“Working some serious magic:” The transtextual use of Easter eggs in Disney+'s Chip'n Dale Rescue Rangers (2022)

When considering the Disney canon, intertextuality, in the form of allusions, adaptations, or so-called Easter eggs, has often been called self-reliant. Allusions and cameos of Disney characters abound in the studio’s films and parks but always seem to solidify the creation of autonomous fictional worlds. Who Framed Roger Rabbit? stood out as the studio’s first noticeable exception to these practices by including character cameos from other famous animation studios while mixing live-action and animation. Chip'n Dale: Rescue Rangers, the reboot of the eponymous Disney Afternoon TV series released on Disney+, acts as Roger Rabbit’s spiritual successor. The film depicts the movie industry of modern-day Los Angeles as one where animated and human characters produce and consume pop culture. This offers fertile ground for referentiality and intertextuality and enables the filmmakers to indulge their own fannish hopes of honoring the legacy of the titans of their trade while at the same time approaching Disney’s gold standard of an original universe, fostering audience engagement. This paper shows that by relying on copious and diverse Easter eggs, Rescue Rangers offers a textbook case of a textually transcendent film: a film structurally relying on all forms of Genette’s transtextual relations.