ART STEVENS: To give you a history of Evinrude [from The Rescuers] himself: of course he developed on the storyboard first and he was to be an incidental character, but we realized we had someone like Dopey from Snow White on him, because he didn’t speak. He did everything in pantomime. Our preliminary audience, people who viewed the picture as it was developing, liked him right off because he seemed to be warm and was very funny looking. A dragonfly [with] the name Evinrude and when you first see him moving around he works just like an Evinrude outboard motor. We should have more of that type of character in our pictures, because it lets the audience do a little work. They can imagine and they can say, “Oh, yes, I got his point or what he is trying to put across.” He wasn’t dumb, he was a smart little guy and he was a vehicle for helping rescue Bernard and Bianca from the crocs in the swamp sequence. I was given the sequence where the bats come in and try to catch him in the web. It was a lot of fun doing that because I just worked it my own way and then presented the whole sequence to the producer.
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