Toontown is a city near Los Angeles, California where animated characters, known as Toons, live.
Around 1949, Toontown was the target for Judge Doom, a Toon disguised as a real human, who planned on destroying it in order to replace it with his own freeway. In order to accomplish this, Doom murdered Marvin Acme (owner of the Acme Corporation and Toontown) who was going to give the ownership of the town to the Toons with his will. Doom later murdered R.K. Maroon (owner of Maroon Cartoons) for almost revealing Doom’s plans to Eddie Valiant, the brother of Teddy Valiant who Doom killed five years ago at that time. However, after showing his Toon form to Eddie Valiant, revealing who he was, Doom’s plan on destroying Toontown was put to an end.
Description
In the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the whole city of Toontown is cartoonish, except for anything foreign to the city such as people and objects from the real world, outside of Toontown.
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 in Toontown, but even the buildings, cars, plants, and such are all animated with their own personalities, speech patterns, stylistic movement, and other anthropomorphic traits that are impossible in reality.
In the television show Bonkers, 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 2000s) live in Toontown.
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. Toontown served as the central setting and reached a wider audience in the novel's loose 1988 Disney film adaptation Who Framed Roger Rabbit. The film won four Academy Awards, and Roger Rabbit was featured in three subsequent animated shorts, 1989's Tummy Trouble, 1990's Roller Coaster Rabbit, and 1993's Trail Mix-up.
Toontown served as the setting for Disney’s television series Bonkers and had several brief references and/or mentions in Warner Brothers' Tiny Toon Adventures, Animaniacs, and Freakazoid. It could be possible that Toontown was the setting for the scenes in The Lion King 1½ where Timon and Pumbaa are watching the film, due to the appearance of several other Disney characters joining to watch it with them at the end.
Toontown has been reproduced in Disney theme parks as Mickey's Toontown. Some suggested rides for Mickey’s Toontown were suggested around in 1990, many of them featuring the characters from the film. However, only one ride came out, Roger Rabbit's Car Toon Spin. The other rides suggested at 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 will take guests on a wild ride through Toontown, first seen in the Touchstone Pictures release, "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" executive-produced by Steven Spielberg.
- Baby Herman's Runaway Baby Buggy Ride, inspired by the misadventures of Baby Herman and Roger Rabbit in the Disney cartoon short "Tummy Trouble," that was going zoom through the sets of Toontown Hospital, fly down stairs, crash through doors and bound over beds.
Commercial bumpers featuring a Toontown-based appearance were used on Toon Disney from its start on April 15, 1998 through September 1, 2002.
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. The game 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.