How Disney Saved The Rescuers From Scandal

In 1977, Walt Disney Animation released a 77-minute film called “The Rescuers.” The movie is about two mice, Bernard and Bianca, who work for the Rescuers Aid Society, an organization that saves (non-mice, usually) abducted from their homes. In this particular case, Bernard and Bianca need to save Penny, a six-year-old girl, who was taken by a pair of jewel thieves who needed someone small to help them obtain a very large diamond. As one would expect from a Disney movie, the mice are successful — before the film ends, they rescue Penny (and the diamond, too).

The Rescuers was a box office success, earning nearly $50 million in its initial release (compared to a $7.5 million budget). Despite premiering in the same year as “Star Wars,” The Rescuers was the highest-earning movie in France and West Germany that year (Apparently, some people prefer heroic mice to Wookiees and X-wings.) The success of the film warranted two re-releases in 1983 and 1989, respectively, and collectively, the movie has earned roughly $169 million in theaters, delighting audiences of young children along the way.

And along the way, Disney was — accidentally — exposing those children to a split second or two of pornography.

In 1999, Disney released The Rescuers on VHS and sold 3.4 million copies. It wasn’t the first time that movie had been available for purchase on tape, but there was something special about this version — it used the same directorial cut as the version that debuted in theaters in 1977. And unfortunately, that 1977 cut had something in it that Disney didn’t want: two brief images of a topless woman. As Parade explains, “In an action-packed scene featuring the cartoon rodents speeding past a row of apartments while riding in a sardine can on an Albatross named Orville, a topless woman could be seen briefly in one of the windows.” Per Screen Crush, “You can see the topless woman in a window in two non-consecutive scenes — first at the bottom left, then at the top.” I won’t share the images here, but trust me, you can find it via a quick Google search.

The nudity was on screen during the 1977 theatrical debut of the movie but it’s very unlikely that anyone noticed, and for very good reason: it was, for all intents and purposes, invisible. According to the Wall Street Journal, “Disney said it had received no complaints about the image, which involves just two frames of a 110,000-frame film. Each of those frames flies by in 1/30th of a second — too fast to be seen without freeze-framing the film.” And it’s unlikely that the Disney company was even aware of the presence of those two frames because, per Snopes, “Disney also maintained that the images were not placed in the film by any of their animators but were instead inserted during the post-production process,” and it’s not like Disney execs or even the film producers went through the end product frame-by-frame at that point. And the theatergoers of 1977 (or, for that matter, today) didn’t have access to a pause button, let alone the ability to advance the film one frame at a time. The naked woman was there, but nearly impossible to find.

But even though the image was nearly impossible to see unless you tried, well, Disney feared that people would, indeed, try. According to the WSJ, the “existence [of the topless woman] has for years been an open secret among some Disney veterans, who treated it as a bit of harmless company folklore,” and a 1992 remaster of the movie — which was used for the original VHS release — had been scrubbed of the raunchy bits. Disney accidentally used the 1977 version, which hadn’t undergone a frame-by-frame review, for the 1996 release, and as a result, the family-friendly company had a problem on its hands.

Disney took swift action. Three days after the VHS release, Disney issued a recall of all 3.4 million copies in existence. The vast majority of those were still in stores, making most of the recall easy (but expensive). For those who had already purchased the film, Disney offered exchanges. It’s unclear how many people took Disney up on that offer, but there are probably still a lot out of the recalled versions out there; many are available on eBay for under $20.

Bonus fact: In 2016, Walt Disney Animation Studios released Moana, to much acclaim — the movie earned more than $650 million at the box office worldwide, and warranted a sequel that came out in 2024 and earned $1.05 billion in theaters. But in Italy, the film wasn’t called “Moana” — Disney retitled it “Oceania,” according to Screen Rant, “to avoid referencing a prominent adult film star well-known in Italy” (whose full name I won’t publish here to avoid spam filters).

From the Archives: The Lion King and the Secret (But Not Actually R-Rated) Message: Does the Lion King have the word “sex” hidden in it? Probably not, but you be the judge.