The Brave Little Toaster/Fridge

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Fridge Brilliance

  • When the appliances arrive in the city, Toaster has some trouble reading the phone book and asking for directions to Rob's house, so Lampy reads it instead. Perhaps all the time Rob spent reading by lamplight taught Lampy to read.
    • Another is the song with the now obsolete 80's appliances mocking the main characters for being "outdated", when actually the heroes are actually the type of appliances that last for many years whose functions would still be useful today. Many people still use twenty year old toasters, lamps, and vacuums. Compare that to how often you have to update and replace your computer.
    • Did the song "B-Movie" seem like this to anyone else? As a kid, it's confusing as to why the Appliance Shop characters suddenly break into a song about old monster movies. Then you get older and realize that they're trying to make Toaster and the gang feel better about the situation with black comedy humor.
  • The flower that falls in love with its own reflection in Toaster's chrome plating looks vaguely like a daffodil, which is a member of the Narcissus family.
  • In the sequel movie 'Brave Little Toaster: Goes to Mars' Kirby says that he's traveled a long dusty road of life. At first it just sounds like he's being old, but then the Brilliance comes when you realise that the Kirby Vaccuum was sold door-to-door.
  • Many people were probably annoyed by Blankie's neediness and tendency to cry at the drop of a hat. But he was characterized that way for a reason-- he's an electric blanket, an object whose very reason for existence depends upon cuddling close to someone and keeping them warm.

Fridge Horror

  • "Worthless" is loaded with it, with some bits more obvious than others.
    • We get to see one car's steering wheel frantically turning back and forth as it gets fed into the crusher, as if the car's trying to escape.
    • The "Zuma to Yuma" car's verse suggested that it "had a hand" in some kind of fatal crackup, maybe due to mechanical failure, since it has bad frontal damage and its owner's surfboard was still attached.
      • Watch the scene again, and you notice that said surfboard has a giant bite mark in it.
    • The Texan car's driver either got cold feet on the way to his wedding, which is bad, or became distracted, took a turn at the wrong time and crashed, which is worse.
      • Which becomes Nightmare Fuel when you realize that the vehicle behind the Texan wedding car is a hearse.
    • The final and most unambiguously depressed car drives itself into the crusher and then waits calmly for death. Even the Magnet seems a little taken aback by it.
      • Actually, the Hopi car refused to be put in the crusher by the electromagnet. It preferred to die in a dignified manner on its own terms, rather than be picked up and tossed in.
      • It's sick in its own way that this theory exists... But a friend of mine was abused as a kid and when she saw this movie, she interpreted pick up's line about the kids with the Hopi as he (the adult) was telling the children they were worthless, because that's what she heard from her abuser, and that the pick up drove into the crusher because the Hopi had molested children in him.
      • This troper has always interpreted it in a different way: The car is actually trying to escape the Magnet, but despite his efforts gets caught off-screen. This doesn't bode well for Toaster and his friends, who are also mobile, but are assumedly a lot slower than that car.
        • No, because if you pay attention to the overhead view before it cuts to the truck, you will see that the conveyor belt makes an S-bend right in front of the bus it is on, so all the truck had to do was drive right off the bus to get onto it.
    • This troper noticed that each car had their own little story (who didn't?), and that due to this, each had fallen into a different state of mind that altered their view on their imminent death. Of these, the hearse and the Hopi seem to be the only two that really greet their deaths to any degree, due to the constant death the hearse experienced that he can't seem to live with anymore and the outright abandonment the Hopi car felt.
    • More Fridge Horror for the song itself: try playing it in Audiosurf, people! It manages to be a funny ride, but what about the last lines, heard as the song ends? Instead of the vortex, you suddenly see the crusher in front of you. Conveyor belt of doom indeed.
  • Considering how the blue car and green truck both met their ends - the former with no resistance whatsoever, the latter actively going into the literal jaws of death - it's a unnerving thing to think a Disney song began and ended with what was essentially two suicides.
    • The translation of Worthless in the Swedish dub manages to be even more horrifying in parts. The wedding car bit goes like this: "Drove a couple to a wedding/Drove a couple to a wedding/But both the bride and groom disappeared/Before anyone could figure out what happened", and the final line of the hearse is (to rhyme in Swedish) changed to "The world is filled with misery". The closing lines of the surfer's car manage to be fairly nihilistic too - starting with "Pico, let's go up to Zuma" it goes something like (some parts are hard to hear) "The whole world will burn/The whole world will burn/Everything's going up in smoke/We've tried to make it stop/But how are we going to make time". The Indy 500 car gets a fairly depressing spin too, where he in the original wonders how well he did, in the dub he seems to heavily be expressing disbelief at the way he was thrown away after winning a lot of races.
    • "Worthless" becomes much more horrifying when you realize that the cars' stories and the overall despondent tone of the song can easily be applied to humans that are past their prime and no longer have a place in society.
      • Extremely terrifying when the correlations stack up. The blue car is a simple sedan--the exhausted, depressed employee, whether office or blue-collar. The pink convertible is an aging valley girl, the red Corvette is a drifter/musician with no place to call home, and the Indy car is an injured athlete who's been dumped by fans and supporters. The wedding 'limo' and hearse seem to be more symbolic than metaphorical, but could relate with bridesmaids and pallbearers--escorts whose importance ultimately pale in comparison to who they escorted. The wood-sided wagon represents beach bums who 'never amounted to anything,' and the green pickup is not hard to line up with a reservation elder who has been marginalized and ignored.
      • This gets even worse when one thinks about the non-singing cars like humans as well. They're all old, worn down, and broken, brought to the junkyard to be thrown into a crusher and destroyed. It seems like they have been tossed into a mass grave...
    • Considering that Blender's motor was very much like his "brains" and that they were scooped out of his case which was (off camera and presumably) transferred to another blender, wouldn't that be like an appliance brain transplant? A horrifying thought indeed! Makes seem a little more horror movie-ish.
  • The song "Worthless" from The Brave Little Toaster features sentient cars singing their swan song just before being crushed. Some are crushed right on camera, and others only show (car) body parts are flying out everywhere. The sight of the orange magnet is enough to frighten children, but the full force of the song's lyrics don't hit until they're much older. And possibly keep getting scarier the older one gets.
    • Worse than that is Peterson's appliance shop. In the scrapyard, the cars are at least 'killed' quickly; in the shop, they're slowly torn apart, built into other things, and sold part-by-part. It's the appliance version of a death camp.
      • And now you see the horror implications in "It's a 'B' Movie" and see a fun extra layer. The light, the only untouched appliance, is just as scarred as the rest. He didn't just know what happened, didn't just see what happened, no, he got to forcibly be used to make it happen more easily and was completely incapable of even attempting to escape as it was done daily. At absolute minimum. Being Forced to Watch could drive anyone to laugh at it all.

You can't go out! You are out of your mind!

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