Toontown (Who Framed Roger Rabbit)


 * This article is about the fictional city of Toons. For the themed land, see Mickey's Toontown. For the online game, see Toontown Online.

"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, 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. 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. It can be accessed via a tunnel just outside of Los Angeles as well as right behind the Acme Warehouse.

Doom later murdered R.K. Maroon (owner of Maroon Cartoons) for almost revealing his plans to Eddie Valiant, the brother of Teddy 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 destroying Toontown was put to an end.

Description
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.

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, cars, plants, and such are all animated with their own personalities, speech patterns, stylistic movement, and other anthropomorphic traits that are impossible in 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 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. 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 served as the setting for Disney's television series Bonkers and House of Mouse. However, the version of Toontown seen in House of Mouse is quite different from the version of the original film, being more of an amalgamation of Mouseton and Duckburg, Mickey and Donald's respective hometowns. Also, while Who Framed Roger Rabbit showed that toons are just actors (Baby Herman hasn't the same personality in his films and in reality), in House of Mouse, they seem to have the same personality and roles off-camera as they do in their films (Jafar's really bad, etc.).

It could be possible that Toontown was also the setting for the scenes in The Lion King 1½ where Timon and Pumbaa are watching the film in a theater, 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. According to the backstory written for Mickey's Toontown, Toontown 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 Disneyland's 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, 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 zooming 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 launch 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. 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

 * Due to the similarities between Toontown and the similar-named Toon World (the world that Mickey Mouse, his friends, and other Disney characters live in the Epic Mickey series), it's possible that both worlds are meant to be the same. But unlike in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the cartoons living in the Toon World appear to be oblivious to the fact that they are one made for people to watch (though this is occasionally contradicted within the game itself, as when Mickey is seen accepting an award, or the fact that both he and Oswald know who Walt Disney is).
 * Outside of being mentioned in the theme song, the term Toontown is actually never used on Bonkers.