Three days after the 1977 animated movie The Rescuers was reissued on home video in 1999, the Walt Disney Company announced that they were recalling 3.4 million VHS and LaserDisc copies because they contained an “objectionable background image.” As it turns out, two frames of the film, which couldn’t be seen under ordinary viewing circumstances, featured a photo of a nude woman.
The hidden picture pops up roughly 38 minutes into the movie, when rodents Bernard and Bianca are riding around on the back of Orville the albatross. You can check out the footage in question below, and it should go without saying that it’s NSFW:
A Disney spokesperson said that the offending image was placed in the film more than 20 years earlier, but declined to reveal who was responsible. This marked the first time that a Disney release was recalled for such a reason. According to the company, they opted to take action in order to keep their promise to customers that the brand could be trusted to provide them with “the finest in family entertainment.” The Rescuers was later reissued with the nudity removed.
Over the years, many have understandably wondered about the person who decided to sneak a topless woman into a beloved children’s movie, and what their motivation was. In 2023, Eddie Bowley of the Eddache YouTube channel claimed that a background artist named Ann Guenther was the culprit. The source of this information, Bowley says, is animator Tom Sito, who worked on Disney classics like The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin. Sito knew Guenther personally and apparently heard it from her directly.
As for the why of it all, Bowley uncovered that Guenther was passed over for a promotion at Disney in favor of a man she’d trained for the position—this was reportedly because they didn’t want a woman to have the job. The Rescuers was the last movie Guenther worked on for the company prior to being let go, which would appear to suggest that she did it out of revenge. However, when Bowley ran the idea past Sito, he was informed that it was merely an in-joke on Guenther’s part.
Furthermore, Sito told Bowley, “Animators have been putting things like this in cartoons since the 1930s.”
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