Oliver & Company was rereleased on this day 30 years ago. Yes, I’m aware commemorating a rerelease might seem kind of unfair or even unwarranted to some. Especially since I’ve already given it the header treatment. But this reissue was personal for me. You see, technically I saw Oliver & Company back when it first opened in Christmas of 1988. But I have no memory of that. I was a fucking baby! But what I did have was the Disney Sing-Along Songs: Fun with Music video, which was released to promote the film during its initial theatrical run and contained two songs from it. And I watched it a lot.

But the movie itself was out of my reach, as it didn’t get a VHS release initially, since Disney was still wanting to cling to their dependable and quite lucrative “rerelease the animated films every eight years or so” formula. If the motion picture is available at homes, that is inevitably going to have an impact on people who want to return to it on the big screen. So Oliver became the last time Disney held out on a home video launch, as the following year The Little Mermaid proved so successful that the Mouse House just couldn’t resist the sweet, sweet alure of those tape sales (it would become the best-selling home video ever at the time it came out).

Anyway, I’m getting sidetracked. The point is I wanted to watch Oliver, I couldn’t watch Oliver, and I wondered if I would ever get the chance to do so. So when I found a movie poster announcing its rerelease in a spring issue of Disney Channel Magazine (which, as I noted in another header recently, was in fact a thing), I was ecstatic. I would finally get to see the rest of the film I had only seen two or three musical clips from. Yeah. It was a big deal for me.

And to make things even sweeter, Burger King had a promotion (actually, they had two promotions in the same year, as they would be on board to market it again in October when it finally arrived on home video). This was a set of five toys. There was “Chompin’ Dodger”–a pullback toy which would move its mouth to “chomp” the hot dogs in his mouth as he rolled along, although I remember it being hard to get this one to work unless it was on a really smooth surface. Fagin was also a pull-back toy. Roscoe and Desoto would bob up and down inside of Sykes’s limo when pushed along. Jenny had a boat which allegedly floated, although I think she sank in the bathtub pretty easily if I wasn’t careful (also she came with supposed main character Oliver). Finally, there was Tito. Tito is best dog, and Tito is best toy. You wound him up, and he would “scamper” forward. And he was in his little jumper. Tito is love and Tito is life. LOOK HOW CUTE HE IS I JUST CAN’T OMG!!!

Also, unlike the Subway toys for All Dogs Go to Heaven 2 (funnily enough, both that film and Oliver had Dom DeLuise providing voice work), I can actually find multiple commercials for these bad boys. I miss the days when fast food enterprises took the effort to shoot several people in sunglasses dancing around in a Burger King for the purpose of selling Disney doggie toys with fast food glorious fast food. We used to be a proper country.

Have a groovy night, y’all!