‘Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers’ Writers on Finding That Nostalgia Sweet Spot While Also Razzing Reboots

[Warning: this story contains spoilers for Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers.] 

Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers writers Dan Gregor and Doug Mand understood the assignment: Sometimes, some crimes go slippin’ through the cracks. But two cartoon gumshoes are back pickin’ up the slack.

Fans since childhood of the iconic ’90s cartoon on which their film is based, the duo knew they had to hit the nostalgia sweet spot just right. And now that the film has finally arrived on Disney+, they have no doubt fans will enjoy the new adventure with old cartoon pals as much as they enjoyed creating it, they tell The Hollywood Reporter.

From a slew of (sometimes shocking) cameos spanning the cartoon sphere to bringing the iconic Disney chipmunks to life in a way that scraped bits of their childhood nostalgia together, Gregor and Mand aimed to make people (and themselves) laugh as much as possible.

At the same time, in today’s reboot culture, the wordsmiths wanted to include jokes poking fun at how much classic IP is being revived and jabs at why fan-favorite series and films can’t just be left alone.

In their chat with THR, Mand and Gregor opened up about their inspiration for the film, how they were able to include characters from so many various studios, and their process of deciding what characters from their childhood should make an appearance, among much more.

There seems to be some serious Who Framed Roger Rabbit inspiration in the design. How did you decide to incorporate those aspects, and what are your thoughts on its impact on film? 

Dan Gregor: I’m literally sitting under my Roger Rabbit poster right now.

Doug Mand: It was really one of the first things we talked about once we decided that we were gonna dive into this world. It’s, to this day, one of the greatest movies ever made, we believe, and we wanted to take the essence of that movie — the idea that toons can live in the real world, and we don’t have to necessarily discuss why that is.

Then, also just kind of capture the joy of that movie, which was to be able to see Disney characters with Warner Bros. characters and having your mind blown, and animated characters interacting with human actors in a very real way, with real emotions and taken seriously. This was very much at the heart of the movie almost from the beginning. So, Roger Rabbit, we wanted to pay homage to it and also hopefully expand upon what was started and put in place for us.

What was your connection to the Rescue Rangers cartoon? 

Gregor: I just had my mom dig up a bunch of old photos of me at Disney World in the ’90s, and she found a ton of pictures of me obsessively hugging the dolls. I dressed up like Dale in one of them. We grew up obsessed with the Disney Afternoon. It was sort of a really important part of our childhoods — racing home from school to watch Darkwing Duck and TaleSpin and Goof Troop and Gummi Bears. I’m still singing the Gummi Bears theme song whenever I have sugary food. And so, it was something super important to us. We love Rescue Rangers.

But one of the things that we felt was really great about jumping into this project was that despite our love for it as a kid, it’s not something that necessarily needs to exist again. We don’t want to necessarily watch just another episode of Rescue Rangers in a new animation style. [The classic series] is up on Disney+ now, so you can watch all the old episodes, you don’t need a new one. So it was really important for us to sort of approach it with the question: “Why? Why should this exist again?” And we’ve tried to really take that question and a little bit of the toxic nostalgia of how everything gets brought back ad nauseam endlessly and put it into the mouths of the characters and the ethos underlying the world of why do these things have to be things. Why can’t we just go watch the old thing and appreciate the old thing?

It was really important for us that we got to be in a place where, thankfully, the Rescue Rangers are beloved, but also they’re not sacred. They’re not characters that you can’t mess around with. I mean, the actual origin of Chip and Dale was that they were Donald Duck’s foils for a long time. Likewise, Baloo is the Jungle Book, and then all of a sudden, he’s a pilot in a jungle bar in TaleSpin, and so that idea that Chip and Dale were putting on hats and costumes every week really became part of the cornerstone of them being actors, that they’re just filling roles, and they show up to do a TV show, and when they leave, they put on different clothes. It’s endlessly joyful to me that we get to see Chip and Dale in different clothes. I don’t know why that’s fun to me.

How were you able to include so many different characters from so many IPs for other studios?

Mand: It is a shocker the amount of characters and cameos that make it into this movie. As writers, it’s easy for us to sit and be like, “Wouldn’t it be cool if this character was in there?” It’s part of the joy of writing it, and while we were writing it, Dan and I were like, “Well, they’re never going to make this. I mean, there’s just no way that they’re going to make this, and [these cameos] gonna happen.” So, for us, it was just about using our imaginations and having fun, and then keeping our expectations low.

Then, [director] Akiva Schaffer coming on when he did was just such an amazing gift to us. He was the perfect person for it. He got what was on the page, and then just made it so much better. Between him and our producers at Mandeville and Disney, we gotta give them credit. Each one of those characters you see, that’s an individual negotiation. That’s an individual conversation that needed to be had, and every single producer on this movie and the lawyers at Disney, they were making calls, sending emails, texting, to try to get these things onscreen. That really wasn’t Dan and myself. We just got to write it, and then we’re still blown away.

Gregor: Someone will put a legal injunction on this movie, and we’ll be like, “Well, those are a lot of fun interviews for a movie no one’s gonna see.”

Mand: It was really just about making ourselves laugh, and then when Akiva came on, he shared the exact kind of vision of wanting to really shock people and have people capture that enjoyment as I mentioned with like Roger Rabbit when you’re just shocked to see these animated characters together. It’s just so much fun, and it kind of lets the audience know, I think right from the get-go, that, hopefully, they’re in for a different kind of ride.

How did you decide which characters you wanted to include in the film?

Gregor: Honestly, just scraping our childhood nostalgia. It all comes from this question of “Well, what’s worth rebooting? What’s worth coming back?” Our police captain is not Gumby, but he’s in the vein of Gumby. And so even that kind of thing in the logic of the world is like, well if you’ve seen a character onscreen, you might not see that character again in this movie. But there’s probably people in his type that are other animations that would exist in his genetic space. That was definitely the really fun part for us, just rolling around like pigs in the slop of our own childhood.

Mand: All the characters, we wrote them. We had obviously plot points, so some characters had bigger parts than others. Then, in some of these cases, things just worked and felt better, and we would lean into that more. That’s also really kind of the spirit that Akiva takes. One of the amazing things he does so well is focusing on something that really is hitting a nerve, and that’s what we were going for with all the characters, and some of the characters we felt just needed more.

How about which Chip and Dale Easter eggs you wanted to include?

Mand: What we used from that show was partially about what helps us tell the best story for this, which was what is the history of these two friends and their career as actors and history as friends? So, I think that was the biggest thing, to treat them like that show was a huge part of their careers. Those other actors in the show were a big part of their lives then and to varying degrees in the present, as well as having fun with it. But we wanted to kind of treat it like when you see the actors from a show you love, get back together, what is that like? So looking at the show through the lens of old friends and people who share a lot of time together for a very short period of time.

Who was your favorite Disney character to work into the script?

Gregor: I’m so excited that Scrooge McDuck is taking a jacuzzi in gold, that’s my dream scenario. I collected coins [as a child] just so I could roll around in them on the floor and pretend to be Scrooge McDuck swimming in coins, and so the fact that there’s a shot of Scrooge in a hot tub is pretty much my dream.

Mand: Within the bath scene, there are a couple of characters that I still can’t believe are in there, and I’m just so excited about it. Without giving away too much joy, there are a lot of times you can pause this movie, and go back and be like, “Did I just see what I think I saw?” I think that captures just the kind of joy and the insanity of this movie.

Did John Mulaney and Andy Samberg improvise or contribute to the script?

Mand: They’re both so amazing. We would get what was on the page. Then, when you’re recording, Dan and I are a lot of times on a Zoom watching and throwing in more jokes, and Akiva is giving them jokes, and they themselves are such amazing comedians and writers in their own right.

There was some kind of collaboration in terms of like, what are other versions of that joke? How do you make this line sound better in your own mouth? John, as a stand-up, with all that experience, and Andy just being just such an amazing comedic actor, they both brought their own voice to the characters and took what was on the page and ran with it.

Gregor: One of the joys of doing animated characters is that it’s never done. There’s no shoot day. If you’re normally onset with an actor, you gotta get it, but we had the pleasure and workload of doing this both many, many times as a script before we ever shot something, and then many, many times in the recording booth, where we would work on the line and change the line. It was a great team effort to get everything just as good as we could.

And now, the million-dollar question: How did Zipper and Gadget procreate?

Gregor: I have a diagram that I’ll pull out right now for you. (Laughs) I mean, honestly, that joke is one of the weirder jokes that I’m so happy has survived the process, because I personally had the same sort of delightfully weird question as you, which is like, “What would their kids even look like?” Even in the show, there’s this flirtation between Chip and Gadget, and you’re like, “They can’t mate. Chipmunks and mice can’t get it on.” The Ninja Turtles always brought it up for me, where it’s like, “Why are they flirting with April O’Neil? The fuck are they gonna do? They’re turtles.” So, that weird, interspecies sort of romance always I find to be a very funny detail that is just sort of assumed into a lot of cartoons. So, to actually get to answer that very weird question of like, “OK, alright, you think they should be a couple? OK, well, this is what’s gonna happen to their kids.”

What do you hope is a takeaway of the movie, both for fans who grew up watching Rescue Rangers, and new people discovering them?

Mand: First and foremost, that people just have a hell of a good time watching it. I hope the experience is, “Wow, I can’t believe what I just saw. I can’t believe it got made.” There’s a smile on people’s faces, and they walk away with some feeling of joy at the heart of the movie, which is this relationship at the center. I think if you’re laughing your butt off and being shocked that this movie got made, and then at the end being like, “Wow, I didn’t realize I cared about these two chipmunks and their relationship.” For me, that would be very satisfying that you just have a good time and that you’re surprised that you actually care about what happened.

Gregor: I hope people feel like they got blasted in the face with a hose of nostalgia for better and worse.

Interview edited for length and clarity.

Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers is streaming now exclusively on Disney+.