Not so long ago, I contemplated legally changing my name to Harry Potter and writing an autobiography called “The Magical Life of Harry Potter” and just throwing it up on Amazon for five bucks to see how much money I could make.
Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers, the new film is now available to stream on Disney+. The IP mega-crossover i.e. The can’t believe it cameos, left-field appearances and packed with surprises bouillabaisse is actually really, REALLY entertaining. It scratched a nostalgia itch for myself and the premise of no-budget bootleg movies or “Mockbusters” a.k.a Confused Grandparent Christmas Present Bait is gold.
Let’s take a look at Ratatöing. a rat and restaurant themed acceptable animated film that in no way owes its existence to Ratatouille. Just kidding, it piggybacked on Remi and came out the same year as Pixar’s release.
Ratatöing was made by Video Brinquedo, a Brazilian studio that specializes in Mockbusters. This studio is infamous. They started with a knock off of Cars, they know pretty well what they are doing. The title is 100% made to trip up grandparents, it’s irrelevant to the actual movie. It was a cash grab using a LOT of underpaid interns to churn out really bad(?) quality. Part of their filmography includes Gladiformers, The Little Panda Fighter, Little & Big Monsters, What’s Up? Balloon to the Rescue!, The Frog Prince, and their Little Cars series, all derivatives of Disney and Dreamworks movies. The hilarious thing about Ratatöing is that the English voice cast is full of anime staples like Wayne Grayson (Joey in Yu-Gi-Oh, Mikey in 2003 TMNT), Lisa Ortiz (Lina Inverse in Slayers, Amy Rose in most Sonic products between Sonic X and Colors), Veronica Taylor (Ash in Pokémon), and Dan Green (Yugi/Atem in Yu-Gi-Oh.) Also, the fact that the people who made Ratatöing clearly thought that the rat’s name in Ratatouille was “Ratatouille” is perfect, beautiful, and awesome.
I love this. It’s a slight improvement over the ‘80s, when “Atari” and “Nintendo” were virtually generic terms for “home video game console.” So some poor kid might ask his parents for an Atari 2600 or NES for his birthday and get an Intellivision or a Sega Master System instead.
It could be that a copy of a copy is the Deceptive DVD packaging from the golden age of dollar DVD’s. This is an under-appreciated art form. Any movie that had anybody who ever made a name years later was packaged with a big picture of them front and center and the real stars of the movie tucked into the corners. Then you watch the movie and they have like three lines.If you got your hands on The Second Coming of Suzanne because you thought it was a Richard Dreyfuss movie you had a huge disappointment in store. They were just copying the Blockbuster Video era philosophy of “people only rent movies because they have their favorite stars in them, you have to put big headshots of the stars on the covers or they’ll never notice them” that ruined most studio video packaging for a generation.
Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers is certainly entertaining, quite funny and definitely mega- creative in terms of the material going all meta. Ugly Sonic, I’m a fan.