Chip ’N Dale: Rescue Rangers

Unfiltered, uncensored, uncompromising trailer reactions from team EMPIRE

Beth Webb (News Editor): Do we have any certified Rescue Rangers fans among us?

Ben Travis (Deputy Online Editor): When I went to Disneyland Paris when I was seven, I got pictures with Chip and Dale. I was really excited, but I didn’t know who they were. I just thought they were exciting chipmunks in hats.

Joanna Moran (Photography Director): My chipmunks were always Alvin, Simon and Theodore. It was never Chip and Dave, it was the other ones.

Alex Godfrey (Acting Features Editor): Chip and Dave were in Eastenders, I think.

Joanna: This is Paula Abdul, and she had this song…

Alex: She had a pretty cool single in the 1980s called Opposites Attract, and the video was her dancing — possibly breakdancing — with a cartoon character called MC Skat Kat. He has a pretty meaty Wikipedia page considering he was just a cartoon character in a Paula Abdul video.

John Nugent (Reviews Editor): This seems like retro nostalgia for a very specific generation, right? Like, this is not stuff for actual kids today.

Alex: Is this a diplomatic way of telling me that I’m old, John?

Beth: I think it’s got a younger appeal as well. The Lonely Island guys are on the voice cast, so it’s very much tapping into an audience that enjoyed, among other things, their ‘Dick In A Box’ music video.

Mike Cathro (Deputy Art Director):

I hope that song makes an appearance.

Joanna: So it’s for young boys who smoke a lot of weed.

Beth: Yes, that as well.

John: I’m so excited to see Roger Rabbit here. Has he done anything since Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

Alex: I think he’s been in prison.

Joanna: Surely there’s going to be a Super Bowl ad next year starring Roger Rabbit. John: Who Framed Roger Rabbit is the best film Robert Zemeckis has ever made. And I will stand by that.

Alex: Why do you hate Back To The Future, John?

Ben: I’m pretty sure you just said that you hate Back To The Future, John.

John: It’s fun that it’s kind of doing what Roger Rabbit did, which is bring together lots of disparate characters. It was one of the first meta, live-action, animated mash-up things.

Sophie Butcher (Social Media Editor): The tiny leather jackets here made me laugh.

Ben: So Chip was designed after Indiana

Jones, wasn’t he? And Dale was basically Magnum P.I.?

Jo: He’s very Tom Selleck, isn’t he?

Beth: Right, we need to really strap in for this. This is when it really gets weird.

Joanna: Do you see buttholes here?

Beth: No buttholes, Jo. None of Judi Dench’s human hands on the end of a cat’s arms. Although I think that would make sense here.

Alex: I don’t want to sound like a dickhead, but they do look better here than they did in actual Cats.

John: Do you think that these are Andrew Lloyd Webber-approved cats?

Ben: I believe that Andrew Lloyd Webber disapproved of the Cats film. Didn’t he disapprove so much that he bought a dog?

Mike: This looks like one of those Korean news reports where they need to dramatise real events.

Ben: The face on this guy looks like Michael Cera.

Beth: I bet that’s not an accident either.

Joanna: I think he looks like Mark Zuckerberg.

Sophie: Is this a reference to a film or a game or something?

Ben: I get the sense from this trailer that there’ll be certain things that are I.P.S and certain things that are just made-up nonsense.

Joanna: This is sort of like a warlords computer game, right?

Liz Beardsworth (Production Editor): He looks like Ewan Mcgregor.

Ben: I think this is another Zemeckis reference. This is Zemeckis’ Beowulf.

Mike: This looks better than the troll at the end of Eternals.

Beth: This looks like Shrek 2-era animation, which again probably isn’t an accident. A lot of shit went down between Disney and Dreamworks over Shrek, didn’t it? They’re probably having a bit of a swipe here.

Ben: I’ve been so distracted by Seth Rogen’s stoner laugh that I hadn’t noticed that there’s a Monsters, Inc.doorway in the background.

Beth: That’s exciting.

Ben: This whole sequence has to take place in a literal uncanny valley, where everyone looks off and it’s all the bad animation from over the years.

Alex: That’s really funny. I’ve never seen that addressed in a film before, or anywhere other than on Twitter, where someone’s just saying that it’s shit.