History WMG / Up

[[WMG: Ellie likely died of lead poisoning from Carl's house]]
The old clubhouse Carl and Ellie fix up may have had buildup of lead from the paint they used to repaint it with. Ellie's inability to have children and her stumbling up the hill before the scene of her on her deathbed are associated with symptoms of lead poisoning, such as changes in fertility and bone deterioration.

Throughout the movie it's made very clear that Russel's dad is never around for his family, so I think the mom filed for divorce and took their son from the man who was never even there for him.

While this was based on Nitpicking that CinemaSins did, the first two examples, Jeramy pointed out, was that

The scientific community laughed him off because the "monster of Paradise Falls" was (metaphorically) just another [[ScienceMarchesOn Brontosaurus]]. He declared that it was real, and he could prove it by finding a live specimen. However, if he'd been in his right mind, it would have been possible for him to accept Kevin's kind as being a real example of a Lost World species, instead of killing them and letting his dogs eat them as soon as he realized that an individual specimen wasn't the same "species" as the monster, and thus 1. useless in proving the existence of the monster, and 2. a worthless freak of nature [[CriticalResearchFailure that we already have the bones of]] (''aepyornis Maximus''), just a colorful emu that nobody will care about.

It's actualy a defense mechanism by Kevin's species; in order to remain elusive, it sends psychic waves to disrupt brain functions and force people to say outdated facts about birds.

Okay, this WMG was mainly built on the fact that Russell was kind of chubby. But still, a WMG's an WMG.

The real reason he doesn't see his dad much is because he went back to the future.

Get it, because...directions? The plot would be about russel going underground to find carl's corpse.

Several evidences for this. A few times in the film, characters (Young!Ellie for one) says that it's a "land lost in time". Muntz states that he's been chasing Kevin "for years". This, coupled with Muntz's 'youth' and Carl's gradual increase in strength (straightening up, becoming [[BadassNormal more athletic]] and the 'swordfight', and that [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelenken Kevin]] is not extinct, time is screwey. Not backwards, not stopped, but ''different''.

*** Perhaps Helen Parr was part of Ellie's extended family somewhere. Definite resemblance between the two.
** Alternatively, Muntz has some sort of brain-power based power, which would explain how he was able to build mind reading talking dog collars out of 1940's tech, and possibly also why he's [[Series/{{Heroes}} gone round the bend...]]

*** And, during the "Through the City" montage, the family of three looking at reflections in a skyscraper window resemble Violet Parr (with brown hair) and the dude she had a crush on. Violet's hair seemed like an unnatural colour even for the Incredible's style, and it's plausible it was dyed, [[BroadStrokes because that's what shy teenage girls do]]. It's also entirely possible that she grew up, married Dude (I don't remember his name, it was Dan or something) and had a kid.

Hence why he's so vigorous for a guy who's at least ~10-15 years older then Carl and his original dogs are still alive.

*** Damn. That is sad...and possible. But if true, there is at least one light at the end of the tunnel: if Carl did indeed imagine the adventure, and then relate it to the audience/Russell, it would show that he did still let go of the house/his past, he did know what was important. Muntz would exist as a warning of what happens when you get too stuck in the past, what Carl could have become--he's that anyway, but him appearing in Carl's imagination would be justified as either his subconscious or Carl deliberately adding him in to make a point. And he was trying to pass that insight on. Not as awesome as a real adventure, but still heartwarming in its own way.

Carl managed to get the patent on the dog collar technology and made a fortune from the marketing bonanza with the dog owner market. How else could he afford to keep the dirigible, not be destitute with all the FAA fines he would have to pay for his trips and apparently prevent being shuffled off to an assisted living home?
* I thought he did go Shady Oaks in the end since he's homeless - one of the photos show the dogs visiting the residents.
** I always kind of thought he moved in with Russell and as mum, as a sort of adopted granddad/ father figure...
** Maybe he paid them a visit, or donated a couple of dogs to a person who makes regular hospital visits with dogs.
* There's also all of Muntz' specimens. Sure they all got destroyed and dismantled in the fight, but it wouldn't be impossible for a museum to put them back together (a few missing bones notwithstanding).

* The airship would be worth a good chunk o' change by itself; any aviation museum worth its salt would love to add it to their collection. Imagine the original ''Spirit of St. Louis,'' only bigger and still functional after all these years.

*** (Yes, I'm ignoring the fact that the first person to scientifically describe the species gets to give it it's scientific name. Just go with me here.)

** This Troper has to agree. Maybe the comment was just meant to [[CrossesTheLineTwice cross the line of couple of times]]?

** Uh... Yeah, kids can feel neglected by their parents, and parents can completely fail at knowing ''how'' to be parents, without said child being in any way different from most children. Not saying it's 100% impossible, just that your theory seems highly unlikely in the face of other options.

** It doesn't seem unusually obsessive; This Troper has known Scouts (and was one) who were pretty hyped up to collecting badges... especially kids like Russel, who probably thought that becoming distinguished through the badge-ceremony would get his dad's attention.

* This also explains why Russell was at Carl's house to begin with. His dad had no choice but to deal with him for a day, so he took him to work.

They clearly mention Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and Epsilon, so why skip Delta. The other dogs seem to look down upon the typically non-agressive Golden Retreiver. Did Muntz refer to Dug in the course of the film?

** Yeah, Omega makes sense. Dug seems like the sort of dog who would occupy the Omega possition.

** Maybe Dug is in an even lesser position that Omega?

* Not only that, it would explain why Dug is the only Golden Retriever among Doberman, Bulldogs, and mixes of the two.

* It also explains one of the houses in the ''George and A.J.'' short. Wait, does that mean Simon finally settled down and lived in Carl's neighbor?

The one thing all these people had in common were pilot hats...very similar to the ones Carl and Elie wore in their childhood. This may be a bit a stretch, but those hats were all part of Muntz merchandising campaign. ("Wear the official explorer's hat, endorsed by Charles Muntz himself!") All of those people were inspired by Muntz and decided to follow his example and go to Paradise Falls for their own reasons. Heck, some of them might have gone down just to try and help him capture Kevin. Of course, one thing led to another...

*** Even hoatzins have the wing bones shaped like those of regular birds. And many other birds have wing claws anyway. STOP FAILING ORNITHOLOGY!

Carl is a Staunen Navigator with two dots in Skafoi. Muntz is an unmada. Russel is either a Beholden or a particularly young Genius. The dogs aren't in fact made smart by the collars, but are Automata 4 constructs. So we come to the conclusion that Paradise Falls is a bardo.
* Can we set it in [[TabletopGame/MageTheAscension the Old World of Darkness]]? That would make Carl a Son of Ether instead, probably Awakened by contact with Ellie (who was so obviously an Adventurer-type Etherite), and he and Russel and Dug can explore a happy '50s sci-fi universe. You know, with a severely downplayed likelihood of psychosis.

* [[TabletopGame/ChangelingTheDreaming The Old World of Darkness, you say?]] Gather, childlings, and hear the tale of the great nocker Carl, the kinain Russel, and the chimeras Dug and Kevin, and how they did battle with Banality by venturing forth into the Dreaming and reclaiming the lost Mobile Freehold of Adventure's Soul. Our story begins with Carl loosing his house from the Earth's bonds with a cantrip and riding the winds of mortal disbelief out of this darkened world, but it should properly start with the tales of the then-Seelie eshu Muntz he followed as a childling...
** You see, in the time before the Resurgence, Charles Muntz was a pioneer of Imagination-- But as time passed and the domain of Science grew, Muntz became obsessed with "proving" the Dreaming to a world that was losing interest. He vanished into the Far Dreaming while Carl was still a child; yet Carl found wonder in the True Dreamer Eleanor and her pure heart. But once his beloved was lost Carl sank quickly into a Grump's state of mind. Resolving to emulate his lost idol and bid farewell to a world nearing Endless Winter, Carl cast off from the Waking World in an explosion of mechanical Glamour... accidentally drawing young Russel, a kinain whose dreams were strong despite his mundane surroundings, along with him.

Well, both films did have the wives of the old man of the house possessed by them. But, Elie seemed to like kids more then the Monster House wouman, and thus, why Rushell got to live, and why she let him grab the hose.

The house instead crashed into the buildings that the CorruptCorporateExecutive wanted to complete in the first place, than accidentally killed said Executive ''a la'' Wicked Witch Of East. However, it ended with Russel severely injured, and Carl in a coma, thus dreaming up the rest of it...
[[spoiler: ... however, once he woke up from it, he discovered that the pages that filled the 'stuff I'm going to', Russel's daddy issues, and Mutz (who just happened to retrieved Kevin and come back around the same time Carl woke up from his coma) being insane, and his doggy army were all real, and the dream just happens to be a vision sent by the spirit of his dead wife. Expect, Kevin's a shape shifter who can disguise herself, mainly as a bird or human, as her true form is [[AFormYouAreComfortableWith not to be seen by a human eye]].]]
That black out at the end of the storm scene had me thinking.
* Me too, but in a different way. A relative of mine saw the film too and said that no-one would really survive a storm like that. That made me wonder if the rest of the movie past that point was a kind of afterlife, with Carl, Russell and Muntz all being dead. Ellie might have been in a different part, it would explain all the talking dogs and weird birds, and we never actually see [[spoiler: what happened to Muntz after he [[DisneyVillainDeath plummets out of sight]]]]
** If Paradise Falls is Carl's personal purgatory, the Muntz that Carl met could actually be Muntz's ghost, who acted as a "guardian angel" of sorts. His role was to show Carl the dangers of holding onto the past, because Carl couldn't move on until he let go of his grief. When Carl finally let the house go (the house obviously representing his grief), Muntz exited from Carl's purgatory as well.

The scientific community laughed him off because the "monster of Paradise Falls" was (metaphorically) just another [[ScienceMarchesOn Brontosaurus]]. He declared that it was real, and he could prove it by finding a live specimen. However, if he'd been in his right mind, it would have been possible for him to accept Kevin's kind as being a real example of a Lost World species, instead of killing them and letting his dogs eat them as soon as he realized that an individual specimen wasn't the same "species" as the monster, and thus 1. useless in proving the existence of the monster, and 2. a worthless freak of nature [[CriticalResearchFailure that we already have the bones of]] (''aepyornis maximus''), just a colorful emu that nobody will care about.

* If Kevin's mate was a skeleton seventy years ago, and Kevin's babies are still roughly the size of a melon, then those birds must live an ''incredibly'' long time.
** Yes, but wasn't there a scrapped subplot where eating Kevinoid eggs slowed down your aging? It actuallt all fits perfectly together!

Because seriously, Omega is the lowest ranking position in a pack (when it is a rank, and not just a statement of birth order), not just the 23rd lowest ranking. Other second-generation dogs that survived the eugenics and training include Aa, B(i)g, and Eo (Dog Epsilon ReallyGetsAround), but Dug is just the only second-gen dog we've seen that's a full member of the "pack" instead of still in the minors' compound.

In ''VideoGame/ModernWarfare'', favela thugs, mercenaries and terrorists are able to access heavy-duty military hardware with great ease, which explains how Carl was able to acquire a bajillion balloons despite a recent lawsuit.
* He sold balloons for a living. He probably just still had them leftover from then.

* I thought that Russell's parents divorced and Phyllis was his father's new wife. The real mom was the lady in badge ceremony scene.

* I always thought that Phyllis was Russel's dad, who just had a feminine/odd name,which Carl assumed was the mother's name. Makes perfect sense.
** Not really, because why would Russell say that Phyllis said his dad was too busy to talk? Unless..Russell's dad has a Split Personality.

Alpha's grammar often slips into vaguely French or German [[AsLongAsItSoundsForeign character]] syntax, has that loose wire which was never permanently fixed, and even his "regular" voice is poorly synthesized. Beta's seems to work consistently, and can convey more emotion, but still has a stronger "as heard via radio" sound than most of the other dogs (much less than Alpha's, though). Dug's works perfectly, with several accents and presumably jargon vocabularies as well as a Japanese vocabulary. Muntz didn't invent the collars himself prior to his adventure, he took the first collar (either bought, stole, or took off the corpse of an intruder male man), made more, and slowly refined the technology (possibly adapting them for canine use, if necessary, and if they were originally meant for humans).

Muntz was in his early twenties when Carl and Elle were about, let's say- ten. This is why, when Carl and Mutz meet, they can both be old- but not ''too'' old. If Carl is maybe 70 (I don't remember if they actually ''say'' his age, so I'm sorry if that's wrong. XD) Than Muntz would only be 80.

The JerkAss wanted Carl out so badly, so he ordered the construction workers to ''accidentally'' hit something and then told them that if should they hit anything, they should be ''aggressively'' nice, knowing that it would make Carl lose his temper and lash out. The CCE probably could have found other ways to have him evicted, but he decided to do this simply to get the message across that you don't mess with him.
* He likely took it personally when Carl got his house to float away. To him its like a big "up yours".

Carl obviously planned the trip, so it's not really like he did it on the spur of the moment. He probably knew he wasn't capable of living out there all on his own. In his eyes, he did not have much left to live for, so he decided he was going to go out in style. After reading through Ellie's picture book, in addition to feeling responsible for inadvertently bringing Russel with him did he change his mind.
* I got that vibe from the movie as well when he sat in the chair just before Russel knocks on the door. Quietly sitting, eyes closed. He very well may not have planned on surviving the trip.
* Quite likely- he figured he didn't have long to live anyway, nor anything to live for with no family, so he decided to pursue the one thing he wanted in life that he could still achieve- going to Paradise Falls, even though it would be a one-way trip, and he likely wouldn't last long out there. He wanted to get there, and didn't care if it killed him, knowing full well it almost surely would.

* WordOfGod says that both his look and personality was meant to evoke what their hypothetical child might have been like, and doesn't this theory just make the whole story even [[SugarWiki/HeartwarmingMoments more heartwarming]]?

* This makes much more sense than Kevin being a female. Male birds are nearly always more colorful, as well as being larger than their female counterparts. In addition, in many bird species, both the mother and father care for the chicks. The only reason people tend to think he's a female is because Doug said so, and Doug is quite frankly- [[{{Cloudcuckoolander}} well...]]

Carl figured out it'd not harm to have a back-up plan just in case he and Ellie never accumulated enough money to go by conventional means so he kept all the balloons he didn't sell. When he retired, he forgot about this plan until the land developers got him declared a "public menace".

It explains the houses ability to fly in the face of the laws of Physics. His trigger was Ellie's Death, and him attacking the Construction Worker was due to his powers conflict generation, in addition to mundane stress. He also has secondary brute powers, explaining as he seems to be healthier the longer he is involved in conflict.

When Russell tells Carl that he saw a long-tailed snipe that looked like a huge mouse, what he actually saw was one of the ratbirds created by Fint Lockwood, who escaped from Swallow Falls, perhaps on a freighter ship from the Baby Brent Sardines Industry, which at the time had not yet failed, and landed on the North American continent.

* If this is the case, then she's one that's evolved convergently into what's essentially a bird anyway. The toothless beak and near-absent tail could perhaps suggest oviraptorosaur lineage?

While this was based on Nitpicking that CinemaSins did, the first two examples, Jeramy pointed out, were that

2. At the beginning of the movie, Carl Fredrickson had back pain after getting out of bed, needed a cane to walk, and a special sliding chair to go up and down the stairs. By the climax of the movie, he was able to: Thrown make a zipline and use it perfectly both within his first try, climb a ladder without any fatigue, and push all of his heavy furniture outside his house within a short time, also without any signs of fatigue, and he no longer needed his cane at the end. All of this could have been something in the air reversing all the damage to his bones that he received overtime from age, allowing him to perform great athletic feats.

Throughout the movie it's made very clear that Russel's dad is never around for his family, so I think the mom filed for divorice and took their son from the man who was never even there for him.

2. At the beginning of the movie, Carl Fredrickson had back pain after getting out of bed, needed a cane to walk, and a special sliding chair to go up and down the stairs. By the climax of the movie, he was able to: Thrown make a zipline and use it perfectly both within his first try, climb a ladder without any fatigue, and push all of his heavy furniture outside his house within a short time, also without any signs of fatigue, and he no longer needed his cane at the end. All of this could have been something in the air reversing all the damage to his bones that he received overtime from age, allowing him to perform great athletic feats.

Because people use "iota" to mean "a small amount".

Some people believe that angels in heaven can affect the weather. Maybe Ellie's spirit was responsible for the storm near the beginning of Carl's journey. Why? Two possibilities. 1: to help him get to Paradise Falls faster; or 2: she didn't want him to go to Paradise Falls in the first place, because she hoped that Carl would live his life free of grief after her passing.

Some people believe that angels in heaven can affect the weather. Maybe Ellie's spirit was responsible for the storm near the beginning of Carl's journey. Why? Two possibilities. 1: to help him get to Paradise Falls faster; or 2: she didn't want him to go to Paradise Falls in the first place, because she hoped that Carl would live his life free of grief after her passing.

[[WMG: Ellie and Carl's wedding was a shotgun wedding]]
If Ellie was pregnant when the two got married, that would explain why Carl's family looked so unhappy at the wedding. One of her relatives even fires off a shotgun during the nuptials.

Some people believe that angels in heaven can affect the weather. Maybe Ellie's spirit was responsible for the storm near the beginning of Carl's journey. Why? Two possibilities. 1: to help him get to Paradise Falls faster; or 2: she didn't want him to go to Paradise Falls in the first place, because she hoped that Carl would live his life free of grief after her passing.

She is a non-avian dinosaur. As mentioned above, the forelimbs on her skeleton look less like bird wings and more like clawed hands. Plus, we see Muntz has collected skeletons of extinct animals such as ground sloths and ''Arsinoitherium'', the latter of which he claims to have encountered in Ethiopia, so a surviving non-avian dinosaur in this world isn't too unlikely.

* WordOfGod says that both his look and personality was meant to evoke what their hypothetical child might have been like, and doesn't this theory just make the whole story even [[CrowningMomentOfHeartwarming more heartwarming]]?

When Russell tells Carl that he saw a long-tailed snipe that looked like a huge mouse, what he actually saw was one of the ratbirds created by Fint Lockwood, who escaped from Swallow Falls, perhaps on a freighter ship from the Baby Brent Sardines Industry, which at the time had not yet failed, and landed on the North American continent.

When Russell tells Carl that he saw a long-tailed snipe that looked like a huge mouse, what he actually saw was one of the ratbirds created by Fint Lockwood, who escaped from Swallow Falls, perhaps on a freighter from the Baby Brent sardines industry, which at the time had not yet failed, and landed on the North American continent.

[[WMG: The Movie take place in same world as ''WesternAnimation/CloudyWithAChanceOfMeatballs'']]
When Russell tells Carl that he saw a long-tailed snipe that looked like a huge mouse, what he actually saw was one of the ratbirds created by Fint Lockwood, who escaped from Swallow Falls, perhaps on a freighter from the baby brent sardines industry, which at the time had not yet failed, and landed on the North American continent.