Of all America’s pin-ups, from Rita Hayworth to Pamela Anderson, Jessica Rabbit may be the most unusual. The redheaded femme fatale is tall, sultry and spectacularly curvaceous. She is also a cartoon.
Now the nightclub singer from the 1988 comedy Who Framed Roger Rabbit is again breaking a mould, this time as the latest symbol of cultural revisionism in Walt Disney’s worldwide theme parks.
Last week the Walt Disney Company announced that it was updating the Roger Rabbit’s Car Toon Spin ride at Disneyland in California to reinvent Jessica as a lead character with an agency of her own rather than a slinkily dressed victim of male violence. She will no longer be the louche character Kathleen Turner breathed into cinematic life with the immortal line, “I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way”, but a female detective cleaning up a weasel crimewave in 1947 Los Angeles — much as the late Bob Hoskins’s private eye character Eddie Valiant did in the original film.
