Bolt/Headscratchers

• The Show Within a Show's director freaks out when he sees a boom mic in one shot, because Bolt would have seen it as well. Considering that Bolt is actually on the set of the show, one wonders how he's been in the dark for so long.
  • And couldn't the whole thing have been prevented if they'd shot the cliffhanger episode in one go and just aired it in two parts?
    • I'm assuming child labour laws would have prevented them from working Penny that long in one go.
      • Penny was, for the moment, out of the picture. She could have left, rested, and so on... and been fine. Besides, they could have just done Dawson Casting.
  • You assume he is a perfectly reasonable and logical person; he seems like a guy who freaks over everything. In reality Bolt has probably seen the boom mic and more, just assumed it was part of Dr. Calico's evil plots. What always bothers me about the shooting method is that Bolt could, if freaked enough, actually hurt or kill the extras to protect Penny from the danger he does not know not is real.
    • You assume Bolt isn't trained like any other show dog (or any highly trained dog), just under different pretenses. Barring abused dogs or dogs that have been trained to fight, highly trained 'attack' dogs are actually trained to not harm but just bring down and prevent someone from escaping. They generally won't even attack unless directly ordered.
    • Actually, Bolt probably doesn't even know what a boom mic is.
• How could they have filmed every single episode in one shot nearly flawlessly?
  • Did you see the part before they 'kidnap' Penny? It took a hell of a lot of camera's, all hidden, and planning. They plan the scripts out and most probably have someone else and a trained dog go trough to see if the camera's in the right place, then let Penny and Bolt go through with little left to go wrong.
• How can a dog survive in a package without food or water as he was shipped across the contury?
  • • Duh! Next Day Air. :)
• How exactly does Bolt know to look for a man with a green eye, when dogs are color-blind?
  • • Dogs aren't actually colorblind, they just have a lower chromatic acuity then humans (they can't see colors as well as we can, but they can see them). Also, Penny called him "The Green-Eyed Man" outright.
• So, a dog that's the star of what has to be a multi-million dollar an episode show goes missing, and the network doesn't broadcast some sort of reward, or publicize that he's missing, or anything?
  • Get the impression the network isn't very nice? And/or that they consider animals easily replaced?
  • Or maybe they were afraid of the negative hype the show would pick up if word got out they lost one of their lead stars.
  • Or the fact that it could still take weeks to find him and they had to start producing the next episode now?
• Is this troper the only one who would rather have watched a movie based on the in-movie TV show? Super dog fighting supervillian sounds more awesome than Toy Story rehash, personally.
  • You're not the only one. In fact, this troper hopes that a spin-off movie along those lines will be released someday.
  • While some elements may seem to be similar to Toy Story, I still found the premise of a TV dog that thinks he's a super hero who has to make his way back to his owner in the real world much more original and interesting than the plot of the Show Within a Show, which was essentially Inspector Gadget with a superpowered dog instead of a man with robotic implants. Also, Bolt the movie was very character driven, with some strong pathos and a personal connection between the audience and both the dog who had the perks of dog-hood taken from him in favor of feeling of personal responsibility that is based on a lie as well the girl, a child star who had her childhood taken from her, and must now deal with the loss of her best fried and companion. It would have been very difficult to get that level of characterization in a Girl-And-Her-Dog action movie, which is why I am glad they went for the fake-out instead (as a side note, It Bugs Me that the trailers spoiled the fact that the opening sequence wasn't real, which otherwise would have made for a great twist right off the bat).
  • there is the wii game which was apparently okay and takes place within the show.
    • The game is also available on Xbox 360. It definitely fits in with the story of the show perfectly.
• When Rhino is first introduced, he's shown to be among hamsters that look an awful lot like his family. In addition, he also lives with an old lady, which one would think would be said family's owner. During the entire time Rhino is gone, no one in Rhino's family nor his owner tries to find him in any way, shape, or form. Worse yet, does this mean that Penny's mom unknowingly stole Rhino from his rightful owner?
  • This bugged me too. One gets the impression that Rhino and his owner were never that close, and that his longing for adventure and heroism like he saw on the Magic Box greatly outweighed any kind of comfort he got from spinning around a wheel in a trailer park all day. In fact, it is this aspect of his character that makes him such an excellent Foil to both Bolt and Mittens, and I wish it were explored on a little more than just his monolgue where he convinces him to rescue Mittens from the pound because of all the animals like Rhino that looked up to Bolt's heroism and independence.
  • Hamsters are notorious for going missing. As are most small rodent pets. The owner probably figured he got out while the door was open or something.
  • How do you know they never looked for him? His owner can hardly have expected him to jump in a vehicle and leave the state! She probably conducted a small local search the way most owners would before giving up. It isn't practical to conduct a nation-wide search for a hamster.
• The use of Executive Meddling to instigate the plot bugged me. It made sense in theory, but after a trip to the fridge I started wondering why the executives of a kid's show would be so interested in the 18-35 year old demographic. I mean, they're not the Target Demographic, so why pander to them if the show is popular with kids? There have been many cartoon over the years with formulaic plots and predictable endings like what the executive complains about, and they have been successful without any need for Retools; while on the other side, shows like Animaniacs and Freakazoid were Cut Short because they attracted too much of the older demographics while not enough actual children were watching them. So what gives? I understand that the Retool is what starts the plot of the movie by causing Bolt to run away, but I wish they had a more believable reason to Retool to the show than "this kids' show isn't getting enough teenagers, so we should threaten to cancel it until it makes teenagers want to watch it."
  • It's amazing what executives will have fits over. Maybe it airs during a time when a lot of that demographic are watching TV, or maybe it airs right before or right after a show that is aimed at that demographic.
  • Who said the show within a show is a kids show? Sure, it stars a girl and her dog, but it features action, explosions, espionage and many staples of the superhero genre. Also, it's live action, not a cartoon.
  • Or perhaps the executive was purposely trying to screw the show and it backfired.
  • You can actually see that the Show is aired Thursdays at 8pm in one scene, it's shown on a bus when Bolt is in New York. So 18 to 35 Year olds probably ARE the shows main target, and the executives were afraid to lose their audience and thus in consequence the jobs of their employees. What Mindi said there was realistic if you view it from that standpoint.
• A bunch of plot holes bother me about Bolt. Let's tick them off.
  • Why is Penny forced to choose between using another actor to play the Bolt character and searching for her dog? These are not mutually exclusive decisions.
    • They don't want her focusing on it because they feel it will hurt her acting ability. Also: the main exec's crazy.
    • And they had to get the next episode filmed.
    • Also, the studio execs are jerks who clearly have little care for Penny and Bolt's well being. They locked Bolt alone in a camper and stopped him from seeing Penny to keep Bolt from realizing things. There were dozens of ways that could've been handled otherwise and be much less stressful on them both, but they didn't care. They had a replacement Bolt, they didn't have a replacement Penny, so as far as they were concerned, Bolt was expendable and they probably had Penny on contract of some sort.
  • Bolt has a collar with his address on it. Even Mittens notices, but not a single human that meets him, including the animal shelter workers, ever check it for ID or try to contact the studio.
    • Only the dog catcher saw him, but he broke out before he could be taken the actual shelter. It's possible that they would've called had he arrived there. None of the other humans got a close enough look at him to notice what his tag said.
  • As mentioned earlier, the studio loses the star of its television show and doesn't even try to retrieve him? Why is Penny printing out "Lost Dog" posters instead of the executives putting out an urgent press release?
    • They're on a tight schedule, and it's implied they had that replacement Bolt in reserve; it's more efficient to just start using him right away than wait for Bolt to be found and probably have to cough up a reward.
    • That and they treated Bolt rather poorly, they locked him in a trailer alone for probably the first time in years without Penny and didn't care. We see in the ending just how much Bolt cares about Penny, they probably know it too as that's the main way they get Bolt to do anything, by making him think Penny is in harms way. Thus they really don't care at all about Bolt.
  • No fire prevention system on the set? Seriously? I'm pretty sure they're required by law to have sprinklers ready in case of an actual fire.
    • It might have malfunctioned...
    • Or you know, as is sadly the case in real life, they either had it shut off or it was never installed just to cut costs.
  • Okay, it's bad and evil to go to Hollywood and not live a normal life like a "real" person in which you strip yourself of anything special or unique. Anybody else catching how terribly ironic it is to have a character voiced by Miley Cyrus giving us the "Child acting is BAD!" spiel? And isn't therefore horrible and bad that the replacement Penny and Bolt actors are going through the same thing?
    • Penny's life was with her family and Bolt. When Bolt was taken, the execs didn't care. That was the bad. One could reasonably assume that A)Penny got a more well-rounded life and B)the new child actor and Bolt-replacement have lives outside the set. The new Bolt is going to know the story isn't real, so the charade doesn't have to be kept up 24/7 anymore--and that was all that was wrong with was Penny and Bolt were going through.
    • Also, the Hollywood execuitives are clearly the villains, so it's not 'child acting is bad', it's more the execuitives are treating them badly. Penny might have gone on to get other jobs as an actress, but she quit really not because she had to act but because they were being treated poorly. So the real point is they were leaving an abusive situation to live life on their own.
  • Yes, I know it's a cartoon, but that still doesn't explain how Bolt suddenly can climb a chair and karate chop someone. You cannot train a dog to do that, period.
    • You can in cartoon land.
    • Rule of Cool and Rule of Funny
• Do they really transport entire houses on the backs of trucks (like the one Bolt and Mittens traveled in, where Mittens shows Bolt what life's like in a normal house)? I've never seen or heard of that before in my life (though I've never been to America) - I can't think how it could possibly work.
  • Yes. Prefabricated houses.
  • And it's not the entire house. It's half the house. The other half is on another truck, probably close behind the first. They're pretty common in the Mid-West, at least.
  • It's fairly common here, although they have to do it after 7pm and the trucks can't go more than about 7 kilometres an hour, and they clear the roads specially for it. I don't know about America, but in New Zealand it would have certainly been faster for Bolt and Mittens to walk than hitch a ride on the truck.
    • Here in America, those trucks drive about as fast as any other 18 wheeler.
    • It depends on if the house in question is specifically designed for it. Moving an ordinary building (house or not) is a time consuming, slow, and complicated process that requires the roads to be cleared, can't move more than a few mph/kph, etc. However, there are "mobile homes" that are specifically designed to be moved, and have a built-in trailer hitch, suspension, and axles. These are about as complicated to move as your standard 18-wheeler. (Well, it might be a little more complicated, since they're classified as "Oversize Loads," with all the extra red tape that implies.) The Other Wiki has more info.
    • The one in the movie isn't a mobile home. A mobile home is something that's designed to be lived in on the road--there would be a family in it, traveling, and stopping nightly. In the film, it's clearly just being transported by an 18-wheeler, and therefore is a prefab house.
    • Must be a dialect thing, because I (and everyone I know) have always called them "mobile homes," whether they're meant to be lived in while traveling or not. To-may-to, to-mah-to, point is, yes, in the US, we do routinely "transport entire houses on the backs of trucks" -- and it's not as complicated as in New Zealand.
• Now how can Bolt go so long in his life without knowing what "hunger" was? When he first experiences it, he believes he's been poisoned, and Mittens exploits it to get free food. Um...?
  • His handlers on the show were probably very careful to keep him properly energized for shooting, which, for TV shows, is usually done on a pretty tight schedule; they probably had to keep him consistently well-fed.
• It's a small thing, but when kicking your agent out of a vehicle, the appropriate thing to yell is not "we quit!" but "you're fired!" You'd think that one of the veteran Hollywood actors they had on the set would have remembered who works for who.
  • She was saying they were quitting the show, not quitting the agent.
    • Although, they were probably doing that, too.
• Just something I'm curious about: Penny has a very similar appearance to another Penny from the Disney Animated Canon. (Not to mention Jenny, who was based the aforementioned Penny.) Was this an intentional Continuity Nod, or did they just forget to do their research?
  • Word of God at least acknowledged that this Penny was named after Inspector Gadget's niece, so it may or may not be possible those are other Shout Outs, intentional or not.
  • Forget to do their research? How is having characters that happen to look similar to each other forgetting to do their researh?
• How come the makers of the TV show couldn't just postpone the second episode? I know "they're jerks" but I think that telling the public about Bolt going missing would be some pretty good publicity for the show (there's no such thing as bad publicity), so they'd probably gain from it.
  • Gain what? The way that TV shows make money is by selling advertisements. No new episode means that you have to show reruns which, in turn, means that you're losing revenue.
• So did the producers of the show brainwash Bolt from his puppy years to make him think he was a superdog? Because the scene at the very beginning seems to indicate that Bolt was either always Penny's dog outside the show or that scene is the first episode of a very Long Runner. Very confusing.
  • If you assume the first scene of Penny and Bolt as a teenager and adult dog, respectively, is the show's standard opening, Bolt became a superdog in the show when he was full grown, not when he was a puppy. The scene with Bolt as a puppy could be part of the show, a "real-life" scene, or both. If it is both, the show we see in the film may be a spinoff of a show focusing on Penny's in-show father, which would result in a genre shift between show and spinoff.