Headscratchers / Wreck-It Ralph — Fix-It Felix Jr.

• If video game characters die and gain extra lives all the time, how come the Niceland apartment tenants gasp in horror when Felix is killed from a broken ceiling (before coming back to life)? You'd think it wouldn't be a big deal!
  • It was probably just a automatic shock reaction to seeing a chunk of the ceiling fall and crush someone. You'd gasp too.
  • Being killed in game is probably still considered an injury. It probably would be like seeing someone tumble off a bike.
  • It could just be considered INCREDIBLY rude to kill the main character. And I kind of doubt the Nicelanders have 'ever' died themselves, which could alter perceptions. (Gene is usually seen getting tossed off camera like a football)
  • To borrow an analogy/explanation from Kid Radd that might fit here: The Nicelanders are programmed to see Felix dying by Ralph's action as a threat to their home, and have a corresponding knee-jerk reaction. It's like us humans getting goosebumps when we're feeling cold — we know that they're useless because we lack long fur to protect us, but the reaction is hardwired into our body and there's little we can do about it.
  • They might not have known that he had an extra life. In which case, he would have stayed "dead" until someone put a quarter in the game tomorrow, and that would have ruined their party.
    • This is probably incorrect: Assuming it's true to the real-life game of Fix-It Felix Jr., Felix only uses that death animation if he doesn't have an extra life. If Felix has a life to spare when he dies, he simply drops off the bottom of the screen while flailing his limbs worriedly. Therefore, the evidence suggests that Felix regenerates immediately in either case, only the regeneration after Game Over is never seen by the player.
  • Given that Ralph was excluded from their social circle before the events of the movie, they'd probably never seen Felix "die" outside a game-in-progress before. They might not have known he would recover the same way.
    • The game is probably supposed to be in Attract Mode, given since that particular death animation only appears when the player gets a Game Over (as seen in many of the Defictionalizations of Fix-It Felix Jr.). Most attract modes give the "player" one life. So its probably a routine that only happens whenever Felix "dies" if the game is not being played.
• The game is called Fix-It Felix JUNIOR. Doylist reasons aside, which peg it as a reference to Donkey Kong Junior, the name means that there's a Fix-It Felix SENIOR. The only reference to him in the movie mentions him passing down the hammer to his son. That name and that hammer may imply that Senior was also the protagonist of an early video game. Kind of makes you wonder what ever happened to Senior in the plot of the series, doesn't it?
  • Maybe Felix's father is just part of Felix's backstory, like Calhoun's fiance.
  • All that "happened" to Senior is that, most likely, there was once a Fix-It Felix game. It got a sequel. The sequel was named Fix-It Felix Jr. No need to concoct any elaborate theories on it or wonder "what ever happened" to him.
    • Going to agree with this. If we want, we can speculate that Fix-it Felix Jr. pulled a Street Fighter 2 by becoming popular while the preceding game seems to not even exist.
  • He might show up in one of the sequels as Cranky Felix.
  • Could be simply that when naming the game, the developers thought that "Fix-It Felix Jr." had a better ring to it than just "Fix-It Felix" by itself, and like mentioned above Felix Sr. is just backstory.
• I noticed as part of the movie's art style that the Nicelanders, being 8-bit characters, were built with stiff jerky movements. Why doesn't Ralph move like this too despite being from the same game?
  • It's to make Felix and Ralph stand out from the generic NPC characters. They operate with natural, fluid movements as primary while the Nicelanders are poorly animated like many background characters.
  • Also, if you look carefully, you'll see that Felix and Ralph have those jerky movements sometimes too, but only when it's done on purpose (such as the dance at the party) or when they lose self-control (like when Ralph gets REALLY angry). My guess is that Felix and Ralph, being the smartest residents of their own game and frequently hanging out at other places like Tapper's, had learned how to move more naturally, whereas the Nicelanders have a herd mentality and stay in the apartments except in emergencies.
  • They also move jerky when someone is playing their game, but that's probably because they know they're an 8-bit game and that's what they need to do to maintain the illusion. Notice how when Felix goes off-camera during Moppet Girl's attempt to play, he maintains his jerky 8-bit movements until he's off the cabinet display, then bolts off camera in normal fashion to reach the dump.
  • Ralph and Felix are the villain and hero of the game. Of course they're going to have more animation frames than the comparatively minor NPCs!
• So in the ending, Ralph finally gets a house of his own. It's a tiny house, cobbled together from bits and pieces of the apartment building, Ralph could barely fit his foot inside it... Then it pans over to a whole street of big, fancy houses built by Felix. The hell?
  • Simple. The only thing Ralph is good at is destroying. The only thing Felix is good at is fixing. It was shown that Vanellope's kart comes out like a mess because Ralph was helping her create it. So when Ralph tries to build a house by himself, it comes out like a 3rd grader's popsicle stick model, while Felix can make a street of fancy apartments in minutes!
  • Pretty sure that the little house we see onscreen is supposed to be Q*bert's home, not Ralph's.
    • Then how come, when we see that in the film, Ralph's narration plays over it that says, "I built myself a little shack"?
    • He adds "And a couple for the new guys, too."
  • It says, however, "With a little help from Felix." Which means Ralph built a house, then Felix improved it, and liked the result so he used the remaining pile of bricks to build AN ENTIRE GODDAMN STREET.
  • Ralph probably lives in Felix's complex, considering that the shack he built himself is barely as big as he is.
  • There's also a video game trope of Bigger on the Inside or Units Not to Scale, where video game characters can somehow fit inside buildings or even cities that are as big as they are.
• It's ridiculously minor, but is Niceland Apartments rebuilt every time the game starts or is it like a prerecorded scene?
  • Maybe what the cranes are really doing is pulling off a giant curtain of darkness. They must not have bothered to put it back on at closing time, which is why you could see the building through the title screen then.
  • Recordings probably do exist for the purposes of background story scenes and routine announcements. Otherwise the apartments would have to be magically turned back into the forest for everyone to reenact the backstory to Fix-It Felix Jr. with every loop of the attract mode, and Ralph would be breaking the story by building a new home for himself.
• Operating under the assumption that the blocks are data segments, shouldn't the leftover blocks be destroyed to free up memory for rest of the game?
  • They are probably stored as only a sprite of a pile of bricks, just like Ralph is only a sprite and a simplistic AI instead of a sentient high-res 3D model.
• At the end of the movie, the game gets a bonus level that has the Q*bert characters all appear. Wouldn't Litwak notice this, and get a bit suspicious that after 30 years, this new level suddenly appears in Fix-It Felix Jr. for the first time, with characters that are completely unrelated to it?
  • Probably, but what's he gonna do about it, pull the plug on the game for suddenly and inexplicably becoming more awesome and as a result became a lot more popular with the customers? He'll just shrug his shoulders and assume it was a REALLY well-hidden Easter egg and someone finally unlocked it.
• When Ralph smashed the cake the Nicelanders made, could Felix have used his hammer to fix it? After all, Vanellope's kart was essentially a cake too. Maybe Felix did fix the cake after Ralph left the party.
  • Seems plausible that Felix could have fixed anything that was destroyed by Ralph's presence (the hole in the ceiling, the broken stairs, the deflated balloons, etc.) However, Ralph's outburst probably killed the party mood regardless, and some of the guests might not have wanted to eat anything that already had Ralph's fist through it. Other complications could arise if Felix would need to assemble the cake bits first to attempt any sort of repair.
• This is just a minor detail...but why did Ralph seem so surprised when he learned from Gene that everyone had abandoned his game? Shouldn't he at least have seen one of the Nicelanders waiting around in Game Central Station?
  • Game Central Station is a big place.
  • And Ralph was feeling terrible about what he just did (smashed Vanellope's car), so he probably didn't even look up as he trudged back to Fix-It Felix Junior.
• If Ralph wanted to show the other Nicelanders how genuinely important he was to the operation of their game, why didn't it ever occur to him to just sit out for a play or two? Mr. Litwak would've declared it out of order when Ralph didn't show up on screen, the Nicelanders would've come to realize Ralph's importance, and Ralph would've proven his point without having to have left the game without telling anyone, which led to everyone panicking and abandoning ship.
  • Because that's not what Ralph wanted. Ralph wanted to be the good guy for once.
  • No, being the good guy was just a means to an end. His overarching goal was to make the Nicelanders realize that what he does is both important to the existence of their game and not something he is capable of choosing to do or abstain from. The Nicelanders were the ones that were convinced Ralph wrecked the building because he was a "bad guy", and when he doesn't show up to do it that one day in the film, they all come to realize that their beliefes about him weren't true.
  • Ralph outright says, multiple times to different people, that he wants to win a medal and be the good guy for once. He says nothing about making them realize the importance he has to the game. That's what happens in the end, but that's not the reason Ralph set out.
  • The Nicelanders didn't outcast Ralph because he was unimportant; they cast him because they thought that he's always being the bad guy. Making the game "Out of Order" would just damage his reputation more.
  • Felix comments Ralph probably just "fell asleep in the Tapper's washroom again". Again meaning Ralph's seemingly gotten drunk at Tapper's and missed games before with a similar reaction from the arcade but it was resolved because Ralph was easily found and back in action right away. They didn't notice his critical importance then, they probably wouldn't if he just no showed out of spite either.

---