On first inspection, a Disney film reviving a long-lost (albeit fondly-remembered) animated show might not be the most tantalising of news. But what if that show was the beloved Chip ’N Dale: Rescue Rangers (they’re chipmunks who solve crimes and save the day!), and the people making it were the comedy geniuses known as The Lonely Island? Then you’d start to get pretty damn excited. And, well, you’d be right: the first trailer for the new Chip ’N Dale movie, directed by Akiva Schaffer and featuring Andy Samberg as Dale, looks nice and witty, stuffed with all kinds of surprising crossovers to boot. Check out the trailer here:
Looks surprisingly fun, right? This one is taking a meta tack – catching up with Chip (John Mulaney) and Dale thirty years after their heyday, now washed up and in need of a ‘reboot’. And time has seen them drift apart – Dale has had dreaded CGI surgery, their former friend Monterey Jack developed a cheese addiction, and they’re no longer in the public eye. If there’s little hint of the plot that gets the gang back in motion, there are plenty of cameos – from Scrooge McDuck to Roger Rabbit, to the Sultan from Aladdin. More curiously, there are appearances from the My Little Pony characters and the cats from Cats too, the latter in a sequence that seems to be set in the uncanny valley itself, with Seth Rogen as a creepy medieval avatar. All that, and you get an Indiana Jones gag about Chip’s classic costume too – surely made possible thanks to Disney’s acquisition of LucasFilm.
Here’s hoping this one has even more gags and delights hidden up its sleeve. Might it even, somehow, live up to Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping and Hot Rod? We’ll find out when Chip ’N Dale: Rescue Rangers streams on Disney+ from 20 May.