‘The Naked Gun’ Writer Reflects On Backlash To His Live-Action ‘Chip ‘N Dale: Rescue Rangers’: “You Can’t Be So Reverential To The Thing That Came Before”
While many were less than thrilled with the film’s irreverent treatment of its various source materials, Chip ‘N Dale: Rescue Rangers writer Dan Gregor stands by his decision to run roughshod over Disney’s catalog of classics, as he believes that such a nostalgia-driven project is not worth undertaking without an appropriate level of pot stirring.
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Gregor, who co-wrote the film alongside Doug Mand, offered this reflection on his dance with the House of Mouse while speaking to The Hollywood Reporter‘s Ryan Gajewski following the opening of the screenwriting pair’s latest film, The Naked Gun.
As their time together drew to a close, Gregor was met with mention of a recent viral tweet that that saw a user declare that Chip ‘N Dale: Rescue Rangers to be “the worst thing” Disney had ever done.
Specifically, their issue with the film stemmed from the “very disturbing parallels” that exist between its portrayal of antagonist Peter Pan as a washed-up, bitter, and substance abusing former star and the real-life case of the flying adventurer’s original voice actor Bobby Driscoll, who experienced a similar spiral after being abruptly kicked to the curb by the studio thanks to puberty aging him out of the expected child actor aesthetic (and eventually succumbing to drug addiction before ultimately passing away from an overdose, his estrangement with his family and friends leaving his body left officially unidentified for over year).
(It should be noted that following an initial burst of outrage surrounding these parallels at the time of its release, Chip N’ Dale: Rescue Rangers director Akiva Schaffer later clarified that any similarities between Driscoll and the villainous ‘Sweet Pete’ (as voiced in the film by Will Arnett) was entirely coincidental, as the intention was to comment on the general Hollywood habit of ‘tossing aside’ child stars after they grow-up rather than on any specific case.)
From there asked if “comments like that surprise you?”, the screenwriter asserted in turn, “When you’re touching someone’s childhood, you do not know what you are going to stir up.”
“There are Gadget fans out there that I would not want to meet in an alley in the street at night. It’s functionally the ethos that we go into everything we do. There’s so much IP-driven stuff now, [and] we really feel like you have to have a certain amount of kicking up dust to make it worth it.
“You can’t be so reverential to the thing that came before. Rescue Rangers came completely out of that ethos, which was like, “How do we completely destroy the concept of nostalgia?” But even going into [The Naked Gun] was the same thing, which was like, ‘We really need to make sure that it has a real reason to exist on its own.'”
