Follow TV Tropes

Following

Fridge / Monsters University

Go To

Fridge Brilliance

  • When you think about it, Dean Hardscrabble is a foil to Waternoose from the first film. First off, how is she introduced? She's shown as a legendary scarer who's rooted in old ways, just like Waternoose. There's also a lovely closeup of her centipede legs, instantly making one think of the other arthropod-esque authority. Almost everything about her screams "This is the villain!" from her design to her cruel, antagonistic attitude. Waternoose, on the other hand, was set up as a warm, grandfatherly old man, and a trustworthy friend. His design didn't stand out as overtly villainous in comparison to the other creatures in the monster world. Then, over the course of their respective films, Waternoose is still rooted in his beliefs, even as he betrays them to try and support his company. Hardscrabble, on the other hand, learns the error of her prejudices and prepares to change her ways for the betterment of her school. In the end, the warm, likable old man becomes hard and villainous, while the cold, cruel headmistress becomes friendlier and kinder without losing her dignity. This is even foreshadowed in the way the Dean makes her flying exits. When she enters a scene, it's in the cover of darkness, playing up her eeriness. But when she flies off, she's shrouded in light, implying she's not quite as evil as she lets on.
  • A lot of Mike's behavior in Monsters, Inc. makes a lot more sense when taken with the added context from the prequel.
    • His desperation to preserve his and Sulley's job. While it might come off as selfish at first, think about what happened to him: he was expelled from his dream university, and suddenly all of his hard work meant nothing. Years later, he's clawed his way from the bottom up with his best friend, has his dream job working on the Scare Floor—and now all that is suddenly at risk because of a situation out of their control. It's also no wonder that he's so frustrated with Sulley for being so laissez-faire about the situation, considering it's exactly how Sulley used to be back when was still a Jerk Jock in college.
    • His egotistical personality. After years of having his dreams (and his ego) stomped on by everyone, years and years of people telling him he'd never make it in the scaring field, and now finally on his way to becoming a resounding success, it seems that Mike has gotten into the habit of compensating.
    • His general attitude towards Randall, and their open antagonism towards each other. They used to be roommates in university—not just that, but friends and study buddies—until Randall dumped Mike to get in with the "cool kids" in ROR. It makes sense that he would only want to rub Randall's face in his and Sulley's overwhelming success, and revel in trouncing Randall's score on a daily basis. It also puts an interesting twist on how Sully always had a tolerable (if slightly exasperated) reaction to Randall early on in the first film: it's not just that he's more easygoing than Mike (though that's almost certainly a factor), it's that Randall was never anything more to him than some easily ignored annoyance he met in college. To Mike, Randall was an old friend who betrayed him, which is much harder to forgive and forget. Sulley, in turn, seems to be almost protective of Mike towards Randall in spite of his overall friendliness towards the guy (especially in Randall's introduction scene in Monsters, Inc.), which makes sense as he witnessed the moment Randall abandoned Mike.
    • Mike's interactions with Randall in the Scream Extractor scene. He starts out being cheeky with the latter, then pleads with him, and only freaks out when he realizes that Randall's going to hurt him. While they're certainly not on good terms, he still doesn't expect Randall to actually harm him because they used to be on good terms with each other.
      • A lot of Randall's behavior also makes sense after the prequel. Part of the reason Randall is so angry about Sully beating him in Monsters, Inc. is not just because Sulley inadvertently humiliated him during the Scare Games, but because he's being bested by someone who's a college dropout—one that he knows was a one-trick pony back at college and relied on Mike to not flunk his first few semesters. Plus, Randall only ever directly attacks Mike, but never Sulley. Before Sulley gets in the way, that is—he tries to openly kill both Mike and Sulley once they interfere with his plans.
    • Also, in Monsters Inc., a recurring joke is that Mike believes he is the main character. And why wouldn't he? He's been one before.
  • The Greek Council is so-called because it acts as a Greek Chorus during the Scare Games.
  • Sulley's behavior in the first film makes more sense after watching MU. After failing to put Boo back, the very first thing he does is to grab her and run straight to Mike, regardless of his friend's current situation. Why? Because Mike is the one with the plans (as wacky as they may be) and Sulley is the reality check (look at the scene when Mike is going through various plans and Sulley shoots them all down). It's also interesting to see how they become an almost classic Straight Man and Wise Guy duo, as Sulley is the Straight Man to the rest of Oozma Kappa.
  • Why was Roz, a.k.a., Number 1, working in the paperwork office in Monsters Inc.? Because after Mike and Sully explode the door lab escaping from the human world, the CDA needs to be watching them. Aaaaaaaalways watching...
  • Why in Monsters Inc. were Mike and Sully not excessively freaking out over Boo's laughter powering all the doors in the door storage? Because they've powered offline doors through excessive amounts of power before. It's how she's doing it that makes them concerned, seeing as they had to terrify multiple adults to get anywhere near the same result.
  • Randall serves as a foil to Sulley. The Randall that was Mike Wazowski's friend was welcoming, kind, and nervous. Even before his Start of Darkness, he talks about "meeting up with cool kids" instead of studying (something that Sulley also did) and tends to come up with lame ways to do so (offering monsters cupcakes). Once he joins Roar Omega Roar, he becomes meaner and warns Mike not to "blow [his] cover in front of the cool kids". Then, Randall shows that he's more than willing to humiliate his first friend when he's in on a prank to humiliate Oozma Kappa. After Sulley unknowingly messes him up and humiliates him in front of Roar Omega Roar, Randall gets bitter and spends the rest couple decades chasing after Sulley's success just so he can get revenge. Had Sulley not met Mike and joined Oozma Kappa, it's entirely possible that he would've followed a similar path—forsaking genuine connections to be one of the cool kids, beating down on the little guy for social clout, eventually getting kicked out of the fraternity after his poor grades prove he's not as good as he claimed, and ending up bitter and alone.
    • Similarly, ROR's choice for Randall is pretty rational. First, his power (invisibility) is near Game-Breaker levels. Second, he is likely as smart as Mikey and, as shown with Sulley, ROR doesn't take well to people with low grades. Third, unlike Mike, he looks scary. Last, he would do anything to be with "the cool kids", so they could probably make him do their frathouse chores and homework if they asked him.
    • If you look closely at the posters in the rooms, Randall has a poster that says "Winds of Change". Sure enough, Randall changes quite heavily throughout the film.
    • Also, when the ROR members last appear, Randall isn't with them, implying they kicked him out. Randall's resentment probably derives from the fact that Mike and Sulley got him kicked out of the top fraternity in MU.
  • This movie shows that it's possible, with enough scream power, to activate a door from the human side. So why didn't Mike and Sully try that in Monsters Inc. when they were banished to the Himalayas? Because there were no humans around near the range of that door. They'd have to drag an entire village there to try that again.
  • Those who have seen the original film know that laughter turns out to be much more powerful than screams, which revolutionizes the energy industry. Keeping this in mind, suddenly all those monsters who mocked guys like Oozma Kappa for not being "scary enough" have had the tables turned on them. Monsters like Art, Terri and Terry, and Squishy probably have a much easier time generating laughter thanks to their non-threatening appearance.
  • In the end Mike said that he and Sully were going to "change the world". At the end of Monsters, Inc., they change the monster world by discovering that children aren't actually toxic and that laughter is a more powerful energy source than screams.
  • The way that Mike and Sully treat all their fellow employees during Monsters, Inc. makes sense once you know that they were kicked out of university and had to start from the very bottom of the ladder and work their way up to the Scare Floor: They greeted all the employees, even lowly interns, warmly and by name, and everybody, in turn, knew who they were. If they had graduated from the university and went straight into scaring, chances are they wouldn't interact with those on the lower hierarchy as much.
    • There's an interaction during Monsters Inc. where one of the sanitation workers calls Sulley "Mr. Sullivan" and he says to call him Sully instead. While meant to be a demonstration of his laid-back personality, it also makes sense that he wouldn't want to be referred to exclusively by his family name, as he always hated living in his father's shadow and wanted to be his own person.
  • These doors were a thesis project by the University students. On the surface, it seems to be a simple door leading into a camp cabin bed with a lot of kids. However, in a lot of ways, it is very similar to real-world university thesis projects related to energy: Many research rare sources with the aim of producing a lot of power, but are mostly not very safe or mass-producible. The camp door would have resulted in a huge energy payoff (multiple kids!), but at the same time, it's a lot less safe than a door leading to only 1 kid - kids in groups are more likely to band together and fight off the monster or investigate what's on the other side of the door. Also, there are only so many camps in their world with cabin doors. It's a rich energy source, but it has a low chance of being reproduced at a factory level.
    • Additionally, even if ways around all the previously mentioned problems were found, a door to a camp's closet would only produce energy when there are kids at the cabin, which would only be during the summertime. It would be an unproductive door for the rest of the year.
  • If there are colleges to prepare monsters for scaring, why is the first thing we see in Monsters, Inc. rookie scarers that have so little academic training for this job that they're not familiar at all with the simulators? Because, by that time, there's a power crisis in Monstropolis, so the power companies are in desperate need of scarers and can't wait for new scarers to finish their education, something that probably takes around 4 years. We also see, by the end of Monsters University, that the company offers promotions and incentives to employees so those with enough skills can become scarers and scare coaches even if they didn't graduate, so they have simulators to test the applicants.
  • If the screams of adults provide so much energy, then why do monsters only scare children even when there's a huge energy crisis looming? Because the illusion can only be maintained since children are expected to invent imaginary creatures while adults aren't unless they're considered crazy, and the 'crazy' excuse would only fly for so long if enough adults started claiming monsters were coming through their closets.
    • An adult can be a problem if they are particularly tenacious about finding out where the monsters come from. They could, for example, stay up all night and wait until the monster pops in and then walk into the monster world (assuming adults are considered as toxic as the children). A kid, however, would be too scared to try a tactic like that, and by the time they're old enough to try checking in the closet, the monsters would have stopped scaring them.
      • Similarly, adults are dangerous. Children are all but harmless to a monster, as they're small and don't usually try to go near the monster. An adult, on the other hand, is at least twice as tall, six to seven times heavier, five times stronger, and, unlike kids, tend to choose "fight" in a fight-or-flight scenario. Even if the monster manages to make its exit without trouble, said adult could very well be wide awake and with a shotgun pointed at the closet door the next time. And that's not counting whether the adult might feel like it's necessary to protect their children.
    • Another reason could be that they produce too much energy. When Mike and Sulley scared the adults at the camp, there were at least a hundred Scream Canisters on the other side of the door. From the screams of at least half a dozen adults, all of those Canisters were filled to the brim and exploded because they could not contain the ambient energy from their screams and the door exploded. For comparison, that slumber party Mike and Sulley scared in the first movie only produced seven full canisters, and each canister is enough to contain the screams of one kid. In short, an adult's scream produces far more energy than a child's, and no scare canister in the world could contain that amount of energy.
  • When Dean Hardscrabble drums Sulley out of the scare program, she does so on the basis that Sulley's roar technique would make a kid with a fear of snakes cry instead of screamnote . Fast forward to Monsters, Inc., where Sulley inadvertently scares Boo. She doesn't scream - she cries. Dean Hardscrabble's test was a Call-Forward to the scene where Sulley scares Boo.
    • Even more of a Call-Forward once you realize that Randall, who Boo was afraid of the most, greatly resembles a snake.
  • The main thing you notice during Art's scare in the final round of the Scare Games was how flexibly he avoided the toys on the ground. Guess he was working extra hard to make up for the fact that he couldn't resist jumping right at the toxic urchins in the first round!
  • Most of the humans in this film had their faces either shadowed or drawn in less detail compared to the very colorful and extravagant monsters seen. It's to play up the unknown and fear that monsters have for humans, especially in the scene where the campers begin to crowd around a terrified Mike.
  • Oozma Kappa is quite distinctive from the other fraternities/sororities not because they have a gimmick like the goth Eta Eta Hiss or the elite ROR, but because they are diverse.
  • How in the world could Randall confuse Mike for Boo and kidnap the wrong person? Because he's short-sighted. In the darkness of Boo's room, all he could see was a silent blob that entered the room and started playing on the bed. You can't really blame him for coming to the wrong conclusion.
  • By the time this film came out, the kids that enjoyed the first film would be in or heading off to university. Therefore, the new film is set in a university!
    • The fact that Sulley and Mike need each other to be a remarkable team (as evidenced by their ultimate scare against the adults at the children's camp, with Mike being the brains, and Sulley being the brawn.), harkens back to Monsters, Inc. After all, Sulley and Mike say to each other in the credits of Monsters, Inc.: ♫ "I wouldn't have nothin' if I didn't have you!"♫
  • Monsters love scaring people, which means they love the sound of screaming. This explains why Squishy's mother was listening to screamo in the car!note 
  • When the Oozma Kappas are introducing themselves, Don mentions working in the textile industry until they downsized him out of a job. At first, it seems like topical humor, but most of the monsters present in the first two movies don't really wear clothing, and if they do it's mainly just a shirt or coat - of course they would be downsizing!
  • Why would monsters have trouble distinguishing adolescent humans from human children? Because humans are a different species. How many signs do human zoologists and biologists need to memorize to properly identify the age of individual animals? The human kids in the "Don't Scare the Teen" event all probably look very similar to the monster contestants.
  • An additional good thing about the discovery at the end of Monsters, Inc. - Don, Terri and Terry, Squishy, and Art have to make extra effort to be scary, but they'll make excellent laugh technicians.
  • Why didn't we see a bunch of familiar faces(besides Mike, Sulley, Randall, George Sanderson, and a cameo of Roz)in Monsters University? They might have gone to different universities, such as Fear Tech.
  • Mike's symbolic threshold-stepping happens four times: as a child, crossing the warning line on the Scare Floor; entering the university; subtly, leaving the university; and finally re-entering the Scare Floor as an employee. While on first impressions the third step is an undoing of the second, which is certainly how Mike views it at the time, all four can be seen as important moments in his journey to working at Monsters, Inc. As we see, leaving college is just as important to his Character Development as entering it.
  • The scene in the cabin in the woods near the end of the movie can be interpreted as Mike and Sulley as a duo representing the two kinds of horror game monsters. Sulley is the monster you can see, the big scary thing that you run from because you're afraid for your life. Mike is the monster you can't see, the sounds in the shadows that make you wonder if something's there, what it might be, but you can't be sure of whether it's your mind playing tricks on you or not...
  • Dean Hardscrabble dismisses Sully from the program because he immediately roars without listening to her information. In her words, the boy he would have roared at was afraid of snakes, so the roar would make him cry, not scream, alerting his parents and exposing their world. But wouldn't a scream also alert the boy's parents? Maybe Hardscrabble was more upset about the scream canister than she was letting on...
    • Screams are useful as a source of energy and therefore worth the risk of exposure. Crying doesn't produce anything worth the risk. When Hardscrabble intentionally chose a child who wouldn't scream for being roared at, it was to either see if Sully already understood that his roar wouldn't have the same effect on all children or make him understand that.
      • It's possible that crying does generate energy, but it's not very effective. Generally, a scream is a louder, quicker burst of emotional energy than crying. This would make the canister fill up faster and give the scarer a chance to escape back to the monster world before the parents see them.
      • It might just be that a human's screams are all getting absorbed into the canister, and therefore no sound is escaping until after the door is shut off. Same with laughter.
    • Hardscrabble was not being fair to either Mike or Sulley. Not even giving Mike a chance to run the simulator, she also likely chose a child for Sully that she knew he would fail because a roar wouldn't have worked. Had they done the test properly Mike might have been able to scrape a pass (we never got to see how well he can do on the simulator at a reasonable setting) while Sully may have lucked it with a more (or should we say less) roar-friendly child.
  • While obviously done to help audiences recognize it as a prequel, it would seem strange in-universe. Monsters University seems to bear a lot of resemblance to the company Monsters, Inc. - complete with the same blue M with the eye in it as a logo. Since one has not tried suing the other, it seems likely that the University might have actually been founded by the power company as a means of training potential new employees. Say, doesn't that sound familiar?
  • Dean Hardscrabble's soft-spoken, calm demeanor may well have been developed during her current occupation; the Librarian strongly dislikes noise in her library, and the Dean must have learned to speak in a tone that satisfied her employee's pet peeve as opposed to simply replacing her. This also hints that the Librarian is the best possible candidate around for the Dean to accommodate her so, as she has a strict adherence to the concept of only the best.
  • And one more for Dean Hardscrabble: during her tearing down of Mike and Sully, she's uncannily good at sizing up the situation and finding their weaknesses almost immediately. It's also shown that scarers have to have a basic grasp of psychology; they have to know what scares kids and how to exploit that fear for optimum scream output. As the best scarer in the known Monsters universe, she has to be terrifically gifted at psychology; it's most of the job!
  • How did Randall, the meek, nerdy friend of Mike, become a member of the elite Roar Omega Roar? By being the student who performed the best at the scaring exam. After-all, he was the second best scarer after Sullivan at Monsters Inc, so when Sullivan got kicked out of the program, Randall became its best performing student, using his invisibility abilities to great effect at the exam. Roar Omega Roar likely then found out about his performance and offered him membership, acknowledging that despite his shy, nerdy meekness, he do has potential of being a great scarer like they are.
  • A Freeze-Frame Bonus at the end of the original film shows that the cans used to collect Laughter are much larger than the ones that were used to collect Scream energy. At the end of University, we see Mike and Sulley create a scare that powers all the cans in the room to the point that they explode, and Sulley mentions in the original that laughter is ten times more powerful than Scream energy. The newer cans aren't just bigger so they can take in more energy, they're bigger because the original cans are overwhelmed by laughter.
  • At the start of the original film, Sulley is more far tolerable and respectful with Randall than Mike is. He never insults him and even wishes him luck before the scaring session, while Mike frequently mocks and gloats at Randall being stuck in second place. In Monsters University, Sulley never directly interacts with Randall and doesn't even seem to notice that he embarrassed him during the Scare Games, whereas Mike actually knew Randall and took it personally when Randall turned his back on him to join ROR. It stands to reason that Sulley only knows Randall through Mike, and Mike is still bitter about his past betrayal.
    • There is an extra personal touch however in that Randall got the spot in ROR that Sulley was rejected from. However Sulley's arc is maturing and realising that ROR are no good. Rather than resenting Randall for upstaging and belittling him like Mike does, Sulley, now Older and Wiser, may empathise with what a Toxic Friend Influence the group were to Randall, especially after they seemingly booted him out after one failure.
  • Squishy and Don show some of their skills early in the film that foreshadow how they'll successfully scare the dummy in the final game. Terri and Terry's method is foreshadowed a bit more subtly though. They offer Mike their skills as a magician, saying it's all about "misdirection"? How do they scare the dummy? Walk into the room shaped like a normal human before revealing their more monstrous features.
  • Randall being a sweet dorky jokester for his backstory may seem like a forced gag, but really, that only further fits the irony of the first film's conclusion. Randall, prior to becoming more bitter and obsessed with outdoing Sulley as top scarer, was actually perfect material for the Laugh Floors. It makes Waternoose hitting his Rage Breaking Point by dismissing him as not even a tenth the scarer Sulley is even more cutting as, like Waternoose, Randall sealed his own fate just too early, obsessed with maintaining his significance as a scarer without ever considering he had other options, unlike Mike.
  • Roar Omega Roar consisting of completely original monsters that don't have adult counterparts in the first film makes their jeering line to Oozma Kappa all the more ironic: "Enjoy the attention while it lasts boys. After you lose... no one will remember you."

Fridge Horror

  • Although Sulley scaring the living daylights out of the adults in the human world serves as a wonderful climax and Moment of Awesome, you can't help but wonder what became of those horribly traumatized people. Remember, these aren't kids that we're talking about. These are fully grown adults who have experienced a scare taken up to eleven and have come face-to-face with a living, breathing monster. In [1], there are actual reports of similar incidents involving unidentified creatures that have occurred in remote areas such as that one. The people who experience these often end up being scarred for life and go through years of therapy to get rid of the paranoia and constant nightmares. They usually have to quit their jobs because they just can't go on with their lives until they're cured from that permanent nightmare. It wouldn't be surprising if they're even Driven to Suicide. Who's to say those poor adults didn't suffer a similar fate?
    • Even worse: imagine what'll happen if any of those adults have children. Picture this: as your baby grows into a toddler, you start to wonder why she looks so scared every morning. She's still too young to explain fully, but through crude crayon drawings and snippets of toddler speak, you're eventually able to figure out what it is she's trying to warn you about: monsters. You try to tell your spouse, but they haven't seen what you saw in the cabin that night, so they just laugh and say that your child probably just has an overactive imagination. You feel anxious and you start thinking you've been hearing noises in the house at night, as though a large animal has broken in. But every single time you leap out of bed and try to reach the room in time, you're too late. There is nothing there but your child, screaming and crying, pointing in terror at their closet...
    • And that's not taking into account what could happen if the adults decided to take matters into their own hands. Imagine them sleeping next to their children armed and dangerous, with an unsuspecting monster entering the room and meeting a buckshot? Or if enough adults had witnessed Sulley, enough for investigations to deduce that all the witnesses had seen something, and enough adults agreeing that the monsters are real and are potentially a threat to the kids: what if it led to a hostile invasion into the monster world to "take the fight to them"?
    • This also becomes Fridge Brilliance when you realize that Sulley might be thinking all this when he realizes how badly he's scared Boo in the first movie. No wonder he doesn't think scaring matters anymore; he's come to believe that it's awful.
  • Dean Hardscrabble might be rendered completely irrelevant by the transition from scream energy to laugh energy. The School of Scaring would probably have to become comedy school, and the stern, no-nonsense Hardscrabble would hardly qualify to govern a school designed to help monsters make kids laugh. While she'd certainly be proud of Mike and Sulley for their accomplishments, their success probably put her out of a job. That is, assuming she didn't retire after the events of Monsters University.
    • Then again, that's assuming that scaring was made completely obsolete by Mike and Sulley's discovery. Not every kid has a sense of humor, and scaring might still be done to squeeze a bit more energy out of a door before it's shredded. Besides, with other power companies out there like Fear Co., it's highly unlikely that they all switched to laugh power overnight.
  • If a child's laughter is powerful enough to power every door in a factory and an adult's scream is powerful enough to make a door explode and overfill almost every scream can in a room, then how powerful would an adult's laughter be?
  • The power generated by scaring the adults is not only strong enough to power a door from the other side, it actually makes the door explode just as Mike and Sulley jump through it. So just imagine: what if they had been a few seconds slower? They would have missed their one chance to make it back to the monster world, and they most likely would have been caught by the police officers if one of them returned. Even worse, they could have gotten incinerated in the explosion, or gruesomely split in half. Granted, how close they were makes the scene all the more awesome.
  • While they were running from the cops after sneaking into Scare Factory, Art mentioned that he can't go to jail again. What did he do to get arrested?
  • While it's indeed a funny scene, the moment where Mike and Sulley wake up in the bunk bed can take on a darker meaning...
    • The moment when Sulley wakes up, he gets and immediately screams out "MOM?!" and has a panicked and distressed look on his face. One only wonders what kind of dream he was having to wake up like that.

Top