Fridge / Cars

Unmarked Spoilers!

Fridge Brilliance

• Look closely at Lightning's reaction when he and the rest of the town notice lights in the distance approaching Radiator Springs just before the press finds him: while everyone's excited, he looks deeply suspicious. He recognizes the lights because he knows what paparazzi looks like.
• Mater being interested in the French market, not only because there's interesting stuff, but since it's his job to tow stuff around, he'd probably like to see all the stuff and learn about it to increase his knowledge... if you call it that.
• Trev Diesel doing a long honk when Lightning sped up may seem like he was also speeding up at first glance, until one realizes that a long honk on a train is actually a warning to clear the tracks immediately when the train is approaching. Trev wasn't increasing his speed, he was telling Lightning to slow down.
• Also, in the second film, Mater takes out three or four cars that try to jump Lightning by himself. Of course— he's used to being around broken-down cars, so he knows their weak spots.
• During the first race of the film, as seen in this still frame here◊, the entire audience in the background is composed of either red or blue spots, and no obvious green spots. This means that pretty much every car there is supporting either McQueen (the upcoming rookie) or King (the seasoned veteran in his swan season), with not as many obvious supporters of Chick. It certainly makes it a bit more obvious why Chick is so jealous.
• The colors of the main racers. The jealous Green-Eyed Monster Chick Hicks is green. Lightning McQueen, the hotheaded, impulsive one, is red. The King, who's cool and level-headed, is blue.
• The cliffs surrounding Radiator Springs all look like either 50's style cars, or muscle cars stuck in the ground. ^note  The mountain range in the distance, Cadillac Range, is meant to resemble Cadiilac Ranch, an art installation in Amarillo, Texas, that consists of 10 Cadillac cars buried front-first in the ground.
• In the end, the troublesome Neon Cars are caught by the sheriff. Seems like Laser-Guided Karma can't get any better than this. Until you recall that Snot-Rod has the tic of speeding whenever he sneezes. Now pray recall, what happened the last time some car worked too fast with Bessie? Yep, those cars are going to be working for quite a while.
• Why did parts of Axlerod's already clichéd backstory of "businessman gains more respect for the natural world after getting stranded in a rainforest or some other untouched place" sound fabricated? Because they actually were.
• When Lightning was offered the chance to be Dinoco's next face of the brand, Lightning laments saying he didn't win, but Tex made it clear he earned it. However, Lightning had the race won, everyone knew that for a fact, he just decided to not finish the race to help let King finish his last race properly.
  • Not only that, Doc heard the conversation between Lightning and King about giving up the Piston Cup, so it's safe to say Tex was told about it by King's pit crew too. Tex knew Lightning would be the right person to take up King's place as the face of the brand. Lightning, however, refused because of another noble quality he gained, loyalty, and remains with Rust-eze a bit longer due to them giving him his big break.
• When Sally goes to court, she cracks a joke about Doc doing something with his side view mirrors. Which is the same idea as asking a balding man if he's doing something with his hair, since Doc only has one mirror. Hmm, that's weird, most of the cars in the movie have both side view mirrors. The most prominent ones that don't are Lightning and other... race cars...
• When a herd of tractors stampede through Radiator Springs, one starts eating some of the tyres in front of Luigi's shop, much to his horror. He then offers the tractor snow tyres to eat instead, which makes sense since his business is in the desert, meaning that he can't sell snow tyres easily due to the climate.
  • Except in Cars 3, it's shown Radiator Springs does get snow. (But it may still be limited to a small part of the year.)
• While you can of course chalk it up to Plot Armor, Lightning making it through Thunder Hollow's Crazy 8 demolition derby without a scratch makes sense when you consider that Lightning once expertly navigated through a huge pileup that Chick caused way back in the first film.
  • Made all the more effective because Doc Hudson taught him how to properly drive on dirt as well.
• Tony Trihull looks out of place, being a modern warship among older lemon cars, unless you are familiar with the teething problems the Littoral Combat Ships had. He's a lemon as well.
• Mater's presence at all of Lightning's races in 3. The ending of 2 has Lightning proclaim that he’s gonna make sure Mater is at all his races from that moment forward. He kept his promise.
• The Rust-Eze racing center has museum exhibits showcasing Lightning's career, but we see nothing that talks about his participation in the World Grand Prix. While at first this just seems like Pixar deliberately ignoring the second film due to its negative reception, the World Grand Prix turned out to be a malevolent conspiracy that got a lot of cars seriously injured or killed. It makes perfect sense In-Universe why they wouldn't want to bring it up. Though Lightning did play a part in exposing said conspiracy, which probably would be something worth highlighting...

Fridge Horror

• In Cars 3, is it possible that McQueen was at least semi-conscious during his crash? It appears that his eyes are squinted shut which implies that he wasn't completely knocked out once he hit the wall. And even if he was knocked out, it's pretty terrifying to imagine waking up in a hospital with little recollection of what happened. Also said crash could count as Body Horror (if there is not enough as seen below) because if you freeze where he's tumbling over before coming to a stop, Lightning looks as though his twisted in a slight angle. Also, in one of the graphic novels, after crashing, Lightning has his eyes slit open with a pained and exhausted expression on his face.
• The Demolition Derby at Thunder Hollow that Cruz and Lightning (disguised as Chester Whipplefilter) find themselves trapped in is basically the closest equivalent to a blood sport in the Cars universe. Also what exactly happened to the cars who had their license plates sawed off by Miss Fritter? Also what would have happened if Lightning didn't get the saw out of his rear wheel and Miss Fritter actually rammed into him? His comment about nearly getting killed and calling her "the School Bus of Death" indicates something fatal; maybe even worse then his crash earlier in the film.
• In Cars 2, the discussion about dinosaurs and fossil fuels is brought up, chiefly that fossil fuels such as gasoline are derived from dead dinosaurs in a manner analogous if not identical to fossil fuels for us humans. So, think about that for a second: gasoline serves as the main sustenance for cars in this universe, and gasoline, a fossil fuel, is derived from dead dinosaurs. But in the Cars universe, everything is a car or at least some sort of vehicle, thus dinosaurs can be assumed to be cars as well. This means that when a car in Cars drinks gasoline, they are in fact eating their long dead ancestors. Charlton Heston was right.
  • Even worse, unless the (car) dinosaurs ran on another fuel, how do you think they got THEIR fuel?
  • Storyreels for an unmade time travel based Cars Toon show regular dinosaurs, which just means that the shift from organic to artificial life managed to occur much earlier.
    • Of course, if the truth is that fossil fuels are from algae, not dinosaurs, like in real life, it's all good.
    • This depiction of dinosaurs appears to have become Canon Discontinuity, as Cars on the Road shows that prehistoric life in this world were still vehicles, with stone tires and everything.
  • If fossil fuels are going to be used up (if they are like ours— which is implied), then unless they come up with perfect alternatives to fossil fuels, eventually everyone in that world will starve to death.
• Remember, at the racetrack? The cars are sentient and are just like humans, right? That means those are body parts flying all around.
  • Or just articles of clothing. Tires, for instance, are clearly the automotive equivalent of shoes, and replaced without anyone making a fuss over it.
    • So when a car crashes, it suddenly becomes nude? With these races being so popular, it'd make a car more than a little uncomfortable...
    • Some bits are clothing. Others... well, any NASCAR fan can let you know that it's not just tires that get knocked off in a severe wreck. Elliott Sadler smashed into a wall at Pocono in August 2010 hard enough to throw his entire engine from the car. And at least one of the cars from the film's Big One was dripping oil. As the ad says, 'oil: the life blood of your engine.' Think about that one.
    • This is made even worse in Cars 2, where leaking oil is the equivalent of pissing your pants.
    • And now, thanks to the Cars 3 Teaser, we'll be sure to find out when the movie hits theaters.
• In one of the deleted scenes for this movie, while Lightning McQueen is lost, he drives into an area filled with just the outer bodies of cars, abandoned in the middle of nowhere, obviously long enough for the foliage to start growing through them. Of course he gets freaked out, and you realize exactly how creepy it is when you think of the human equivalent of that...
• Speaking of Cars, where the hell are the humans? The cars are obviously developed to fit humans in them, seeing as they have seats and rear view mirrors. What did they do to the humans?
  • We never see inside any of the cars. Their windows are always opaque and grey. Convertible characters are always seen with their roofs up. The only time we see seats inside a car (I've only seen Cars 2 once, so I could be wrong) is the car in Paris with her eyes in her headlights. All of her windows (and windshield) are transparent, and (I think) there are seats inside. (Likely a parody of Chevron cars.)
    • For even more horror and disturbing imagery, think about the human version of that car... Eyes Do Not Belong There indeed!
  • Note that decades like the 50's are mentioned, and Mater mentions dinosaurs in Cars 2. Perhaps the humans built sentient cars, there was some sort of grand apocalypse that wiped out humanity and just about all non-mechanical life-forms... and history had to completely start over, with sentient vehicles as organic replacements?
  • Humans went to outer space, leaving Earth to sentient mechanical life forms.
  • The creator of the franchise actually confirmed where all the humans went in the Cars universe.

It's not exactly pretty.

• Mater's line of work is towing... and salvage. Salvage is taking old parts from broken cars to be sold or reused. Think about that.
  • Well, maybe he's the car version of an undertaker? And those broken cars are the car version of people who were organ donors when they died?
• Pixar's Cars 2 shows that many of the cars have weapons mounted underneath panels. So does that mean they basically have to be "surgically" altered for certain jobs?
  • Like Wolverine's claws? That's treading the line between Body Horror and Fridge Awesome.
  • Also, it's not just cars anymore: Cars 2 shows us a talking plane, and Disney has an entire Planes spin-off. By extension, does that mean that military vehicles are sentient? If so, and at one point they were accompanied by humans, what would they do if confronted with violence that they didn't want to commit? Or, even worse, what if they did want to commit violence? Could they have grown hateful in a bigoted environment?
    • Yes, the military vehicles are sentient. Even the aircraft carriers are sentient. Indeed, the military vehicles don't seem to have any purpose besides warfare. There were some fighter planes who got into racing after WWII, but they were still fighter planes.
    • Just the fact that there's a WWII in this universe. That means there was car/plane-Hitler, and a Car-locaust.
    • Heli-caust? Haul-ocaust? Holo-cars-t?
    • There's a bit in Planes where we see the New York skyline... and there's no Twin Towers. Meaning there was a Car 9/11. And the planes that hit them would've been sentient.
    • A car Pope implies the existence of car Catholicism, which in turn implies the existence of a car Spanish Inquisition.
• Not to mention, all of the trains, planes, and boats are built for specific purposes. Cars can have a certain amount of freedom in what they do, but if an individual is a boat, train, or plane, they're doomed to carting around other individuals (cars) for the rest of their natural lives. Which means their entire society is basically a caste system/slavery culture, with cars at the top. Just let that one set in for a moment...
  • Not quite, there are a lot of military planes and ships. Of course, that opens up a whole new barrel of Fridge Horror.
• #4 in this Cracked article.
• The Big Bad manipulating the lemon mobs can carry out conversations while in the middle of what could be considered open-heart surgery. Repetitive open-heart surgery. How much anesthetic would that take?!
• So if Cars are mechanical life forms, they were probably built somewhere, not born. We know that automotive companies exist, and Lightning refers to himself as a precision machine, implying he was designed. This means that cars are created to have certain capacities and deficiencies by design. The Lemons, for example, were all designed to be kind of crappy, and Mater, being a tow truck, was designed to tow cars. And of course, if cars are built in factories, there's probably some kind of assembly line system at work. Now, imagine that in human terms. People are being made on an assembly line, specifically designed to be better or worse than others and given qualities that will determine their entire life, practically from birth. The Car society is just a few doses of Soma away from being Brave New World. The society in Brave New World was even based on the example of Henry Ford.
  • An alternate theory— there are also references to "birth" and to family relations (mothers, brothers, sisters, uncles, etc.) in-universe, so that implies that vehicles of this world may in fact be "born" in some fashion. Perhaps the role of factories, then, is to "modify" or "standardize" the resulting offspring. Imagine being an unaltered "natural" child in this world, especially if your mother was of one make/model and your father was another. Yikes. If it ain't Brave New World, it's Gattaca! The fine folks at Pixar/Disney have been rather sketchy on the "birds and bees" of Cars, probably for this reason.
• In one of the rejected ideas for the movie, McQueen's engine is taken out of his body and put in a steamroller. And then Mater's engine is put into McQueen's body, and runs off to live McQueen's life. While it was thankfully a dream sequence, the whole concept is just rife with fridge horror; imagine a human equivalent.
  • However, it does sort of mitigate the above bit of Fridge Horror. If the car's "brain" is its engine and can be switched out, then there's the chance of change for any of them.
• The superspies' deaths in the second movie (despite being mostly offscreen) are pretty horrifying if you remember that the cars are sentient and able to feel pain.
• If The Ditz Mater can fool Holly and Finn into thinking he's a spy without even trying, what would happen if they were infiltrated by moles who actually knew what they were doing?
• A Blink-and-You-Miss-It gag in the first movie advertises a restaurant with "topless waitresses", which apparently means convertibles with their roofs open. That's what all the ride vehicles for Radiator Springs Racers are.
• Cars 2 introduces us to a car version of Prince William. That means there was a car version of his mother Princess Diana, who actually died in a car crash in Real Life. Ditto to the first Cars movie, which featured a car version of Dale Earnhardt, Jr., whose dad Dale Earnhardt Sr. got killed in a racing accident in real life.
• Finn McMissile hires Crabby, a crab boat, to take him out to the middle of the ocean, before Crabby is chased away by Tony Trihull. He never sees Finn hanging onto the side of Tony. He must have assumed that Finn fell overboard, or worse, willingly jumped into the water. He's gonna have to live with that guilt for the rest of his life.