This article is about the Toontown from Who Framed Roger Rabbit. For other Toontowns, see Toontown.
- “What's wrong with Toontown? Every Joe loves Toontown!”
- ―R.K. Maroon to Eddie Valiant.
Toontown is a city near Los Angeles, California where animated characters, also known as Toons, live.
Around 1947, it was the target for Judge Doom who planned on destroying it in order to replace it with his own new freeway via his company Cloverleaf Industries. In order to accomplish this, he murdered Marvin Acme (owner of the Acme Corporation and Toontown) who was going to give the ownership of the city to the Toons with his will, with Toontown having been originally painted in his backyard to give the Toons a home[1]. It can be accessed via a tunnel just outside of Los Angeles as well as right behind the Acme Warehouse; first, though is a Toon meadow with occasional anthropomorphic plants and trees, and a smiling Toon sun. Drive or walk across this meadow and you head to Toontown. The interdimensional barrier is so thin that you can very easily do both of these things.
Doom later murdered R.K. Maroon (owner of Maroon Cartoons) for almost revealing his plans to Eddie Valiant, the brother of Theodore Valiant, whom he killed five years before. However, after showing the eyes of his Toon form to Eddie, revealing who he was, his plan on bulldozing Toontown was put to an end.
Description[]
A street in Toontown's downtown area; take note that the buildings are not anthropomorphic in this scene
In Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the whole city of Toontown is cartoonish, except for anything foreign to it such as people and objects from the real world, outside of it. Real foreign objects have also been known to become animated once being exposed to the Toon environment. However, the same cannot be said for Toon-based objects, such as the Punching Glove Mallet (a mallet/boxing glove combo weapon that Eddie uses to aim for the Dip sprayer when fighting against Doom).[2] At the time of the film, Toontown's look is that of a city in the 1940s. The total population of the city is not widely known, nor its area.
At one point a non-anthropomorphic airplane can be seen, revealing that the city of Toontown has at least a few airports.[3]
An aerial view of Toontown, showcasing a very tall apartment complex
Not only does the city appear illustrated (drawn and painted) and animated, but the whole environment has an imaginary, fantasy, almost dreamlike atmosphere. Not only do cartoon characters live there but even the buildings (some of them at least), cars (some of them at least), plants (some of them at least), and such are all animated with their own personalities, speech patterns, stylistic movement, and other anthropomorphic traits that are impossible in our reality.
Furthermore, humans are, more or less, able to experience cartoon physics or perform feats that contradict the laws of physics in the human world, seen with Eddie when he was flattened in an elevator. Due to the erratic nature of the Toon World, Toontown was considered to be both remarkably fun and extremely dangerous for humans.
In the television show Bonkers in the episode "Imagine That", Toontown is depicted as a portal from the real world to an alternate dimension known as the “Tooniverse”.
Residents of Toontown[]
With the exception of the characters appearing or created specifically for the movie, all cartoon characters ever created (ranging from the 1900s to the present) live, some perhaps even born, in Toontown. According to the Roger Rabbit comic series, they are separated in different areas of the town according to their age of creation: toons born during the black and white period live in a monochromatic zone, while colored toons like Roger live in another one with more tints; older toons belonging to the mute period have the peculiarity to not produce any sound, therefore their home neighbourhood is completely silent.
Several residents of Toontown are cartoon buildings where other residents enter, while other buildings are non-sentient, such as the apartment complex (where Droopy works as an elevator valet), Mickey's House and McDuck Manor.
Behind the Scenes[]
Toontown is a cartoon city created by author Gary K. Wolf. It was present in his 1981 novel Who Censored Roger Rabbit, but only in brief mentions. It served as the central setting and reached a wider audience in the novel's loose 1988 Disney film adaptation Who Framed Roger Rabbit. It won four Academy Awards, and Roger was featured in three subsequent animated shorts, 1989's Tummy Trouble, 1990's Roller Coaster Rabbit, and 1993's Trail Mix-Up.
Toontown was reproduced in Disney theme parks as Mickey's Toontown. According to its fictional backstory, it was a Toon suburb that Mickey and his friends moved to in the 1930s, and had long secretly existed right behind Disneyland before Mickey eventually decided to allow guests to visit Toontown. Some rides were suggested for Mickey's Toontown around 1990, many of them featuring the characters from Who Framed Roger Rabbit. However, only one was actually completed - Roger Rabbit's Car Toon Spin. The others suggested that one plan included:
- Toontown Trolley: A ride that would have introduced a new fantasy dimension to the simulator technology made popular by “Star Tours.” Roger Rabbit would take guests on a wild ride through Toontown.
- Baby Herman's Runaway Baby Buggy Ride: Inspired by the misadventures of Baby Herman and Roger Rabbit in the Disney cartoon short Tummy Trouble, guests would zoom through the sets of Toontown Hospital (confirming that toons are indeed born like human children), fly down stairs, crash through doors, and bound over beds.
Disney's game Toontown Online, the first MMORPG for children, which takes place in a cartoon world populated with classic Disney characters such as Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. It was introduced in 2003 and was said to bring the Roger Rabbit franchise online, though it did not include characters introduced in the film due to Wolf and Disney being engaged in a lawsuit over royalty payments at the time.
Trivia[]
- According to the letters column in issue #13 of the Roger Rabbit comic book, the main unit of money in Toontown is called a simoleon. Before this, the city's currency was never revealed in the movie except for a line by Lt. Santino. The word itself means a United States dollar.
- Outside of being mentioned in the theme song, the term Toontown is actually never used on Bonkers.
- In the Mickey Mouse universe, there's a city that was inspired by this town from the film and the Disneyland selection Mickey's Toontown.
- As mentioned before, the total population and area of Toontown are currently unknown.
- The filming location for the tunnel to Toontown is the Mt. Hollywood tunnel, located in Griffith Park, Los Angeles, California.
Gallery[]
References[]
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