First, there was Chip, who was new to crime fighting, after years of running around naked and harassing Donald Duck (really). However, in order to pay off his mounting gambling debts and nut addiction, he decided to start fighting crime. You can tell he’s the leader because he wears a bomber jacket and a fedora. Seriously, when’s the last time you know someone who wore a bomber jacket and a fedora who wasn’t the leader of their gang? I didn’t think so. Also, Chip was perpetually consumed by his desire for the one female member of the team, but for reasons which will soon become pitifully self-evident.
Dale was the raging Yang to Chip’s sober Yin. The combination of his loud Hawaiian shirt, lack of pants, and ill-concealed love of nuts clearly paints him as the most flamboyant one of the group (if you know what I mean). Also, his red nose clearly betrays his status as the doofus of the group, as well as being a telling sign of both his uncontrolled alcoholism and shameful reindeer ancestry.
Gadget Hackwrench was the only female member of the group. She was also the only one that wore pants of any kind. Though both Dale would occasionally make a half-hearted attempt to win her affection, it was clear that his first love was in fact Chip. Chip therefore, with his dashing good looks and process of elimination, was pretty much destined to end up with her from the outset. The only thing that kept this from ever kept the two of them from truly having a relationship was the highly controversial interspecies nature of their relationship. Chip, you see was a chipmunk (Tamias striatus), while Gadget was a long-tailed field mouse (Apodemus sylvaticus). Notice how they’re not even the same genus? Hell, they aren’t even in the same family! For comparison’s sake, imagine your sister getting engaged to a blue-butted pygmy marmoset. To the rodent community, this would have been even freakier. Speaking of freakiness, while I was researching this article, I found that Gadget is in fact the subject of a sizeable web-ring and fanfic club. Now, I didn’t actually read any of the stories posted, but by looking over the titles and speculating wildly, I think I can safely say that the internet is indeed home to far greater perversities than ever I had imagined.
Monterey Jack was an Australian Mouse, who had raised Gadget from the time she was a mere squeakling, after her father died when the farmer’s wife cut off his tail with a carving knife. He was the largest of the group, being the actual size of movie star and human speedbump Danny DeVito. His sidekick was a fly whose name I can remember at the moment, so I’m just gonna call him Krell Fleshrender, who only hung around with Monterey Jack so that he might one day feast upon his decaying corpse, assuming he didn’t end up being brought back to vivid and terrible semi-life by mad scientists or Canadians. He was also the big, overzealous, get everyone in trouble, guy, who existed in part to make all the other characters looks smarter, a common fixture in 80’s cartoons and totalitarian governments (“Who left all this perestroika all over the Kremlin?” “Gorbachev!!” insert laughtrack here).
Their nemeses were fairly standard for the genre, one was a fat cat named, creatively enough, Fat Cat, while the other was a mad scientist named Dick Cheney. Usually, they wanted to harm little woodland creatures, causing said woodland creatures to call in the Rescue Rangers, like the A-Team, only furrier. Our heroes all lived in a fiberglass tree that they took over after they killed off the Keebler elves with rabies and other less mentionable diseases.
One noticeable gap in the cross-section of rodent demography in the show was the conspicuous lack of squirrels. Mysterious, no? Not at all. In fact, when you’ve known as many squirrels as I have, you begin to learn why they’re referred to by so many biologists and international rock stars as the white trash of the rodent world. Nasty creatures, squirrels, step on your face as soon as say hello to you. Why, these days a man can hardly set foot outside his door without seeing a whole clan of them passed out drunk on home-brew and their own debauchery, practically falling out of the trees above you, with all their tiny little rusted out Ford Pintos up on tiny little cinder blocks in their front yards. If there was a law, it’d be agin’ ‘em.
Sorry about that, it’s just that my hatred for squirrels burns with the all-consuming fire of a thousand fiery suns and last week one of them pooped on me at work. So yeah, as soon as the conquest of
