Let's pick up where we left off with Journey Home, with Fox having been separated from the rest of the Farthing crew, and the animals having resolved to continue the journey in his absence.
44.14 - Fox gets a rude awakening when he discovers that the boat he's taken refuge in has been heading toward a town and that he's now surrounded by a mass of gawking humans. We see the frightened Fox escape and race through the streets, crossing paths with various startled townspeople and narrowly avoiding getting hit by vehicles. In the original series, Fox eventually found shelter from the humans in an alley behind a supermarket, where he encountered Tom, the tough but diplomatic cat in charge of the building's pest control, who allowed him to stay the night in exchange for doing his duties for him. Tom does not appear in Journey Home - instead, we go into another montage and get the film's second insert song, "Follow Your Heart". The lyrics are cheesy and generic as hell (see below), but it gets points merely for being tolerable, which is more than I can say for the film's two other insert songs. A sample:
Things can go from bad to worse, you've begun to learn,
It's hard to know what to believe, or which way to turn,
There's a voice that's deep inside, it's saying to hang on,
You may be on you're own but you're not alone.
Follow your heart, follow your dreams,
The road may not be as long as it seems,
Home's where the heart is, wherever you roam,
Follow your heart, follow your heart and love will lead you home.
The reference to "love" seems a bit out of place in this particular context, but whatever.
The montage alternates between scenes showing Fox traveling on his own and the other animals without him, which come from all across the series. Notably, the dead baby field-mice put in an appearance during this sequence - at 45.18, we see Fox wandering into the Butcher Bird's territory and gazing up uneasily at their rotting carcasses. It's a pretty horrific sight, although given the total lack of context I do have to wonder if viewers only familiar with the story via Journey Home would have quite appreciated what they were seeing there.
45.36 - We see a sequence in which Fox is chased by a couple of bulldogs after raiding a dustbin, and is forced to flee across the path of a train. This was actually taken from much later on in the series, in Episode 11, long after Fox had successfully rejoined the other animals (and is one of the very few scenes from Episode 11 which makes it into Journey Home at all). Vixen was also involved in the bulldog chase, but has been edited out here.
46.22 - The montage closes with Fox sleeping in a box in the supermarket alley, and being accidentally loaded into the back of a delivery truck. Again, the original context is removed, including Tom looking on slyly as he is taken away.
46.45 - Journey Home now has to deal with the matter of the Mice and Voles voting to opt out of the journey, and I feel that this is one of the occurrences from the original series which it really struggles to incorporate fluently and coherently. The inclusion of this particular incident was somewhat necessitated by it later impacting upon Fox and Vixen's search for the other animals (they deduce that the animals might have split into two groups and are forced to search separately), but it's evident that Journey Home doesn't want to include any implications of infanticide in the story, so all references to the baby field-mice have been cut (the out-of-context glimpse we got of their bodies during the "Follow Your Heart" montage notwithstanding). This does make the Mice and Voles' insistence upon staying behind a bit confusing, as there seems to be no really obvious motivation for it whatsoever. In the original series, this followed on from an incident in which Toad had temporarily forgotten the route to White Deer Park and started leading the animals back in the opposite direction, so some of the party were beginning to lose faith in him, but that additional factor is gone too. In Journey Home the smaller animals insist on dropping out because...well, why not?
We cut to Vole and Mr. Field-Mouse confronting Badger with their decision. The resulting debate has been trimmed, partly to cut down on the amount of stalling that Mr. Field-Mouse does in this scene, but mainly to remove any references to those ill-fated babies that Journey Home does not care to include in the story. The most confusing line of dialogue comes from Owl, who's had a pretty crucial aspect of her opinion on the matter removed. Bolding indicates what was cut:
Owl: Whether Fox is here or not is of little consequence. WE must decide what is best. Clearly the Field-Mice, as good parents, must do the best they can for their children, and if that means staying here, that is what they must do.
Confusing, because Journey Home never establishes why staying behind is so good for the Mice and Voles and for nobody else. It really isn't clear what Owl's supposed to be arguing for here.
47.57 - Cut back to Fox, who is seen escaping from the back of the truck. Included is his encounter with the grazing horse, who allows him to rest in his field before revealing, much to Fox's distaste, that he is an ex-hunter. Their conversation has been trimmed somewhat - excluded are the snippets of dialogue in which the horse admits that it was never anything personal on his part and that he finds human behaviour a bit baffling.
49.06 - As with the original series, we cut directly from Fox wondering how his friends are getting on to a shot of the Butcher Bird flying overhead with a dead mouse in his beak. As the babies have not been mentioned, I assume that Journey Home wants us to believe that this is one of the adult mice (or possibly not even one of the Farthing mice at all). This is our only glimpse of the Butcher Bird in Journey Home - gone is that particularly gruesome shot of him standing beside his bloody collection of impaled mouse corpses. Fox's later encounter with him is also cut.
The second half of Fox's meeting with the horse, in which the horse recalls having heard a story about the Farthing animals from a crow, does not feature.
Vole apologises to Badger for his poor decision, whereupon Badger reassures him that it was brave of him to have wanted to stay with the others - a statement which no doubt perplexed the film's viewers in the absence of any particularly pressing need for "the others" to have stayed behind at all.
50.14 - Fox encounters Vixen who, like most of the characters in Journey Home, keeps her original British voice. Also included is Fox's bizarre fourth wall-breaking moment, in which he comments that "things are looking up" while winking at the camera, here seen fading into the opening shot of Episode 8.
Included in Journey Home is Fox and Vixen's encounter with a male owl who reports having spoken to the Farthing Owl. Vixen's encounter with the mother thrush, who advises her on her dilemma as to whether or not to return to Fox, is cut however.
52.50 - We then cut to a shot of the main party of animals climbing up a hill, only to cut, bizarrely, to another shot of them in an open field and visibly turning in a circle. This, of course, came from Episode 6, during Toad's aforementioned memory loss arc. No idea why it was mixed in here.
53.54 - Badger is seen reaching the top of the hill, whereupon he addresses Mole. Sharp-eyed viewers might have noticed, however, that Mole is visibly absent from his back at this point. In the original series, Mole had fallen from Badger's back without his noticing, leading to a small subplot in which Mole was required to climb the hill by himself. This is all cut from Journey Home.
54.03 - Cut to a shot of the lead huntsman sounding his horn, as a hunt gets underway. As Vixen panics and begins to flee, missing from Journey Home is a scene in which she runs past the Butcher Bird (in his final appearance in the series), who advises her, somewhat mockingly, to run for her life.
In the original series, Fox's attempt to draw the hounds off Vixen's scent by crossing her trail was not entirely successful, as it merely caused the hounds to separate into two groups, but this is not brought up in Journey Home.
57.03 - Journey Home adds an additional line of dialogue for Weasel ("I'm outta here!") as she takes cover in the bushes.
Although Journey Home retains a shot in which Kestrel is seen attacking a hound and inflicting an obvious head wound upon it, a later shot showing the same hound with a large red gash on its head is removed.
58.12 - Fox finally rejoins the other animals and frets when he realises that the hunt is now back on Vixen's trail. Journey Home leaves out the portion of the scene in which Badger realises that Fox had been trying to save Vixen's life because he was in love with her, and regrets his interference. A side-note, but I never really liked how ridiculously obtuse Badger was on that point - he'd recognised prior that the strange fox was a female and that Fox was risking his life to keep the hounds off her trail, and yet it never occurred to him that there might be a very obvious motivating factor for that? Jeez, Badger.
59.07 - As Vixen flees up the hill and Fox encourages her on, we're missing the exact moment in which Vixen is seen to collapse with exhaustion.
After Adder attacks the hunter's horse, causing it to rear and the hunter to fall, gone is the scene in which the hounds are seen sniffing around his motionless body. Personally, I never got the impression that he was killed or anything, but I'm guessing that Journey Home didn't want to so much as risk putting the idea into anyone's heads.
Journey Home excludes the scene in which an embarrassed Adder tries to avoid being credited for having saved Vixen's life, and faces a teasing from Weasel.
1.00.01 - Vixen finally accepts Fox as her mate and Fox declares that, "I'm so happy!" Again, I prefer Farley's delivery of that line over Macchio's because of the utterly giddy joy with which the former manages to infuse it.
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