Fix Fic: The Brave Little Toaster · 7:05am Dec 21st, 2015
Back in 2012, I put up a few chapters of what I called “Misappropriated Fanfiction Theater” on this blog, where I basically re-wrote chapters of other author’s fanfics I disagreed with. It’s not something I’m very proud of, but sometimes I can’t help myself—if I see an otherwise great idea ruined by a crummy execution, I’m impelled to do something about it.
A “fix fic” is basically the same impulse, but applied to a movie or TV show instead of to a fanfic inspired by a movie or TV show. I’m pretty sure that fix fics have got to be the #2 inspiration for beginning writers to get into fanfiction, right after the tricky-to-execute-without-making-your-readers-want-to-kill-you known as the self-insert.
One of the most epic fix fics I ever attempted to write was inspired by the animated film The Brave Little Toaster (1987), a now largely forgotten work created by a group of animators that would later become famous at Pixar. In fact, the Toy Story series seems to have taken several of its ideas from Brave Little Toaster.
Brave Little Toaster centers around a boy who spent several summers in a cabin with his parents, where all he had to play with were household appliances instead of toys. As a result of his attentions, the appliances developed minds of their own when nobody was looking, rather like toys have been doing in fiction since the early Twentieth Century. Years have passed since The Boy last visited the cabin, and when the appliances learn that the cabin is to be sold, they set out to reunite with him. By replacing the expected toys in this scenario with appliances, the story emphasizes the notions of usefulness and uselessness, and draws a contrast between our heroes, who were all manufactured in an era were devices were expected to last, and to be repaired when they failed, and the villains, the animated appliances currently owned by The Boy, which are all designed to fail within a few years of being purchased. The evil appliances plot to destroy the good appliances before The Boy can discover them, but the plot nearly kills The Boy and his girlfriend—nobody seems to have realized that humans age, and so the fact that The Boy is a teenager is a tremendous shock. In the end, the Toaster sacrifices its life to save The Boy, The Boy repairs the Toaster, and everybody and everything live happily ever after.
The film is far from perfect, and in particular its politics of dependable American toasters vs. worthless Japanese entertainment centers falls flat. But that in fact attracted me all the more, in that this was an unexplored universe with room to do my own work. Besides, this film was dark, almost as dark as Return to Oz (1985). The genderless character of Toaster was a particular highlight—it frequently needs to pull the other appliances together in order to get anything accomplished, and yet it is haunted by a recurring vision of that inevitable day when The Boy decides to see what would happen if he sticks a fork into Toaster’s slots (answer: pure nightmare fuel...with clowns). At the time, my primary complaint with the movie was centered on the fact that the entire universe revolved around this one human character, who never once catches on to the fact that literally everything he touches comes to life when his back is turned. After watching the end of the movie over and over and over again, I managed to convince myself that the young man must have seen the Toaster sacrificing itself in a way that proved that it was alive, and was merely pretending he didn’t know because his girlfriend was there. (I also learned that The Boy was named Rob.)
And with this revelation, I set out to write my sequel to The Brave Little Toaster, a story called “Expanding the Franchise”, dedicated to setting up a scene between The Boy and his Toaster.
This thing was ludicrously complicated. I know, because my notes on the never-finished fic form the oldest document on my computer, a document lovingly transferred at least a dozen times between the hard drives of all the computers I’ve owned over the years. The plot involved a group of disparate teenagers becoming friends while attending a small college, all while the world was headed for inevitable social collapse on the brink of W2K (I was writing this around 1996 or 1997). In the end it’s reality itself that has to be saved, and only this group of friends is in possession of the knowledge and means to save it. I not only had characters from Brave Little Toaster in there, but also literally every other fictional source that caught my eye at the time: VALIS by Philip K. Dick, “Waldo” by Robert A. Heinlein, The Mouse and His Child by Russell Hoban, Watership Down, and Chip ‘n’ Dale Rescue Rangers.
I’ll finish this blog off by providing two quotes: one from the actual novel that shows my “introspective style” at its ripest, and second a bit from the notes that seems to show a definite decline in my analytical abilities when not backed by the power of Wikipedia between the late 90’s and today. I’m leaving all of my phrasing from two decades ago intact, including my insistence then on putting two spaces after each sentence (the horrror!). Oh right, one more important thing to note: the identity of the all-seeing snarky narrator of “Expanding the Franchise” was never supposed to be revealed to the reader, but I’ll tell you right now that it was a particularly nosy cat who couldn’t face the fact that it was the only sapient cat on earth for no explicable reason. I just liked making stories unnecessarily complicated back then.
I followed Linda through the open door into the dorm room. Rob was studying for finals, while Jack and his friend Kyle were intent on an alien-destroying video game. Linda was quite upset about her parents’ plans for her, and was intent on distracting herself. Rob was absorbed in what he was doing, Kyle was preoccupied with his dropping GPA, and Jack was thinking about “the machines”. The machines, in turn, were not doing anything at the moment (except the toaster, who was working himself up into a mild boil about Kyle making a fool of his reflection again). Even so, I was quite sure they were watching everything we were doing. I settled into a not-so-convenient corner (since the good one was occupied by the electric blanket) and waited for something interesting to happen.
Linda waited in vain for someone to notice her, then cleared her throat. “In case anyone is interested, I’ve just been accepted to Haverford.”
Jack turned his head. “Congratulations. Are you finishing the year here?” He turned back to the game before waiting for her answer.
She wanted something more emotional from her news. “Yes, it would be more convenient that way.” With a wicked smile she added, “Of course, I can’t wait to get to a real school at last.”
This had the desired effect. The three young men leaped up at once in indignation. “And what makes Winchester a fake college?” demanded Kyle.
“This school is so lacking in the more important subjects: art, history, philosophy...”
“So, then,” Jack interjected, “liberal arts equals real, huh?”
“It’s not just that,” Linda countered. “College is supposed to be about expanding your horizons and discovering who you really are and what you really want to do with your life. I’ve gotten none of that here. A year and a half and not one deep philosophical discussion, the stuff about God and politics that makes college, college!”
“Well, I guess we could do that,” suggested Rob with a smile. “What kind of deep question are you interested in?”
Linda furrowed her brow in thought. She wanted to unburden herself to her friends, but years of training kept her quiet. Finally, she picked a question.
“What is the meaning of it all?”
“Define ‘it’,” quipped Jack.
“My life, your life, humanity, Earth, the universe. Why is it all here? What purpose does it serve?”
Rob whistled. “Good question. Well, I don’t know about the rest of it, but I think the purpose of us earthlings is service. We all are born with unique talents, and our purpose is to use those talents to help people out.”
I looked out at the counter, and I saw the toaster at the edge, looking with admiration at his owner. I looked over at Linda and got a different reaction; Rob’s was the wrong answer for her. “And who are we helping? Are we helping the less-fortunate? Probably not, since they aren’t the ones with the money, and whoever dies with the most toys wins, right? So we’re in the business of making the rich richer and the poor more miserable than ever, right? What’s the good of that?”
Kyle spoke up; he had a much bigger chip on his shoulder. “What does good or bad have to do with it? The assumption you are both making is that there is someone to watch all of this and judge, a God to reward and punish. But look around you--do you see good rewarded and evil punished? No. You don’t even see good punished and evil rewarded. The universe is above morality. It is above life. It is even above its own existence. It came into being by pure chance, and any second it will disappear into nothing along with all of us, also by chance. There is nothing to be gained by ascetism or hedonism. We try to achieve immortality, yet the human race will probably be gone long before any other races ever discover Earth, and nothing of us will survive. In the face of this, why bother to do anything?”
There was nothing anyone could say to refute this argument, so a dread silence descended upon the room. The blanket was sobbing quietly, and the toaster looked sadly at the floor far below. Linda looked to Jack, who had been listening to the blanket. A sly thought crept into his brain.
“I suppose it would be no surprise to you that I got my philosophy from children’s books,” he said. “Let me tell you one of the deeper stories:
“Once upon a time there was a wind-up mouse and his child. They were taken from the only family they had ever known to become the playthings of a family that was too busy to love them. After a few years they were discarded. The mouse and his child then set out to find some meaning in life. They were used by charlatains and caught in the middle of immense forces far beyond their comprehension. They nearly caught up with one of the members of their long lost family when fate catapulted them to the bottom of a deep, murky pond.
“The pond was ruled by C. Serpentina, the snapping turtle. Serpentina was a philosopher, and he told the two toys that by studing a can of Bonzo Dog Food they would discover the Ultimate Truth, and then maybe he’d rescue them. The can’s label depicted a dog dressed as a chef holding a tray on which was a can of Bonzo Dog Food. On that can was another dog with another can, which showed another dog and another can, and so on to infinity. The Ultimate Truth was beyond the last visible dog. With the help of a mud-skipper, the young toy mouse worked his way down the series while the father lost all hope that they would ever leave the swamp.
“Days, weeks, and months passed, as the water was very murky and the child’s painted eyes were not as sharp as they once were. Finally, he reached the end of the series. Beyond the last visible dog were dots of color, separated by white space: nothing. C. Serpentina then told them that this was the ultimate truth behind the universe. The purpose of everything is nothing, and if nothing matters, why should anyone bother to do anything?” Jack looked around to be sure he had his entire audience. Even the toaster, eyes open in disregard to consequences, was looking at him at the edge of his “seat”.
“The boy was nearly overcome with helplessness, but stubbornly he fought back. ‘And what is behind the nothing?’ he asked. ‘Impertinent child!’ snapped the turtle, ‘There is nothing behind the nothing!’ The mud-skipper reached forward and ripped the label off of the shiny can. Seeing himself for the first time in his life, the mouse exclaimed, ‘There’s nothing on the other side of nothing but us!’”
The silence was broken by the sound of a toaster falling off of a countertop in shock.
There are three types of anthropomorphic characters in children’s media: toys, animals, and aliens. The idea of toys that came to life when the child left the room does not go that far back (I think—I am assuming that Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy was the start, and that cannot be older than mid-nineteenth century). The Velveteen Rabbit added the proviso that the child must love their toy to animate it. The rule about pretending to be inanimate around any children was probably invented to keep from disappointing the children hearing the story. It must have seemed totally nonsensical to a child, on a par with the rules an adult issued every day. In the post-Watergate era, the excuse usually given in children’s media is the fear of what the government would do (a great message of insecurity to be blasting into the mind of a toddler). Of course, with the plot laxity evident in mainstream children’s media, it is common for the toys to break this rule anyway, leading to the same child frustration the rule was designed to prevent.
Animal sentience has nothing to do with the love of any human being. Talking animals can be traced to the fables of Bidpai, about three thousand years ago. Animals have their own societies, which reflect upon the human ones. Different species mingle freely, the only separations being based on size and feeding style. Try as I might, I could find no way that human belief could have anything to do with animal sentience, so I decided as a joke that the humans thought themselves responsible for talking animals, even though they had always been talking. By the way, it is much easier to believe that an animal would have nothing to say to a human than that a toy would.
The anthropomorphism of aliens is almost never questioned, despite the overwhelming probability that a sentient alien would be totally unable to communicate with us (consider our failures with dolphins). Aliens enter this story in a totally indirect manner, so there is nothing further to discuss about them.
Anthropomorphic stories work by not bringing up the difficult question of how stuffed rabbits, real rabbits, or lagamorphous aliens are able to speak English. Privately, I am assuming that a form of telepathy that cannot be distinguished from speech is being used, but since a major theme of the book is how scientists fool themselves, I will not reveal this.
You know, objects gaining sentience has a long tradition in Japanese folklore. Like a lot of animals (fox and cats for exemple), objects would gain power and¬or souls after 100 years.
Though the toaster and his friend did it much faster... and so did a lot of other objects so maybe it is a function of humans to bring them to life? Imbuing them with a piece of their own soul by caring about the innanimate object?
Can anyone think of anything more alien like than these ponies we are enamored with?
THE BRAVE LITTLE TOASTER!!!! omg, seriously though i can not believe anyone remembered this Disney movie much less expand upon it. thanks for making my day with that header image and the nostalgic and informative read.
McPoodle, I love you dearly, but if you ever call The Brave Little Toaster "Largely Forgotten" again I will straight cut you.
The fact that you're right makes it so much worse.