The Brave Little Toaster/YMMV

• Adaptation Displacement: Not everyone remembers the Disch book this was based on, but that's not too surprising. According to Wikipedia, Disney had bought the movie rights to it before it was even able to get published!
• Animation Age Ghetto: This was the animated film that started the recovery from it. They hired a composer with complex instrumentation (David Newman), they included jokes that only parents would catch, the film never pandered to its audience, and it was Serious Business for the animators. Furthermore, this was the film that Pixar sprung out of, including John Lassetter and Joe Ranft. You might notice Lampy resembles a certain animation house mascot, too. It's all in the OST linear notes as well as later interviews of the people involved with the project.
• Ass Pull: Radio's tube is just the right kind of tube to save Wittgenstein. No matter that this tube is extremely rare and they have to go to Alaska otherwise to get one.
• Awesome Music: The entire soundtrack, from the amazing David Newman score to the well-written musical numbers. Specifically, the bass lines in some of the songs are also awesome. If you listen closely to some parts of "Worthless" and "B-Movie" (most notably) you can hear spontaneous little bass riffs that just make it THAT much better when you hear it.
• Non Sequitur Scene:
  • At one point the movie successfully pulls off a BLAM (The lonely flower) within a BLAM (the meadow scene). One could argue that this may not qualify as a BLAM; it causes Toaster to realize what could happen if a person truly starved of company or affection is rejected. Granted, the result of death is quite extreme, but the scene's purpose is not lost; Toaster begins to behave kinder to Blanky.
  • There's a rather egregious one in The Brave Little Toaster Goes To Mars when the appliances meet a group of balloons who floated away from Earth. Believe it or not, the scene was in the book, and wasn't a BLAM: Toaster and Crew picked up a balloon that helped them navigate their "spacecraft" and told them some of the Mars Appliances' backstory.
  • The song that computers sing about the "Super Highway" in the second film.
• Cult Classic
• Ear Worm:
  • Hands. That. Gave us flight! Hands too little to hold on tight! Now we float forever, in and out ooOOoof sight!
  • "It's a B Movie" in spades!
  • "Worthless." Despite this song's dark lyrics, the beat is pretty catchy.
  • Life is like a journey on a road that's within...
• Ensemble Darkhorse: Radio, certainly in the first movie.
  • Air Conditioner and the cars in Worthless seem pretty popular.
• Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory: Yeah, they're journeying to the "City of Light" to find "The Master". No room for overtones there.
• Faux Symbolism: The film is rife with Christian imagery.
• First Installment Wins: While the sequels are considered decent by most, almost everyone will say that the first movie is far superior.
• Funny Aneurysm Moment: One scene in "Cutting Edge" featured a plane crashing through a building, saying "ACTUAL SIMULATION".
• Harsher in Hindsight: Everything?
• Hilarious in Hindsight: "We are on the cutting edge." Also, the song "Cutting Edge" (sung by, among other things, a Tandy-style computer) was a satire of consumerism featuring modern technology singing their own praises. But to a modern audience, it's hilarious when you consider that nearly every single one of those cutting-edge appliances is now severely obsolete.
  • Mr. Tandy, meet Mr. iMac!
  • Mrs. Phone, meet Mr. Blackberry!
  • The younger master seen in the flashback still had red hair, but also wore a orange-and-pale yellow striped t-shirt and blue shorts.
• Iron Woobie: All of the Five-Man Band have survived things that no appliance should.
• Jerkass Woobie: Air Conditioner. Even with his initial smug attitude, it's hard not to pity him after seeing his insecurities of immobility get to him. And then we see him tear up after the Master repairs him.
• Nightmare Fuel: Toaster's nightmare with the damn Monster Clown!
  • Has such a ridonkulous amount, it now has a full page to itself.
• Older Than They Think: Watch Toy Story 3, and then watch The Brave Little Toaster. See any similarities?^[1] Several people who worked on this film would later be integral at Pixar, like John Lasseter and Joe Ranft.
• Paranoia Fuel: The magnet crane. An angry creature from above, chasing you wherever you hide...
• Ruined FOREVER.
• Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped:
  • The song "Cutting Edge" is a pretty blatant Stealth Parody of the consumer culture of the 1980s. Given the kind of people that particular avenue spawned....
  • In the novel version of The Brave Little Toaster Goes to Mars, the main villain was an ancient hearing aid created by Albert Einstein, who went insane after being used by a Nazi party member, then escaped to Mars, inhabited a giant refrigerator, and amassed an army of "Populux" appliances ("Wonderluxe" in the movie), with the goal of returning to Earth and killing all the humans in revenge for planned obsolescence schemes. Seriously. And it became an animated movie as well.
• They Just Didn't Care: The two sequels were released out of order, simply because production on Goes to Mars got finished first.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: See also Ambiguous Gender.
• What Do You Mean It's for Kids?: A few of the scenes supply enough Nightmare Fuel to spur this question. Especially anything with the clown.
• The Woobie: All of the Five-Man Band, but Blanky is the best example.
  • And despite the fact that they are all very minor characters, the Narcissus flower, the blender, and the junkyard cars certainly qualify.

---

Back to The Brave Little Toaster

1. ↑ EVERYTHING!