Continuing with my vintage movie streak, this weekend’s movie was Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

“It’s 1947 Hollywood and Eddie Valiant, a down-on-his-luck detective, is hired to find proof that Marvin Acme, gag factory mogul and owner of Toontown, is playing hanky-panky with femme fatale Jessica Rabbit, wife of Maroon Cartoon superstar, Roger Rabbit. When Acme is found murdered, all fingers point to Roger, and the sinister, power-hungry Judge Doom is on a mission to bring Roger to justice. Roger begs the Toon-hating Valiant to find the real evildoer and the plot thickens as Eddie uncovers scandal after scandal and realizes the very existence of Toontown is at stake!“

I had honestly forgotten how much fun this movie was. It starts out with a classic-looking cartoon with a cartoon rabbit in charge of babysitting a danger-prone baby after some cookies and then a real, human director shows up and yells at Roger for having cartoon tweety birds instead of stars when the refrigerator drops on his head. And then as Eddie is leaving “Toon Town”, a man with a saxophone is playing theme music from Fantasia to get the magic brooms to sweep up the mess.

And the battling pianos scene with Donald and Daffy Duck in the nightclub is one of my favorite musical pieces in all my movie watching throughout all the years.

There’s so many different references with so many cartoon cameos that this movie is just a visual treat. I think it’s also one of the only movies Disney and Warner Brothers ever agreed to do together.

Though, I will also say that for all this movie has a lot of fun, it’s also really, really dark. Like, using chemicals to murder cartoon characters? That red shoe scene is so hard to watch. What a sad, squeaky shoe. Eddie’s brother was killed by a toon and so he takes out his unhappiness on all the toons. And there’s also the concept of how dark the world was in 1947. And the really sad part is how Judge Doom’s vision of freeways, gas stations, and the future is actually what came to pass. And maybe a little bit about how it’s so hard to find things that make us all laugh these days, like the viewers in the cartoon movies laughed. I don’t know that I see very much uncontrollable laughter these days.

Overall, I have a lot of fond memories of this movie and it was still an enjoyable rewatch. It’s still a three on my rating scale and it made me happy to rewatch it.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Directed by Robert Zemeckis, Executive Producers Steven Spielberg and Kathleen Kennedy, Produced by Robert Watts and Frank Marshall, performances by Bob Hoskins, Christopher Lloyd, Charles Fleischer, Joanna Cassidy, Touchstone Pictures, 1988.