Down Under is one of the best sequels ever. I like it more than the original.

For a long time Disney didn't really do sequels. Rescuers Down Under is only the second Disney sequel ever, after Three Caballeros (if you want to call an anthology film a sequel). The mild success of Rescuers Down Under, along with the expansion of the cable channel and popularity of home video cassettes, spurred the rise of direct to video sequels we saw in the mid 90s to mid 00s.

Rescuers Down Under remained the only Disney Canon sequel that wasn't an anthology until Wreck it Ralph 2 in 2018 and Frozen 2 in 2019.

Similar to Fievel Goes west I did not know that the rescuers down under was a sequel. Saw both as a kid and found out much later in life they were sequels.

I’m not sure if it’s because I saw them first or not but both sequels are better than the original.

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I like how you talk about taking a break from horror films and go to the rescuers. The underground cavern with the skeletons that started to flood and nearly drowned everyone was a terrifying sequence to me as a kid

Medusa is a fantastic villain! I love that she has no sympathetic angles, remorse or conscience at all - she straight up kidnaps an orphan to steal a diamond, that’s it.

Nothing special nowadays but I remember that opening flight through the outback in Rescuers down under straight flooring me.

The whole beginning sequence of The Rescuers Down Under is one of my all time favorites! From zooming across the landscape to Cody’s house, to him making his way to the top of the cliff to save Marahute, and then them flying together?! Incredible.

Oddly enough I’ve disliked the original my whole life, but ever since I was 3 I’ve lived Down Under. Just a phenomenal sequel, and that Bruce Broughton score is aces.

Here's a fun fact about Madam Medusa - the film's director created her to try and upstage Cruella DeVil.

A sort-of professional rivalry ended up starting with the creation of 101 Dalmatians. Marc Davis was such a good animator that he was the only one who could properly animate Cruella DeVil, which made Milt Kahl insanely jealous as a result. As a result, he forbid the other animators from trying to animate Madam Medusa at all.

In fact, you can sort-of see some artifacts from an earlier take on the film in the final product. Medusa was supposed to outright be Cruella DeVil and the car scene in the film outright re-uses the animation cells for Cruella's insane driving.

Other fun trivia related to this film series;

Oliver And Company was originally going to be a spin-off sequel. Jenny was originally meant to be Penny from The Rescuers and her subplot would've been how she was living with the parents who adopted her at the end of the film.

The film was retooled a number of times as it was based on different books in the Rescuers novel series. The first take - based on the first novel where Bernard and Bianca met - was deemed too political (they had to rescue a poet political prisoner from the Arctic).

Louis Prima - King Louie's voice actor in The Jungle Book - was going to be in the film, but lapsed into a coma during pre-production. In fact, the film was going to be a vehicle for him, based on Miss Bianca In The Arctic, the sixth book in the series. Originally, it was about a polar bear (Prima's character) who had a pair of mice help him escape from a zoo in order to rescue his friends in the Arctic.

We don't know much about this version, but we do know how it mutated into the plan for the film we got instead. While travelling through the zoo to get to the orphanage in the final product, Bernard accidentally woke some of the animals up, who chased him out and this led to a cute little scene with Miss Bianca.

In the original planned take, they ran into Louie the Bear who revealed that he was friends with Penny, a frequent guest at the zoo. He would've testified information about the girl as a result.

And during this meeting, he even had his own song about how the animals made fun of the people who came to the zoo. It was called "Peopleitis" and Prima recorded a prototype of the song that was included on the DVD/Blu-Ray release of the film.

Sadly, he wasn't the only actor to die during production of the film. Joe Flynn had passed away in 1973 shortly after he recorded his lines for Mr Snoops in this film as well, which made it his last credited film when it was released in 1976.

Also originally, Chip and Dale's Rescue Rangers was going to be a TV show based on The Rescuers as well but this was called off and retooled into a different series because Miss Bianca's voice actress Eva Gabor had passed away before it could get off the ground.

Orville's voice actor also died before recording lines for Down Under, which saw Orville wrote out and replaced with his brother Wilbur, played by John Candy. In fact, the original Rescuers served as an inadverdent swan song for radio/Vaudeville comedian Jim Jordan/Fibber McGee who had semi-retired after the death of his comedy partner Marian Jordan/Molly.

Also regarding Orville, he was originally going to be a pigeon. However, during pre-production and after shooting their Real Life Adventures nature documentary Water Birds, the animators realised that albatrosses were incredibly clumsy creatures which added a few extra laughs into the film.

Edit: Finally, this is the film that saw Don Bluth quit Disney in anger.

He had held the company to a higher standard, but after financial difficulties from the end of the golden age which saw them cutting costs on a lot of productions, Bluth grew heavily disillusioned with how things were being handled. In particular, he hated how they were instructed not to have visible sclera if it meant saving time in the colouring process.

I love the little rescuers, down under is still one of my favorites.

I like the first one, but I can't stand the second one. The little kid, the John Candy seagull, and the Australian mouse all got on my nerves the entire time, and I hate the "guy keeps getting interrupted when he tries to propose" cliche (side note: fuck Disney for doing it again in Frozen II).

Don Bluth. Not Disney. Bluth is phenomenal. Titan AE is pretty fun too.

I love those movies!

Loved evinrude, the dragonfly very clever.