Jessica Rabbit



Jessica Rabbit is Roger Rabbit's human Toon wife in Disney's (Touchstone's) 1988 film Who Framed Roger Rabbit. In the book, she was an amoral, up-and-coming star and former comic character, over whom her estranged husband, comic strip star Roger Rabbit, obsessed. She is re-imagined in the film as a sultry, but moral cartoon singer at a Los Angeles supper club called the "Ink and Paint Club". Here, she is one of several suspects in the framing of her husband, who is a famous cartoon star. She is voiced byKathleen Turner. Amy Irving was cast to sing Peggy Lee’s "Why Don't You Do Right" for Jessica's first scene in the movie.

Several attractive Toon females (specifically Betty Boop) apparently consider Jessica to be incredibly lucky to be married to Roger.

Personality
Jessica Rabbit is beautiful, passionate, and glamourous. She is slender and fair-skinned. She has blue eyes, red pouty lips, purple eyelids, long red hair that covers her right eye, aqua earrings, red strapless sparkling dress that shows her largest breast cleavage, bare back, and any one of her legs, long purple opera gloves, and shiny red pumps. She claims to Eddie Valiant, "I'm not bad, I'm just drawn that way." She adores her husband Roger, and claims she married him because he "makes me laugh".

Role in the film
Jessica is first seen from behind the stage curtains at the Ink & Paint Club, singing "Why Don't You Do Right?" After her show, followed by Eddie Valiant, the Toon-hating detective, Marvin Acme, both ruler of Toontown and founder of the Acme Corporation, enters Jessica Rabbit's dressing room and informs her that she sure absolutely, truly, and honestly murdered the audience one night, and he really means it. Then, he says that she was superb while Eddie tries to peer through the keyhole to see what's going on, but he was thrown outside into a pile of trash by a Toon tuxedoed gorrila. When he hears Jessica and Marvin talking through one of the nearby windows, he pulls up a box and peers through a gap in the curtains. Marvin insists Jessica to play pattycake with him on her bed, but Jessica replies that she has a headache.

However, Marvin says that she promised, then convinces her to do it, and she agrees, but she tells him to take off his handbuzzer. While they play pattycake together, Eddie pulls out a camera and takes several pictures by order of R.K. Maroon, owner of Maroon Cartoons. Later, after Roger Rabbit, Jessica's husband, crashes through the studio office window, leaving a rabbit-shaped hole in the glass and the blinds, and walks across the road at the Acme factory, crying his eyes out, he pulls out his wallet and looks at his photos of him and Jessica on their wedding day, their honeymoon on a beach, and hugging each other in a bar.

The next morning, at the Acme factory, Jessica's body has been ran over by Eddie, but she whips him hard across the face and scolds him that she hopes he's proud of himself, and those pictures he's taken. Then, she storms out in a terrible fury. In the deleted sequence, that night, in her dressing room, Jessica, with the wickedJudge Doom and his posse of weasels, was looked up at by Eddie in search for Marvin's will when the whole room undarkens.

After the removal of his Toon pig mask, Eddie exits his office bathroom, and there stands Jessica, waiting. She tells Eddie that he's got the wrong idea about her, and asks him that he can help her find Roger. Then, she advises him to name his price, and she'll pay it. Eddie says that she must have the rabbit to make that scam work, but Jessica states she loves Roger, and tells Eddie that he's got her all wrong and doesn't know how hard it is being a woman looking the way she does. And Eddie says that she doesn't know how hard it is being a man looking at her looking the way she does. Then, Jessica states to him, "I'm not bad. I'm just drawn that way."

Eddie asks her that she wasn't the one he caught playing pattycake for Marvin, and Jessica tells him that he forbade to catch her and was set up to take those pictures which means Maroon wanted to blackmail Acme. She explains to him that according to Maroon, if she didn't pose for those pattycake pictures, Roger would never work in Maroon Cartoons again, and she says she couldn't let that happen and would do anything for Roger. She also claims that she's desperate and asks he can't see how much she needs him. Eddie's girlfriend Dolores, shocked, jealous, and hurt, sees Eddie, with his trousers fallen down, wrapped around by Jessica's sexy arms. Then, Eddie rapidly tries to pull up his trousers and as he stands up, his head comes up between Jessica's giant breasts, then apologizes. As Jessica heads out, she blows a sexy Toon kiss at Eddie which flutters across the room and smacks onto his cheek just before Dolores pulls it off in anger.

Outside Maroon Cartoons, at twilight, Jessica hits Roger's head with a frying pan and throws her unconcious husband into the trunk of her car, then puts it in her handbag. After Maroon's brutal death, Jessica runs off to her car and has been looked out the office window and seen by Eddie just before the detective exits the building. Then, the car chase begins, and Eddie tries to follow Jessica, but she disappears into a tunnel leading to Toontown.

In Toontown, a silhouette of Jessica is seen in a tall apartment building by Eddie. Then, when he is elevated byDroopy, he opens the door to Jessica's bedroom to see her inside with some underwear. However, as Eddie's "mistake" turns around, the hair drops from her face to reveal Lena Hyena, so she runs towards Eddie with her lips puckering for a kiss, but Eddie slams the door on her, and her lips impale it. After being tricked into plummeting about 500 stories by Tweety Bird and 2 parachuting Toons (Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny), but both saved and kissed by Lena just before she crashes into the wall and knocks herself senseless, Eddie's been pointed at by a gun of Jessica, and a shadow of a gun pointing itself at Eddie from the other direction casts itself on the wall beside the private investigator. Then, she shoots, and the pistol falls from the shadow's hand. Now Eddie draws his own g u n, holds her at gunpoint, and scolds her to drop it. Dropping her pistol, Jessica claims that she just saved his life, but Eddie claims that he doesn't trust anybody or anything. Jessica shows Eddie Doom's gold pistol on the ground that turned Maroon into a corpse, and the evil Judge squeezed the trigger.

Also, she says she was on his tail to Maroon Cartoons, but she was too late to stop him. Suddenly, who shall be heard by both her and Eddie but Judge Doom himself, screaming and running down the alleyway, and Eddie shoots 3 times with his Toon gun, but before the bullets reach Doom, the dark man disappears down a side alley. However, the bullets grind to a halt, then go the wrong way instead of the right to get Doom. Then, when Jessica drags Eddie to her car, she is shocked to see her car trunk open and completely empty and asks where Roger is. Eddie replies that Roger chickened out on him back at the studio, but Jessica honestly tells him that she struck her husband's head with her frying pan and put him in the trunk, so he wouldn't get killed. And Eddie says that it makes perfect sense. Jessica decides that she and Eddie will take his car. However, Eddie points back down the road where swerving tire marks lead off into the distance past burst fire hydrants and knocked-over lampposts, he states that he's got a feeling someone already did, and Jessica says from the looks of it, it was Roger who was never very good behind the wheel which means a better lover than a driver. Just then, when they hear a siren, Jessica warns Eddie that the Toon Patrol are on their way, and decides that they'll take Gingerbread Lane, but when Eddie sticks out his thumb by accident, Benny the Cab appears from nowhere.

The 2 hitch Benny and speed along the tunnel leaving Toontown. So Eddie demands how long Jessica's known it was Doom, and Jessica explains that Marvin confided in her that Doom wanted to get his hands on Toontown and he wouldn't stop at anything before the Toontown keeper was transformed into a corpse by a giant safe on his head, so he gave her his will for safe keeping, except when she opened the envelope, there was only a blank sheet of paper inside. And Eddie says, "Huh! A joker 'til the end." So Benny impatiently asks them to know where he's taking them because his meter's running, and Jessica tells him she has to find Roger because she's so worried about him seriously and tells Eddie that what she sees in her husband makes her laugh. As they leave the tunnel, Doom tips a barrel of Dip onto the road. Benny spins around on it, screaming in serious pain, and crashes into a lampost, sending Eddie and Jessica flying to the ground. Now they are taunted by the bullyish Doom. When his weasels drive out of the tunnel and pull up next to their boss, they put their 2 captives in Doom's van to the Acme factory.

Back at the Acme factory, Greasy, one of Doom's 5 weasels, volunteers to frisk Jessica, rolls up his sleeve, and puts his hand inside Jessica's giant breast cleavage. However, there is a snapping sound, and Greasy rapidly withdraws his hand with a bear trap on it, screaming in serious pain, causing the other 4 weasels to laugh, and Eddie says to Jessica, "Nice 'booby' trap." Doom whacks Greasy into a pile of boxes spilling false eyes all over the floor and asks the his Toon minions that she and Eddie have the will or not, but Smart Ass, Doom's lieutenant, says that it is just Roger's love letter. Doom says that it doesn't count. Then, he warns Eddie and Jessica that if the will won't exist in the next 15 minutes, Toontown will be legally his; lock, stock, and barrel. As Roger is entering the factory, Doom walks up to a large object covered by tarpauling, drops a silver tray onto the floor, pulls it aside and opens a valve releasing a green liquid onto the tray which starts to corrode, then asks that Eddie and Jessica can guess what that is.

Jessica then screams, "Oh, my God, it's.... DIP!!!!" And Doom removes the tarp to reveal a large pressurized Dip machine that carries 5,000 gallons of heated Dip all pumped at enourmous velocity through it. When he responds that Toontown will be erased in a matter of minutes, Jessica says that she suppose he thinks no one will notice Toontown's disappeared. Doom demands who's got time to wonder what happened to some ridiculous talking mice when she and Eddie are driving past at 75 miles per hour. Jessica convinces him that there isn't any road past Toontown, but Doom says almost. Then, he explains to them that several months ago he has the good providence to stumble upon a plan of both the city councils and epic proportions: a freeway. When Roger pops out of a manhole, he holds the weasels at gunpoint, he says that if they don't lift their hands, he will let Doom have it, and then he is reunited by Jessica. When a pile of bricks land on Roger, Jessica rushes over and tells him to say something, and Roger shows her stars around his head, then says to himself, "Ready when you are, Raoul." Then, Doom commands the weasels to tie up both Roger and Jessica together on a giant hook and use an escapeproof Toon rope. While Greasy activates the Dip vehicle, Jessica tells Roger that he was magnificent and better than Goofy and wants him to know she's loved him more than any woman's ever loved a rabbit.

Before his departure, Doom advises Smart Ass to let Eddie watch the Toon couple get dipped, then shoot him, and Smart Ass agrees with his boss. When Eddie activates a music machine in order to make the weasels laugh like crazy, Jessica declares that he's lost his mind, but Roger disagrees. Then, Jessica helps Eddie finish his next verse, like "Running out of time!" After the weasels' defeat, Eddie turns the cannon back the other way by accident just before the villainous Doom returns, slides across a line to strike Eddie, and sends him flying just before the 2 men are dueling. While Doom's body gets squashed like a pancake by a steamroller, the Dip machine is getting closer to Roger and Jessica, but Eddie deactivates it. However, when Doom reaches a gas cylinder and reinflates himself, then reveals himself as a dastardly Toon bank robber with evil crimson eyes who really destroyed Eddie's brother Teddy, Acme, and Maroon, he starts up the Dip machine again to kill Roger and Jessica. While the deadly Dip is getting extremely close to Roger and Jessica, the beautiful Toon woman bids her husband goodbye, protesting, and as the Dip level in the machine runs out to let the jet of dip from it dies out, she says that she thinks she'll faint. After Doom's sudden death, Eddie grabs a remote control and presses a button, and the large hook with Roger and Jessica hanging is moved out of the encroaching Dip machine's way.

When it goes through the factory wall and is hit by a speeding train in Toontown, Roger asks Eddie how he and Jessica will get down if there's Dip all over the place, and Eddie cleans it up with fire hydrants. After Eddie unties them, Roger replies that that was a close shave and thought for sure their goose was cooked. Jessica dubs Eddie her hero, then saunters over to her "honey bunny", kisses him all over his face, and tells him that he was a pillar of strength just before Benny, Dolores, Lt. Santino, and the police arrive. When hundreds of Toons (including Mickey, Donald Duck, Goofy, Pluto, Bugs, Daffy Duck, Sylvester the Cat, Tweety, Porky Pig, Snow White,Dopey, Pinocchio, Bambi, Yosemite Sam, Woody Woodpecker, Baby Herman, the Big Bad Wolf, the Toon gorilla, etc.) pop out from Toontown through the large cavity in the wall, Eddie asks Roger to read a love letter to Jessica that he wrote at the Ink and Paint Club with her lipstick, and he does so.

However, being interrupted by this, words start appearing on the paper, and as Roger keeps reading, he discovers it is Acme's will that they were looking for! Then, after he finishes it, the Toons let out applauses and cheers. Also, he tells Eddie that was a pretty funny dance he did with the evil Toon Patrol and asks him that his days of being a sourpuss are over, and Eddie says that only time will tell. Then, to shake his hand and congratulate him, Roger tricks Eddie with Acme's handbuzzer, causing all the Toons to gasp in shock. However, with no sense of humor, smirking, Eddie toughly grabs Roger by the neck and gives him a big kiss. At the end, Jessica states she will bake Roger a carrot cake just before the Toon couple, Benny, Baby Herman, Eddie, Dolores, and the Toons start walking toward Toontown through the hole, singing "Smile, Darn Ya, Smile".

Tummy Trouble
Jessica appears as a nurse, pushing a cart carrying baby drinking bottles.

Roller Coaster RabbitE
Jessica appears as a damsel-in-distress.

Trail Mix-Up
Roger fantasizes over Jessica as a park ranger, calling her a 'babe in the woods' and panting like a dog.

Comics
Jessica also appeared frequently in the Roger Rabbit comic book series, and she had her own feature in most issues of Roger Rabbit's Toontown such as “Beauty Parlor Bedlam,” where she comes face to face with female weasel counterpart, Winnie.

Disney Parks
With the success of the film and upon the opening of Disney-MGM Studios on May 1, 1989, the film's characters featured prominently in the company. After taking the "Backlot Tram Tour", various props decorated the streets including two different photo opportunities with Jessica: a glittery cardboard cutout and "The Loony Bin" photo shop which allowed you to take pictures in costume standing next to an actual cartoon drawing of characters from the film. There was also a plethora of merchandise including Jessica Rabbit rub-on stickers called "pressers".

In 2000, Disney-MGM Studios stopped using any character memorabilia in the park, though some props are still present. These include a Maroon Cartoon billboard featuring Roger, Jessica, and Baby Herman across from the Indiana Jones Stunt Spectacular show, Eddie Valiant's office and a cut-out of Roger on the blinds of a neighboring window near the 50's Prime Time Cafe, and the "ton o' bricks" hanging near the "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids" Movie Set Adventure.

Jessica Rabbit Store
The Jessica Rabbit Store, entitled "Jessica's", was once part of Pleasure Island, Disney’s nightclub attraction and shopping area. The store featured nothing but Jessica Rabbit merchandise, from her signature nightgowns and jewelry to shower curtains and beach towels. A giant 2-sided neon Jessica sign with sequined dress and swinging leg sat atop the light purple colored building. A floor-to-ceiling windowed corner of the store allowed light to shine in during the day. Another corner of the store had a large stage door with Jessica’s name on it. The inside was art deco in style and was very similar to designs used in the films Ink and Paint Club scene. There was a cardboard cutout of Jessica reclining above the cash register area and another of Jessica, Roger, and Benny the Cab. Cast members wore regular uniforms, and there were no special shopping bags or print material for the store other than mention in the Pleasure Island guide map where they invited people to visit. The store was abruptly closed some time in 1992. The large neon Jessica sign was relocated to another area of the park alongside a "Pleasure Island Tonight!" sign where it stayed for many years until it was removed in June 2006. Tomart's Disneyana Magazine #66 featured a special article about the store complete with merchandise pictures and interior photos.

Roger Rabbit’s Car Toon Spin
Jessica can first be seen in the beginning tied up in the trunk of Smart ***' car and then later with a giant mallet making her escape at the ride's end.