'90s Kids Movie Club: THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER and THE RESCUERS DOWN UNDER

 by Adam Riske

In hindsight, this was grindhouse for ‘90s kids.

During the holiday season of 1990, the go-to movie for kids was Home Alone. I, like many ‘90s kids, was obsessed with that movie, but after seeing it a couple of times there was still a glut of other options clamoring for our attention like Three Men and a Little Lady and Look Who’s Talking Too. Those sequels are not very good, but another one was good and that’s Disney’s relatively modest The Rescuers Down Under. I say modest because while the movie was released during what became considered Disney’s animation renaissance (which began with The Little Mermaid one year prior and lasted the entire decade in the ‘90s), The Rescuers Down Under is mostly forgotten or, at best, under-discussed. Disney seemed to be hedging their bets and attached their Mickey Mouse short The Prince and the Pauper to showings of The Rescuers Down Under in theaters, likely to entice people that the delayed sequel to The Rescuers was worth a trip against stiff competition.

Disney marketed The Prince and the Pauper and The Rescuers Down Under together as an event and the promotion worked like gangbusters for me at eight years old. I say as a joke in the headline that this was grindhouse for kids, but honestly it might have been my first experience seeing a double feature and certainly was my first experience seeing a program with an intermission. The intermission is especially cute because it’s a 10-minute break in between a 25-minute short (The Prince and the Pauper) and a 75-minute feature (The Rescuers Down Under). Nevertheless, the novelty was cool and I’m sure my mom was amused by how enthusiastic I was that we got to see two movies together and had an extra break to go get more food at the concession stand. I probably didn’t go get more snacks, because that would mean I’d miss the intermission countdown, and I certainly wasn’t going to do that. You can see a couple minutes of the intermission preserved on YouTube right here.

I recreated the experience the best I could at home this past weekend with the help of Disney+ and YouTube. I first watched The Prince and the Pauper on Disney+, switched over and caught two minutes of the intermission shown in theaters on YouTube, took a few more minutes as a break, and then went right into The Rescuers Down Under back on Disney+. So, how did they hold up? The Prince and the Pauper was okay. It’s cute and no short film featuring Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Goofy, Pluto, and Pete could be bad. It suffers in comparison to better shorts like Mickey’s Christmas Carol, which do a better job truncating a literary classic into under a half hour. However, I was struck by how beautiful the animation looked. The Disney+ transfers are spectacular on their older animated features.

After the intermission (which was a fun novelty to see again), I revisited The Rescuers Down Under for the first time in decades. I really liked the movie as a kid and owned the VHS, so it was cool seeing that a lot of the film came back to me quickly (I must have watched it a lot in the early ‘90s) and that the movie is good enough to be considered (by me at least) as a forgotten gem. It worked great as an action-adventure story in the same way as Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. An interesting thing I picked up on this viewing is how the weakest part of the movie probably are the scenes with The Rescuers (voiced by Bob Newhart and Eva Gabor) themselves. They are upstaged by Wilbur (voiced by the late, great John Candy) and new characters like Cody and the poacher villain McLeach (voiced menacingly by George C. Scott in a performance that’s not softened for children). The animation is spectacular, especially in the scenes where the young boy, Cody, is flying on a golden eagle through the landscapes of Australia. It recalls the flying sequences in How to Train Your Dragon and Avatar. I’m a big fan of The Rescuers Down Under, which I probably like even more than the original The Rescuers, though I haven’t seen that in a few decades either.

My main goal of this article is to get fellow ‘90s Kids to remember this long-forgotten double bill and encourage them to recreate it at home. It’s a fun way to spend an afternoon. But I also want to use this article to say thank you to my mom. One of the reasons movies are important to me is because I use them to remember things I did, places I went to, and people I spent time with. It’s stickier when I have a movie to attach the memory to for context. Rob marvels at the fact that Patrick and I are so good at remembering where we saw movies, when we saw them, and with whom. It’s a gift in my eyes to be able to associate movies with memories of the past. Even though I’m sure it was just something to do on an afternoon with her son for my mom back then, going to see The Prince and the Pauper and The Rescuers Down Under has become a cherished memory for me. My mom took me to a lot of movies when I was a kid, especially Disney re-releases like The Fox and the Hound, One Hundred and One Dalmatians, and Pinocchio to name a few. I remember them all. I remember The Fox and the Hound being sold out, but she still went in to get me popcorn because I really wanted some. I remember seeing One Hundred and One Dalmatians with her at the Disney World Pleasure Island 10 movie theater and how impressed I was that the theater sold not only popcorn, but also hot dogs. I remember seeing my favorite movie at the time – Pinocchio – and demanding my mom and I sit in the first row so we could be as close to the movie as possible. So, I want to wrap up this column with a simple thank you to my mom, who will forever be my movie buddy and the first person I think about whenever I revisit an old Disney classic.