subject matter, and how intentional their handling of it even was, varies considerably.

The stronger of the two, "The Case of the Cola Cult," is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. The Rescue Rangers happen to cross paths with a cult of mice who worship the corrosive power of soft drinks to melt away the trappings of this sinful world and leave its members free and pure in their super-insular commune. There are aesthetic details parodying the Unification Church, the Society for Krishna Consciousness, and the Church of Scientology, with the centrepiece of a trademarked sugary drink obviously being an oblique nod at the People's Temple.

Where I'll give this episode full marks is in its portrayal of cult recruitment tactics. When the Rescue Rangers bump into the cola worshippers, it's initially a friendly encounter. The cultists seem like harmless weirdos, though their leaders have distinctly shady vibes. They invite the rangers to join, and present a happy, welcoming face, and their charismatic high priest is savvy enough to know how to apply emotional pressure without seeming pushy or coercive. When the rangers decide it's time to head on home, the priest sees them off with a smile and a perfectly innocuous invitation to come back any time they want to learn more or even just say hello.

Things start to turn sour when a cultist who's been having doubts reaches out to the Rescue Rangers for help, only to be disappeared by the sect's militant wing (they have a whole martial art based on using bottle caps and straws as deadly weapons). And, this is also where the psychology of cult recruitment gets a relatively accurate portrayal. During an attempt to further investigate the cult after that one mouse's disappearance, the team inventor (with the uncreative nickname of "Gadget") gets her machines sabotaged by the cult's main legbreaker. She'd already been rolling a bunch of fumbles with her engineering recently, and after the dire failure that ensues from this she loses her confidence altogether and falls into a self-loathing spiral. She quits the rangers and - while the others just sit it out and assume she'll get over it and come back to them soon enough - she runs into a cola cult parade and gets talked into joining them.

They haven't actually found any evidence implicating the cult in wrongdoing yet, so her guard isn't up all the way.

Now, granted, the gaslighting and destruction of her self-confidence isn't deliberate on the cult's part. The sabotage was purely a tactical move to prevent the investigation. However, the fact that they readily jumped on the new weakness that performing it created still hews close enough to what actual cult leaders (and other forms of abuser, for that matter) do. Convincing marks of their own weakness and worthlessness, and then offering them a solution to their problems when they've been beaten down. At her initiation, they are also seen throwing her technician tools in their corrosive cola vat, removing her ability to support herself or stand on her own feet outside of the cult.

Elsewhere in the episode, it is shown that the cult preferentially targets wealthy mice for recruitment. Again, very true to life.

The ending...kinda sticks the landing, in some ways, but in many others it doesn't. When the other rangers eventually come looking for Gadget, they end up discovering the vault where the cult's leadership has been secretly stashing all of their recruits' worldly possessions instead of dissolving them in cola like they claim. And, they end up stumbling into a power struggle between the cult's two leader figures, with the purely cynical chief enforcer making a move against the actually-drinking-his-own-cola high priest. Gadget gets her mojo back, and she ends up landing the killing blow on the bad guy with an improvised invention; a crit success to balance out her previous fumbles. So that's cool.

The portrayal of the power struggle/coup plot itself would also be fairly true to life, except the show is really weirdly forgiving of the high priest after the more violent upstart has been dealt with.

Like, I think the episode is trying to make it seem like the high priest wasn't actually intending to use any of the stolen riches, just hide them? Or...he was originally planning to enrich himself, but then started believing his own lies and ended up not doing so while his lackey did? Maybe? Anyway, after a final battle that sees the thug dude drowning in his own cola vat, the priest and other cultists just get a heartwarming speech about how they don't need a phony religion in order to give themselves a sense of community. They can still have their little commune and their marching orchestras and such without needing to do any of the creepy shit or extorting money. And um. They listen. Everyone lives happily ever after, I guess.

Like I said, some parts of the landing stick, but most of them don't.

The other episode, "Risky Bees-ness," is just fucking weird from beginning to end.

The plot is much more typical SatAm kids' stuff than the cult episode, at least on its face. A bee colony's entire worker population gets hypnotized by a mysterious infrasonic pulse, and the abandoned queen needs the rangers to help her get them back. There's a subplot running through it about the rangers' housefly member, Zipper, having an unrequited crush on the queen and trying to use the team's heroics while on the case to impress her. Also fairly typical kiddy show material.

In keeping with the homages to classic Disney, the queen has quite a bit of their traditional "princess" aesthetic to her, to compliment the workers' Steamboat Willie look.​

The weird thing is that this episode has this constant undercurrent of class conflict that it keeps diverting itself away from at the last second. And when I say "undercurrent," it's really more "rushing river with a thin, transparent membrane over the top."

Much of the runtime is spent showing the queen being a spoiled, elitist, self-important caricature of aristocracy. She clearly thinks of the hypnotized workers as her property rather than her family or community, and in her own words describes the crime as "theft" rather than "kidnapping." This persists even when we eventually liberate the workers and hear them describe for themselves how horrible it was being under the villain's mind control. Zipper's one-sided crush on her is mostly one-sided on account of him being a commoner, not because she's disinterested in him on his own (lack of) merits.

Meanwhile, the villain is shown to be an underappreciated human scientist whose brilliant inventions in the field of acoustic pest-control devices are enriching the company without really benefitting her. Her villainous career starts with her repurposing her worker-bee-repeller into a worker-bee-controller, and (in an amusingly whimsical bit of plotting, to be fair) uses her hijacked bee swarm to brute force her way into the musical world as a bee-themed folk-rock star.

Like, Taylor has the bees steal a bunch of top-tier instruments and then play them for her at the concert she terrorized her way onto the stage of.

The fact that Taylor is very unattractive-looking definitely feels like part of the package in framing her as an underprivileged, underappreciated person driven to madness by her treatment by her social and financial betters. The fact that she isn't a very good musician (but IS a very good inventor), on the other hand, definitely makes it clear that out of all the grudges she might have against society, "holding back my dreams of a music career" is not one of the legitimate ones.

Anyway, the payoff for all this social tension is...nothing. The rescue rangers break Taylor's machine, the swarm turns on her and drives her out of the studio before returning to their queen and hive, and...the queen thinks to send Zipper a valentine card made of the living bodies of her workers in order to thank him for risking his life for her. Validating his crush on her a little bit, maybe.

There was so much focus on what an overbearing bitch the queen is that I was *sure* the final twist would be the workers deciding that she's no better than Taylor and leaving her of their own volition this time. But nope.

Ditto, we never get back to the corporation that Taylor was working for. Not for better or for worse. It's just never seen or mentioned again after her intro scene.

It's not like I expected a 1980's Disney cartoon to be super leftwing. I didn't. I'm more just surprised that the episode came as close as it did to getting openly political if it *wasn't* going to follow through with it. The villain didn't need a sympathetic, downtrodden starting situation for the plot to work. The queen didn't need to be so unpleasant for the plot to work (hell, she didn't even need to be so unpleasant for the subplot about Zipper's crush to work). It's weird for what it did AND for what it didn't do.

...

As a sort of silly aside here: I'm a little disappointed in how anthropomorphic media always takes the low-hanging fruit when it comes to social insects.

Like, sure, we call the reproductive females of the colony "queens." When you're making a cartoon for children, it's intuitive enough to roll with the terminology and portray them as literal royalty. But, wouldn't it be cool if - just once - we had a show or a movie like this that actually portrays the hive as a family with the queen as its mother?

Or hell, keep the not-all-that-biologically-accurate framing of the hive as a society rather than a family unit, but have the queen be as exploited (or as not exploited) as everyone else. Queens don't actually lead their colonies, they just lay eggs. You could even work in some #feminism about flying free until you settle down, and then never leaving the house and being stuck with reproductive labor for the rest of your life.

Or something else. I just feel like there's a lot of storytelling potential being squandered here, you know?

...

The high point of this episode was probably the heavy metal band that Taylor chased out of the backstage with bees so she could steal their stage. They look like this:

But they have these super-posh British accents and dainty upper crust mannerisms that cracked me up for pretty much as long as they were onscreen.

The low point of the episode was the exterior shot of the bee nest:

These are identified as honeybees in as many words, and we see them making honey and storing it in wax combs in the interior shots. However, this globular, free-hanging structure is very clearly a paper wasp nest. This broke my suspension of disbelief and ruined the entire story.


Something that stuck out for me about both episodes is how little Chip and Dale themselves had to do with anything. They rarely are the ones advancing the plot, or carrying the subplots. Almost seems like they're just here for brand recognition, while the "supporting" rescue rangers are the actual lead characters. There's a reason that none of the screenshots I saw fit to include in this review actually have Chip and Dale in them, despite the show ostensibly being about them. But then, that might just be an issue with these two episodes rather than the show as a whole.

Anyway, that's pretty much all I have to say I think. Interesting look at where Disney's for-television animation was at the time, both visually and writing-wise.