Baby's first introduction to the inevitability of death
I will confess to you now that The Brave Little Toaster never made me cry. It’s not the sort of movie that made me fear that there was a monster under the bed, or anything like that. But I do remember, vaguely, being fascinated by the film all the same. I couldn’t really tell you why; I liked talking cars, so that last musical number had an enduring appeal to me. But, as those of us who have actually watched this film could tell you, the actual content of that musical number will in retrospect make people question my upbringing.
This is a movie that I remembered fondly throughout my youth but for the longest time never actually sat down to rewatch. I rediscovered the soundtrack on a Reddit thread (more on that later) and would listen to it during certain tough times. I did not, however, dedicatedly watch the film again. The film is from 1987. I was born in 1996. I watched it in the early 2000s. And in the Year of Our Lord 2026, I watched it again, staring down the gunbarrel of thirty years old.
I must admit: this film is dark for a children’s film, but is dark in a way that is perhaps not obvious to a child. Your basic plot is that five appliances—a toaster, an electric blanket, a vacuum cleaner, a lamp, and a radio—have been left at the country cottage of a city family. The appliances miss the child that they had provided for for so long, whom they call “the Master.” After years and years of being left in the cottage with little sight of the Master, the appliances get together and decide to brave the wilderness to find the Master and resume their lives of faithful service. It turns out, though, that the Master has grown up. He is no longer a child, and in fact he is setting off to go to college, and from there adulthood.
In that premise alone there is a lot to unpack. This is set during high Reaganism, the age of “greed is good,” the age when America assumed what was profitable and what was good were in fact one and the same. What is striking is one of the assumptions made by the film (based off of a 1980 novella by acclaimed science fiction writer Thomas Disch) about its characters: the idea that their fulfillment is found in service. This is an idea that, by itself, sounds very Reagan-era. The film literalizes the concept of a “dream job” by downright stating that these characters are pining for a state of continued servitude. But, if you cock your head a bit in a certain direction, you can see this in a much more liberatory way. Everyone wants to make a living doing what they love, what they’re good at, and you can read the appliances’ quest as a quest for self-actualization. But if this is a metaphor for self-actualization, the metaphor fails a bit; tools are designed to be used for specific purposes. Human beings are simply born.
The appliances march through a dangerous wilderness to the city. This wilderness isn’t particularly dangerous to human beings; indeed Indigenous people had lived in them for millennia (the nature of this film looks vaguely like that of the Mountain West—the radio mentions Utah as being a different place, so I am very tentatively willing to guess that the film is set in Colorado, but really it could be somewhere between there and northern California), though I would suppose that a city-dweller would need some teaching. In any case, these are not humans, but human creations. They have to navigate the wilderness using a vacuum’s wheels and a battery tied to an office chair, and to get out of scrapes, they have to use the vacuum’s cord (they use it to swing across a river once, and another time use it to get the blanket down from a tree). But what they all discover, with emotional force so intense they sing about it, is that this world can be utterly beautiful. Their own sense of purpose has locked them in a house, pining for somebody who isn’t there, and they have denied themselves so much because of it.
They eventually find themselves in the possession of a man who works with appliances like them for a living, a rotund tinkerer-cum-salesman by the name of Elmo St. Peters. He works what is, for our main characters, a grisly trade: he sells appliances, and more disturbingly, he sells appliance parts. Your characters are therefore plunged into an actual horror story for beings of their nature. You get another musical number, led by a hanging lamp with an unnerving resemblance to Peter Lorre. Elmo St. Peters is a man who can be read as the evil doppelganger of the Master: the Master uses his appliances to help himself, thereby actualizing them, while Elmo St. Peters uses his appliances to help himself, thereby dismembering them. You, and they, are confronted with the wildly different meanings of the verb “to use.“
The appliances eventually make it to the Master’s new home, an apartment in the city. They are met by the shiny new appliances, cutting edge for the 1980s and hideously dated by modern standards. That’s where the film shows its age the most; the old vacuum looks very much like a modern vacuum, and the titular toaster is very close to the one I have in my house. The computers and stereos and all the other things in the new apartment, however, look very ‘80s, and this becomes ever more in your face as they sing about how new they are in a tune that is filled to the brim with synthesizers of that era (as well as an obvious Carmen Miranda parody at one point).
And then we get to the junkyard scene. This is the part of the movie that I remembered vividly, even in the twenty-some years I didn’t watch it. This is the song that I found in a Reddit thread that became a talisman for me in times of misery. I listened to it a lot right after I graduated high school, before finding a proper summer job, having been put through the rite of passage that those of us my age, give or take a few years, went through: being driven from store to store by your parents and ordered to ask if they had any job openings, only to be told to apply online (maybe one store let me fill something out there—this was summer 2015). I listened to it a lot during my mental health crash my sophomore year of college (I showed it to at least one therapist). I listened to it, again, in the wake of my suicide attempt, an attempt born out of guilt.
But describing it in words won’t do it justice. Take a few minutes and watch it.
Look into my virtual eyes and tell me this isn’t the darkest shit you’ve ever seen in a children’s film. Occasionally, in college, the swing dance and ballroom dance clubs I was in would share the songs from the movies they loved as children. Most would have some sugary song from the Disney Renaissance. I would show them this, and they would give me weird looks.
Again, I think that I liked this bit as a child because of the talking cars. It’s certainly a catchy tune, with bits of surf rock and a driving beat that would make it easy to swing dance to (I have never had the pleasure, unfortunately), written by the acclaimed Van Dyke Parks. As an adult, this scene encapsulates the themes of the film in a terrifying way. You are literally staring into the jaws of death! How did anyone let this get put in a children’s film? (A big part, by my understanding, was having it made independently rather than financed by Disney). This is a song about feeling left behind, the feeling that you belonged to a different era. Long-time science fiction readers may notice a thematic overlap with George R. R. Martin’s 1983 novel The Armageddon Rag. That is a work dominated by nostalgia and the fear of being left behind. The characters are aging rockers whose heyday was the swinging ‘60s, the age of free love and peace and the antiwar movement. It is a book that is the hypercapitalist, reactionary, money-obsessed ‘80s looking back at the freewheeling, anti-establishment ‘60s, asking where the time had gone.
I’m going to go through that song car by car. I think it deserves it:
The first car we don’t get that good of a look at, but he’s a common person’s car, a means to get from here to there. He’s very much the person who’s thrown too much time into their job and has lost any sense of self. He reminds me of my father.
The second car is more artistically clear in her intent: she’s a car of the optimistic Space Age of the ‘50s, with her sleek design that calls to mind rockets. She is a paean to lost optimism.
The third car is a ‘50s hot rod, with the raspy voice of an aging rock star whose voice has been destroyed by booze and cigarettes. He’s one way of looking at lost youth, tied to a very specific time and place.
The fourth car is a race car of the type common in the interwar years, who realistically couldn’t hold a candle to the cars of the ‘80s. He’s about how skills and senses degrade as you age, and how the highs of youth cannot be recreated afterwards. He’s the car most comparable to an athlete.
The fifth and sixth cars are a limousine and a hearse, respectively. The former sings of a wedding, the latter a funeral, and these are implied to be for the same man. They are clearly the same model of car in different livery to suit different purposes, and sent together into the maw of death. Sex and death are so commonly intertwined in art, and that is the case here. One begets the other.
The sixth car is the reason why, whenever I want to listen to this song, I listen to a version ripped directly from the film rather than the official soundtrack. For on the soundtrack they bowdlerized her lyrics and overlaid a weird-sounding new line that juts out like a nail. I understand why they felt the need to do this, as it is the most openly sexual of any of the verses. This car is reminiscent of the VW vans that the hippies loved, and the surfboard on her roof is self-explanatory. She is the embodiment of the swinging ‘60s, the age of free love, and (as Jack Weinberg put it) never trusting anyone over the age of 30. By the time this film was made, those bright young people would mostly have settled down, reached middle age, taken corporate jobs, and started families—and I suspect that several of them would have watched this film with their children. This segment is another catchy song with talking cars for children, but I can imagine it was a shot across the bow for their parents.
The last car is downright tragic. He is a work truck, left forgotten to rot, deemed superfluous as his owners looked for a better future in the city (here, Santa Fe). Notably, this is specifically stated to be on a reservation, and from the mention of the Hopi later on we can guess this is the Hopi reservation of Arizona (surrounded, incidentally, by the larger Navajo reservation). The time this car was made useful would have been the age of the Red Power movement, when the Indigenous peoples of the continent demanded that the settler state and the settler society remember that they were still living, breathing peoples, not dead ones. This truck is a forgotten tool of a forgotten people, and those layers of forgottenness leave him only one course of action: he is the only car to voluntarily take his place on the conveyor belt to total destruction.
This is a film that is frankly much scarier as an adult than as a child. I am now months away from thirty, the age that society has decided is the end of your fun and the end of your youth, the year you are supposed to be an “adult,” whatever that means. I am autistic, and I have ADHD, which means that I have been “behind” several “adult” milestones. I still live with my parents, because everything in Northern Virginia is hideously expensive. I only got my first job at 25, and I am still there, because the job application process is hell for people like me. I have never had a relationship. I have never even dated anyone. As someone who has spent his entire life chasing an ideal that I simply cannot reach, the themes of obsolescence of this movie resonate with me deeply. Part of me wonders if such great thematic work is wasted on children, but on the other hand, I would never have seen it as an adult had I never seen it as a child. It is a seed that grew into a great and mighty tree that has borne many fruits, and it has done so because the fear it is based on comes for us all.
And, if you're so inclined, it's now on Disney Plus.
POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.
