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- In the animated Disney movie "The
Rescuers," a pair of intrepid mice attempts to rescue a girl from
Madame Medusa, an evil swamp woman who has kidnapped her in an attempt
to find a fabulous diamond.
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- There's color. There's action. There's
delightful music.
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- There's also a pair of naked breasts.
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- The discovery of a brief, virtually undetectable
glimpse of the (human) female anatomy in video versions of "The Rescuers"
prompted an embarrassed Walt Disney Co. yesterday to take an unprecedented
step. It recalled all 3.4 million copies of the video that it has distributed
to stores in recent days. Consumers can get refunds or corrected copies.
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- The reason, according to a brief Disney
press release, is that the movie contains "an objectionable background
image."
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- Disney officials declined to say publicly
what the OBI was. Pressed for details, a spokeswoman, Claudia Peters, vaguely
and primly insisted it was "an image that does not belong in a children's
video."
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- Perhaps not, considering that the image
in question is a photograph of the torso of a nude woman, according to
company sources and animation experts. The photo appears in the window
of a building during a scene early in the movie in which the two mice take
flight on the back of a sea gull.
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- Unless one goes looking for it, the photograph
is nearly impossible to see. It appears for only two frames, which is less
than an eye blink in the course of a 77-minute movie containing 110,000
frames. Disney sources say the image was inserted into the movie by an
unknown employee during production in 1976 or early 1977.
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- The film premiered in 1977, and apparently
no one noticed, even when it returned to the theaters in 1983 and 1989.
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- An earlier video release of the film
in 1992 did not contain the two offending frames, because it was made from
a master copy of the film that did not contain them. But the one that has
just hit the stores has the frames.
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- Earlier this week, however, an anonymous
animator with a VCR capable of playing videos frame by frame spotted the
photo; a posting to an Internet discussion group for animators eventually
tipped off Disney.
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- "The Rescuers" takes its place
in what appears to be something of a grand tradition among animators: slipping
virtually invisible naughty stuff into cartoons.
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- Warner Bros. animators, for example,
once drew Bugs Bunny getting out of the bathtub with what appears to be
a phallic object briefly appearing on screen, said Jerry Beck, an animation
consultant and author of "The 50 Greatest Cartoons." In Disney's
"Who Framed Roger Rabbit," the curvaceous Jessica Rabbit appears
in one scene without panties.
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- Although Disney denies it, Heather Kenyon,
editor of Animation World magazine, says the word "SEX" is visible
in the night sky during a scene in "The Lion King."
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- "Knowing animators, then and today,
a lot of this was [done] before the video era, and no one expected you'd
be able to see these films frame by frame," said Beck. "It's
difficult to know exactly how or where something like this gets put in.
A Disney animated film is an assembly line, a factory-made process, and
there are hundreds of people involved. For them to add a little embellishment
that no one will see is their little joke."
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- Disney declined to say what the recall
will cost, although it says it took the action to "keep its promise
to families that they can trust and rely on the Disney brand to provide
the finest in family entertainment."
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- To that, Kenyon says lighten up: "Yes,
it's inappropriate. Yes, it shouldn't be there. But if you have a copy,
your kids won't die . . . It's just a little inside joke."
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- Customers can return the video by COD
mail to BVHE, Dept. 100, 1240 E. 230th St., Carson, Calif. 90745. A toll-free
information line is at 1-800-723-4763.
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