When Sherlock Holmes fans think about Walt Disney animated films based on the Holmes canon, they naturally think of The Great Mouse Detective, the 1986 film based on Eve Titus’s novel Basil of Baker Street. According to a Los Angeles Times article, several Disney employees were dismayed when the company decided to change the title of this film from Basil of Baker Street to The Great Mouse Detective, based on the fear that audience members would not associate the names Basil or Baker Street with detective fiction or Sherlock Holmes. The article lists a number of alternative titles for Disney films invented by employees as a way of lampooning their bosses’ decision. One example is the 1977 animated film The Rescuers. The title listed in the article is Two Mice Save a Girl. Fortunately, The Rescuers did not suffer the kind of title change that The Great Mouse Detective suffered.

The Rescuers, which is also based on a series of children’s’ books, was one of two 1977 films that captured my interest. The other film, Star Wars, is also about the rescue of a damsel in distress. Basil was also the first in a series of novels: Titus wrote five other books featuring Basil. The Rescuers is based on a series of books written by a British author, Margery Sharp, between 1959 and 1978. The first novel, The Rescuers, is (not unlike Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories) intended for an adult audience. In Sharp’s case, her book became much more popular with children. A list of Sharp’s books featuring the mice Miss Bianca and Bernard reads almost like a list of Sherlock Holmes pastiches: The Rescuers, Miss Bianca, The Turret, Miss Bianca in the Salt Mines, Miss Bianca in the Orient, Miss Bianca in the Antarctic, Miss Bianca and the Bridesmaid, Bernard the Brave, and Bernard into Battle. Like Basil and his Watsonian companion, Dawson, Miss Bianca and Bernard are mice with a mission. In the books, they are agents of the Prisoner’s Aid Society. In the movie (and its sequel, The Rescuers Down Under), they are agents of the Rescue Aid Society.

            Six Degrees of Separation refers to a theory espoused in the 1920s by Frigyes Karinthy, claiming that everyone and everything in the world is six or fewer steps away. Seventy years later, a parlor game called Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon was invented. The game is based on the belief that anyone in the Hollywood film industry can be linked through their film roles to the actor Kevin Bacon within six steps. In the spirit of Six Degrees of Separation and Six Degress of Kevin Bacon, I offer these thoughts on the similarities between two of my loves: The Rescuers and Sherlock Holmes.    

            The Rescuers begins with a little girl named Penny writing a note, putting it in a bottle, and dropping it off the balcony of a riverboat. Notice that in the Victorian Era, lurid novels were often called Penny Dreadfuls. Also, the abandoned riverboat on which Penny is held captive represents the steam-powered technology that characterized the Victorian Era. The bottle takes a long journey and winds up on a beach, where it is found by mice. The mice take it to the headquarters of a secret society called the Rescue Aid Society. Remember that Basil and Dawson live in the nooks and crannies of human society. In fact, the two mice are based at 221B Baker Street, the famous address of Sherlock Holmes. In a similar vein, the Rescue Aid Society meets in an old suitcase in the basement of the United Nations building in New York City. Although the first film takes place in 1897 and the second film is possibly set in the 1970s, it can be postulated that both films take place in the same fictional world. The mice of the Rescue Aid Society could even have been inspired by the exploits of Basil and Dawson.

            In Sharp’s original novel, Miss Bianca is a British aristocrat. In fact, she lives apart from the other mice in a porcelain pagoda, and wears an expensive silver chain around her neck. In the film, Bianca is the Hungarian delegate to the RAS, which makes sense, because Eva Gabor voices the character. Still, the filmic Bianca sports a pillbox hat, which reminds us of Jaqueline Onassis and suggests this is a high-born mouse. In both the novels and the film, Bernard is a humble everymouse. In Disney’s version, he is not even a field agent; he’s a janitor. His job is to keep the RAS meeting hall (the suitcase) clean and tidy. Bianca investigates the note in the bottle and discerns that it was written by a little girl. The Chairmouse (who has a haughty, Nigel Bruce-like, British accent) asks Bianca to choose a co-agent. Every red-blooded, male RAS agent has fallen for Bianca, just as I did when I first saw the movie. Therefore, everyone raises their hand. Bianca shocks the crowd by choosing Bernard to be her co-agent.

            If we substitute Bianca for Holmes and Bernard for Watson, we can see the Sherlockian connection to The Rescuers even more clearly. Sharp describes Bernard as a “humble pantry mouse.” Like Watson, Bernard is competent, but no match for Bianca and her superior skills of observation and detection. In addition, Bernard is triskaidekaphobic; that is, he is afraid of the number 13. Bernard encounters the dreaded number three times in the movie: first, the ladder he uses to retrieve Penny’s note from the bottle has 13 steps (or 13 teeth, because the ladder is actually a comb). Second, when climbing the ramp to board Orville the Albatross, Bernard notices the ramp has 13 steps. Third, at the end of the movie, after Penny has been rescued, Bernard and Bianca are required to embark on a second mission. The only trouble is the mission starts on the 13^th of the month. What does Bianca think of Bernard’s superstition? She dismisses it, but cares enough for her co-agent to help him work through his phobia. When they climb the boarding ramp, she suggests that Bernard jump the 13^th step. This reminds me of Holmes’s skepticism toward the occult. While Watson is not necessarily phobic, he is more gullible than Holmes in the face of so-called supernatural phenomenon, such as the Hound of the Baskervilles. Remember Holmes’ famous comment about supernatural solutions to mysteries: “No ghost need apply.”

After the two mice analyze Penny’s note, they set off to solve the mystery and save the girl. Their first stop is the orphanage that Penny was kidnapped from, where they interview Penny’s best friend, a cat named Rufus. Their next stop is Madame Medusa’s Pawn Shop Boutique, an establishment run by the kidnapper and her accomplice, Mr. Snoops. The name Snoops is interesting because this is what detectives do: they snoop.

Bernard and Bianca overhear Medusa’s telephone conversation with Snoops. After trying and failing to hitch a ride on Medusa’s car, the mice decide to travel by air. They book a flight with Albatross Airlines, and their pilot, Orville the Albatross, becomes their captain and conveyance to Devil’s Bayou, where Penny is being held captive aboard the riverboat. Orville’s name is, of course, a reference to Orville and Wilbur Wright’s famous flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903. Like the riverboat, Orville’s name is an homage to Victorian (and post-Victorian) technology and innovation.

Of all the ways they could get to Devil’s Bayou (which I assume is in the Florida Everglades), the two mice choose an Albatross. Could this be another nod to the British Isles, the place that birthed Sherlock Holmes? “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is the longest poem written by British poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The poem, published in 1798, is about a crew whose ship is stuck in an ice jam. An albatross appears and leads them out of the ice jam. The title character later shoots the albatross with a crossbow, and the other sailors punish him by forcing him to wear the bird around his neck. In The Rescuers, Medusa shoots fireworks at Orville, and is punished when her kidnapping plan is foiled.

 After Bernard and Bianca take to the air, their romance begins to emerge against the backdrop of Carol Connors’s song “Tomorrow is Another Day.” Let’s not forget that “Tomorrow is another day” is the catch phrase of another Victorian-era character: Scarlett O’Hara. Another Connors song from The Rescuers, “Someone’s Waiting for You,” was nominated for an Academy Award in 1977. The name Carol Connors also reminds us that the Diaboli of the Blustering Gales from the South-West (BGSW) is named Carol Sperling. (The BGSW is a Sherlock Holmes club in Southern California that was gracious enough to confer membership upon the author) Coincidence? I think not. 

My Sherlock Holmes allegory needs a Professor James Moriarty, and I believe Madame Medusa is a perfect fit. Like Moriarty, she maintains her criminal activities while holding down a legitimate – or at least legal – profession in her nation’s urban hub. Moriarty is a college professor in London, and Medusa is a pawn shop owner in New York. Medusa is also a possible sociopath: she functions in legitimate society, but her greed causes her to kidnap a little girl. Why does Medusa need Penny? It turns out that Devil’s Bayou is the location of a priceless diamond called the Devil’s Eye. Unfortunately, the Devil’s Eye is located in a cave called the Black Hole, the entrance to which is too small to admit an adult. So, Medusa sends Penny into the Hole to find the diamond. Medusa gets Penny to enter the Hole by threatening to permanently separate her from her beloved Teddy Bear, whose name happens to be Teddy. Remember that Teddy Roosevelt was President of the United States from 1901 to 1909, and that Holmes meets Roosevelt in at least one pastiche.

The name “Devil’s Bayou” reminds me of the restaurant at Disneyland called Blue Bayou, but it also sets the stage for Medusa’s evil. So does the name the Devil’s Eye. In fact, the names of the bayou and the diamond remind us of the Holmes story “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot.” The name the Black Hole also reminds me of the bad 1979 Star Wars rip-off, titled The Black Hole. Now that Disney owns the rights to Star Wars, they no longer have to rip it off with stinkers such as this. They can now make official Star Wars stinkers.

When Bernard and Bianca arrive at Devil’s Bayou, they enlist the help of several so-called swamp critters, including a dragonfly named Evinrude. Evinrude serves as a kind of living outboard motor. Not coincidentally, Evinrude is the name of a company that produces outboard motors. This is the only instance I can recall of a character who is named after a product, and not the other way around. At one point, Evinrude is almost eaten by bats on his way to deliver a message from the mice to their swamp critter allies. Let’s not forget that in The Great Mouse Detective, the toymaker Hiram is adducted by a peg-legged bat who works for Ratigan (the film’s stand-in for Moriarty). The other swamp critters include a rodent couple, Luke and Ellie Mae, who are like distant Southern cousins to Bernard and Bianca. Luke has a taste for moonshine, which prompted one viewer to complain to the Los Angeles Times that watching The Rescuers may cause her young girl to take a shine (no pun intended) to alcohol. Another swamp critter is a turtle named Gramps. Gramps wears a gray kepi (a regimental cap worn by Confederate soldiers). Could Gramps be a Civil War veteran, and perhaps someone who remembers the era of Sherlock Holmes and Basil of Baker Street? Remember that Great Britain was sympathetic to the Confederate cause, and this fact inspired the Sherlockian pastiche Enter the Lion, written by Mike Hodel and Sean Wright.

For those of you who have not seen The Rescuers, I will not give away the ending here. Rest assured the film has a happy ending, and nobody’s mother is killed by a hunter. I will leave you one more piece of data to digest. In one scene, after Bernard and Bianca have suffered a defeat at the hands of the broom- and shotgun-toting Medusa, Bianca says: “If I were a ten-foot mouse, I would show her a thing or two.” Bianca’s fantasy may remind us of the giant rodents in Stephen King’s short story “Graveyard Shift,” but it should also remind us of Sherlock Holmes’s lost case: “The Giant Rat of Sumatra.” Once you see The Rescuers, you may find more comparisons with the Holmes canon. This essay is only the beginning. After all, tomorrow is another day.