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Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers (1989)

Originally posted on 14 February 2026

First episode title: Piratsy Under the Seas

How familiar with the show am I?: I know of it - it's definitely possible I've seen some of it before.

Chip and Dale were an existing pair of mischievous chipmunk characters from Disney's old short cartoons, but this series gives them new roles as part of a team of adventuring heroes. Is it as successful in this sort of goal as DuckTales was?

Oh, heh, that's weird - along with The Telebugs, that's two shows in a row I've covered where one of the main characters is named Chip!

Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers title card

The main group of characters in this show consists of:

Both of the chipmunks have artifically high-pitched voices reminding me of another group of chipmunks, although Chip and Dale do pre-date Alvin as characters. All of the main cast are the type of cartoon animals to wear clothes on their top half and go bare on their bottom half, except for Gadget who wears trousers.

This show has another catchy theme song. It refers to Chip and Dale as "gumshoes", an old-fashioned term for detectives that I'm only familiar with because of Detective Gumshoe from Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney.

So let's get into the actual episode. The Rescue Rangers live in a tree that's in a park, so that's where we begin. Chip, yawning, walks into the living room to find it covered in rubbish - packaging and food remains. Since the chipmunks are normal-sized animals, that means banana skins as big as they are and so on. Chip is annoyed and starts gathering stuff up, and when he starts picking up peanut shells from a big pile, he grabs what turns out to be Dale's nose, startling him awake! Imagine being able to eat nuts so big that you could fall asleep under a pile of the shells...

Chip clears up rubbish and accidentally grabs Dale's nose

Dale jumps up and the pair of them start arguing, Dale complaining about being woken up and Chip about the mess Dale has left everywhere. Then Monterey Jack comes sliding down from a higher level on a spiral tube of some kind, also asking about the mess. One of the first words out of his mouth is "bloke", so that we're immediately sure that that accent is meant to be Australian. I'm not sure why an Australian mouse is named after an American cheese. Zipper arrives with him, unacknowledged for now.

The chipmunks continue their argument until Gadget walks in, at which point Chip and Dale both put on lovey-dovey expressions as they simultaneously say "Good morning, Gadget" like everything's cool. Gadget is also annoyed by the mess and asks who is going to clean it up - Chip and Monty both point at Dale, who is forced to comply.

Dale takes all the rubbish to a bin outside, which at his scale means climbing along the top of a bench to even reach the rim of the bin. He scatters garbage from his bag as he struggles to pour it in, and ends up falling into the bin himself! Chip is looking down at all this from a branch of the tree, laughing at Dale - he's in a more animal-like four-legged position as he does so, and his short striped tail wags happily as he laughs. It can often be a cute little detail when the animators of these sorts of shows give us a reminder that these characters aren't just funny-looking people but are actually their species.

Chip's mirth turns to shock when a guy from a bin lorry lifts up the bin and pours all the rubbish into the back of his vehicle, taking Dale with it! Chip presumably immediately alerts the others, as we soon see Gadget driving a vehicle she looks to have made herself from a rollerskate, a fan, a corkscrew, and some batteries, with Chip, Monty, and Zipper all riding on it with her. The part that looks like a corkscrew is like handlebars that she turns in order to steer it, and the fan acts as an engine. She drives them out of the park and down the street chasing the garbage truck, having a near miss going underneath another car, and then inadvertently riding up a random conveniently-placed plank of wood that acts as a ramp, propelling them all into the back of the lorry!

Gadget drives Chip, Monty, and Zipper along in her little vehicle

The next time we see them all, they're on a barge piled with rubbish that's being towed along on the water by a boat. It's weird that we didn't get to see the transfer process there, because you'd think they would try to escape during that, but I suppose they were unable to. Chip tells Dale he should feel right at home as an insult about his uncleanliness, but then Gadget, apparently able to ignore the mess they're in, says that she finds see voyages romantic, and Chip gets swept up into her world for a second and agrees.

Monterey Jack: This reminds me of the time I got shanghaied in Shanghai on a junk full of junk. I think it happened twice!

I guess the boat isn't expected to be going far, because Chip says that once it reaches the dump they can hitch a ride home. Dale says he wants to be back in time for dinner, and Chip can't believe anyone would be thinking of food in a place like this, only to see Zipper eating a grape whole. Obviously, a fly would not care much about how hygienic his food is!

Dale climbs to the top of the garbage pile and ends up making it unstable, forcing Chip who's standing below to dodge a falling can. Then Dale gets himself stuck in a glass bottle, which topples, landing perfectly upside-down on Chip in order for them both to get stuck inside it!

Dale is stuck in a bottle on a garbage heap, then the bottle falls and traps Chip too

Monty runs over to them and says he's going to free them, lifting a hammer over the bottle, and making Chip and Dale panic even more! But they all get distracted when a barrel bobs up out of the water and opens its lid, and a pole emerges from the top with an upside-down skull-and-crossbones pirate flag attached to it! Even though it is of course recognisable the wrong way around, hilariously Monty looks at it upside-down before then saying "Looks like pirates!"

An upside-down pirate flag pops out of the barrel, and Monty says it looks like pirates, looking at it upside-down

A stereotypical pirate voice shouts "fire" and four guns emerge from the barrel, but they together fire a net instead of bullets, each weight of the net having been inside each of the guns. Gadget, Monty, and Zipper all zoom out of the way, but the chipmunks, still trapped in the bottle, get dragged into the net along with the haul of rubbish that the pirates seem to be after. The pirate voice orders his "bilge rats" to "heave-ho", and the net starts getting pulled back in. In the process, Gadget and Monty get knocked into the water! Zipper can fly, of course, but he stays around Monty all the time. The three of them clamber into a small container that's floating amongst the rubbish that's been scattered into the water, and can only watch as the net gets dragged under! Gadget lets us know that there will luckily be air trapped in the bottle with them for now - phew, so the title characters aren't going to drown in episode one - and Monty points out that the barge has left them behind, so they have nothing to do but find a way to reunite with Chip and Dale.

So, under the water, Chip and Dale are being dragged down as the barrel sinks. There is visibly water in the bottom half of the bottle and air in the top half, but the blue of the bottle's water looks weird considering all of the surroundings are also meant to be underwater and aren't blue at all. The chipmunks see that the rope that's dragging the whole assembly along is connected to an overturned ship on the seabed. They try pushing up on the top (well, technically bottom) of the bottle and repeatedly kick downwards with their feet in the watery half, and this propels the bottle upwards, which I'm not really sure of the physics of. When the bottle reaches the top of the net, it bursts free... but then a red tentacle grabs the bottle and drags it back down! A big squid is now carrying them towards the ship, which is very scary for the pair of them, and they propel the bottle back up again, causing the squid to tie its own tentacles in knots trying to grab them. They've ended up under the ship, though, so they float up through a hatch in it...

And when the bottle surfaces (the ship also has air trapped in it, evidently), a group of rats dressed as pirates are looking down at them through a trapdoor! Their clear leader, in a captain's hat and eyepatch, is the one speaking in the voice we heard before. The rats throw down a rope to pull the chipmunks up, managing to get them out of the bottle in the process. The leader introduces the group as "pi-rats". Yes, that's the pun the episode title was going for too, but it's a little clearer here. Unexpectedly, the leader rat refers to himself as the first mate, not the captain - remember that - and his name is Jolly Roger. He also introduces the second mate as "Arrr-vey", and Arvey adds an "arrrr" for good measure.

Jolly Roger introduces himself

The chipmunks are obviously wary of the pirates, but then Roger invites them to join them in a feast, and Dale enthusiastically accepts, even pulling a napkin out of nowhere! The "feast" is just the pile of garbage they hauled in earlier, though. Hopefully there's something edible in there! There's a quick cut to the surface of the sea, where Gadget is working out what she can make with the various objects and containers they're floating around with, but that is just a reminder of their situation before we go straight back down to the sunken ship again.

Thanks to the fact that the entire ship is upside down, the chipmunks and the rats eat their meal on the underside of a table that's fixed to the floor that's over their heads. There might have been an easier way to say that. Since they're all tiny rodents, they fit in the middle of it all, sitting on cups as chairs and using a serving tray as a dining table. It looks as though they've managed to scrounge out the few edible bits of rubbish as their feast, and they're all drinking from what look like cups made of acorns. Dale is wearing his own pirate hat now and is enjoying himself, and Chip... is not.

Arvey suggests going on a treasure hunt, and he and the other generic pirates go rushing off, until Jolly Roger tells them off for leaving the feast without cleaning the table. Chip, grinning, elbows Dale and says "You see?", while Dale looks stunned that the pirates apparently aren't his kind of people after all - until the pirates "clean" the table by tipping it up and dumping all the trash back onto the floor, pleasing Dale and frustrating Chip. I like how much of an idea of their respective personalities I already have so soon into this episode, given that going into it I was only pretty sure I knew which one was Chip and which was Dale!

Now Roger says it's okay to go on a treasure hunt, and the rats all scamper off. Dale rushes to go after them, and Chip grabs him by the tail to stop him, despite the chipmunks not having very much tail to grab. Chip tells Dale he can't mess around pretending to be a pirate when he has a job to do as a Rescue Ranger, which is the one mention in this episode that they actually have the job that's referred to in the title of the show. So, what exactly that job entails is still unclear! Dale tells Chip he's jealous because he doesn't have a hat, which is a very strange thing to say considering that Chip does wear a hat. Yes, obviously he means pirate hat, but he didn't say that.

Chip grabs a pirate-hatted Dale by his tail

So Dale goes off anyway and Chip is forced to follow, because of course he doesn't really want Dale getting into any trouble. Roger, handing Dale a map (at their scale) and a compass (big, human-scale), tells him that he can lead the treasure hunt. Dale heads to one door that Roger has to hurriedly stop him from walking through, because it leads back to the territory of Billy the Squid, the one that attacked them earlier. Then Arvey excitedly says that he knows the way to the treasure, but Roger reminds him that Dale is leading them "this week", a wording that alerts Chip that there's something strange about this whole search, but Dale doesn't seem to notice.

Dale works out the map and successfully leads the party to the correct door, opening it to reveal a massive room full of coins and jewels that he Scrooge McDuck-dives into. He asks for help gathering the treasure up, but Roger tells him they can't do that, because they have to leave the treasure there to find next week! Roger explains to Chip that they've been discovering this same treasure every week for around two hundred years - it's not stated but I think we can assume this is something that's been passed down from the rats' ancestors rather than these specific rats being over two hundred years old! Dale still wants to take some of the treasure anyway, but Chip, sensing danger, pulls Dale's hat down over his face and quickly tells the pirates that they'll be leaving. It turns out that's the wrong thing to say too - the pirates all draw their swords (rodent-scale ones) and Roger tells the chipmunks that, since they've seen the treasure, he can't let them leave!

Dale leads the pirates into a room full of treasure

Back on the surface of the water, Gadget has finished fastening a bunch of random things together to make a craft to take her and Monty and Zipper down under the water. They get in to start it, and there's an odd little bit where the craft sinks slightly and Gadget says that they've got a problem, then adds "Reverse that, no problem". If the animation was meant to be conveying what this temporary issue was, it didn't do it very well at all. They descend and see the sunken ship for the first time, Monty being very impressed by it.

The fuel of their craft (baking soda) runs out right under the hatch that the chipmunks came in through, so they rise up into a room where they now can't see anything. Gadget turns on a torch that's part of the assembly - and the light shines right in the face of Billy the Squid. Monty exclaims "Blimey! An octopus!" Everyone else has been saying "squid", but I think he's right, it does look more like an octopus. The fact that this exclamation comes as they inadvertently shine a light in Billy's face and make it rub its eyes makes me wonder if the writers knew that "blimey" is a euphemism for "God blind me", making its use here oddly appropriate.

The light from Gadget and Monty's craft lights up the octopus

Billy grabs the craft so the three of them escape it, into the water, right before the octopus crushes it. They swim back out of the hatch and towards a crack in the boat that's too small for Billy to get through, which it turns out leads to the room with the big pile of treasure - however, one tentacle follows them and continues to menace them! Gadget leads the tentacle over to a treasure chest which she slams shut on it, causing Billy incredible pain and finally making the octopus flee. So Gadget isn't just good at inventions, but she thinks quickly in an emergency too! Monty wants to start gathering up as much treasure as he can but Gadget has a better plan:

Gadget: You and Zipper find Chip and Dale, while I try to build another submarine!

This is the first time the names Chip and Dale get mentioned at all in this whole episode, by the way, and it's in a context that doesn't tell you which one is which!

So Monty and Zipper go searching around the ship and catch sight of some of the pirates - eventually they manage to find the room where Chip and Dale are. Jolly Roger has got the chipmunks locked up in the "brig" - actually an old bird cage with the skeleton of a parrot still there on the perch! Dale is pleading that they made him an honorary pirate, but Roger doesn't want to risk that anyone might be trying to steal the treasure, because all the pirates are guarding it on behalf of Long-Lost Lafitte, the captain of the ship who disappeared two hundred years ago. That's why Roger is only the first mate despite being their leader, then. Presumably there was also a human captain given the scale the boat is built at.

Chip and Dale argue with each other over the fact that it's Dale's fault they are stuck here. These two turn to physical violence with each other more than you'd expect, as if they think they're still in a cartoonier show than this one generally is. Chip punts Dale up towards the parrot skeleton and its skull falls onto Chip's head like a mask, making him look a bit like Cubone from Pokémon, and the pirates all laugh at the two of them.

Chip kicks Dale, who crashes into a parrot skeleton, and Chip ends up with its skull on his head

Then another piratey voice starts shouting at them from off-screen, and they turn to see Monty wearing a hat, eyepatch, and false beard, with Zipper on his shoulder covered in a few feathers and a fake beak, and Monty claims to be Long-Lost Lafitte! He really hasn't had that much time to prepare this! The pirates are sceptical - Arvey thinks Zipper is too small to be a parrot, and Monty's excuse is that he's been ill. I wonder what kind of bird the feathers even came from!

Monty as a pirate, with Zipper on his shoulder as a parrot

Arvey remembers that Young Ned should be able to tell them whether this is the real Lafitte because he was his cabin boy. Obviously the joke here is that a rat called "Young" Ned is actually elderly, but for this story to work, he would need to be over two hundred years old, wouldn't he? Up until now there's been nothing supernatural about all this!

Dale, not getting what's going on, remarks that Lafitte looks a lot like Monterey Jack, and Chip shushes him. At least there might be some younger audience members who genuinely wouldn't know what is going on.

A couple of other rats carry the elderly, grey-bearded Ned over, and he announces that there are three ways you can distinguish the captain. One is the squint in his eye, which rouses a chorus of "aye"s from the pirates who can't seem to resist the chance to be stereotypical. Monty duly squints at Ned. Ned says that the captain was short, and Monty nervously squats lower. And then Ned says the captain only had one leg - Monty even more nervously stands on one leg, and Ned tells him it's the wrong one. He switches, and Ned embraces him, saying that the captain has come back! Apparently Ned takes finding the real captain about as seriously as the other pirates take their game of finding the treasure.

The other pirates cheer for the return of their captain and immediately follow Monty's orders to free the chipmunks from the cage. Almost immediately he's balancing on the wrong leg again but no-one seems to notice. Zipper arrives with Gadget, who almost gives everything away because Zipper can't tell her any of what's going on, but Chip quickly covers for her. Then Monty considers taking some of Lafitte's gold back with him, but a glare from Chip changes his mind. Sometimes it seems like Chip is the only character here with any sense! The heroes are now planning to leave in that barrel the pirates used earlier on, by the way, in case you were wondering what happened to the need for Gadget to build another submarine.

It seems like they're going to get away fine... until Ned stops them, asking the "captain" if he wants his cheese that Ned has been guarding for him all this time. It's a big cartoon-typical wedge of holey cheese with a stench cloud coming off of it, and Monty, who is apparently as much of a cheese fan as his name suggests, gets hypnotised rings in his eyes and bolts towards the cheese, all of his pirate disguise flying off him, making the rats realise he's not the real captain!

Ned carries some cheese on his back and says 'Been saving it for ye all these years!'

The pirates capture the heroes, and get them tied up in rope, ready to "walk the plank". The plank in question is actually a sword tied near the entrance in the room where Billy the Squid lurks in the water, and the sword is tied to a human-scale skull - if this really was a pirate ship with human pirates on it, that skull might be real! Billy pops up from the water and we see that one of his tentacles now has a little bandage on it, obviously from when Gadget slammed that chest shut on it.

Chip and Dale and the others are edged along the sword by Roger brandishing his own sword, and Chip says that he has an idea, telling everyone to breathe out. So he's trying to create enough slack in the ropes for them to get free, and this does at least succeed in allowing Zipper to fly out from the ropes, but this annoys Roger and he slams the big sword with his one, propelling everyone else over the water! They drop, but somehow Monty's tale gets curled around the sword, stopping their fall - although hanging by one's tail is always going to be a painful experience for a mouse, and hanging from the tip of a sword that way sounds excruciating!

The Rescue Rangers, tied together, fall off a sword and Monty's tail hangs onto it

Billy the Squid grabs onto the rodents, pulling on them and stretching Monty's tail even more, but Zipper gets up in the octopus's face, making it sneeze. It inadvertently lets go, and the heroes all go flying, as does the big sword - thanks to cartoon physics, the sword comes back down first and slices perfectly through the rope, freeing everyone! Billy then has to duck out of the way to avoid also being sliced by the sword, and the rodents end up hanging from the string of a trapdoor above them, which opens, depositing the trash from earlier all over the octopus.

While the pirates run off to try and reach the Rescue Rangers another way, the heroes try to figure out how they're going to get back to the surface, since the pirates will certainly be guarding the barrel. Gadget suggests making the entire ship float up, since the heavy treasure is probably what's keeping it down. That seems unlikely to me - an old ship that's been sunk for that long is probably in no condition to float no matter how empty you make it.

The pirates reach the room they're in and a battle ensues. Two of the pirates wheel in a "cannon" - one of the guns from the barrel earlier, wheeled along on two coins. As the heroes run, they encounter an actual, human-scale cannon, in amongst all the rubbish, and Gadget points out they can blast the treasure free using it. Monty says that he and Zipper can hold off the pirates in the meantime, and we see Zipper - who, remember, is just a tiny fly - swinging around a rodent-scale sword, not injuring any of the pirates but managing to bring down a net on some of them by cutting the rope that had been holding it.

The gun-cannon fires and Arvey falls off of it

Gadget has grabbed a match from somewhere and orders Chip and Dale to load the cannon, which they struggle with because cannonballs are heavy even when you're not smaller than them, but the pirates shoot at them and the bullet inadvertently pushes the ball into the cannon for them! In amongst all this there's some shenanigans with Monty swinging around on a rope to try and attack the pirates and getting himself tied up in knots in the process.

Gadget launches the cannonball and it bursts through a wall and into the room with the treasure, breaking some ropes that were apparently holding up the floor of that room and spilling the treasure out onto the seabed. I don't think that really works - this boat is supposed to be upside-down, so what purpose did that hatch and those ropes serve when it was the right way up? Billy the Squid has to rush to dodge the spilled treasure, and clings onto the ship's mast in fear, which means he's taken along with the boat as it starts to rise to the surface as Gadget predicted.

Chip pushes Dale out of the path of the cannon, which fires, releasing the treasure

The ship reaches the surface and tips over to the right way up again, the chipmunks having to dodge a falling treasure chest in the process - did the writers forget that they were in the room with the garbage and not the treasure room? And didn't the treasure all spill out? The pirates see that they're at the surface and praise it as a miracle, saying that they can have real adventures again. Of course, this can't be just because of the fact that they can go above water now, because they already had the barrel for that, so this is more that they can sail their ship again. Chip and Dale are up on the mast and call down that the pirates don't have to worry about Billy the Squid any more, as we see that they've tied all his tentacles to the mast, but that doesn't seem like a very permanent solution!

The pirates let the heroes leave in the barrel. We see the heroes floating off, waving goodbye to the pirate ship, the pirates commenting that "the red-nosed swab" would have been a great pi-rat. Chip asks "Where is Dale?" The episode is about to end and finally there's been a line that distinguishes which chipmunk is which! It turns out where Dale is is inside the barrel preparing the gun "cannons", which he sticks over the top like the pirates did and launches garbage all over the pirates! Wait, why?! It seemed like everyone was getting along in the end!

This is a fun show! It's a good cast of main characters and I want to see more of them, especially since we didn't get to see them do much rescuing here.

I'm planning to try a different format starting from next week's entry. Stay tuned! And in the meantime, if you have any feedback, please get in touch!