The Brave Little Toaster - Television Tropes & Idioms

The Brave Little Toaster is a 1987 animated film produced by Hyperion Pictures, distributed by Disney, and based on a children's novel by Thomas M. Disch.

The film centers around five appliances - the titular Toaster, Lampy (a lamp), Kirby (a vacuum), Radio (guess), and Blanky (an electric blanket) - who live in a old cabin out in the woods. The appliances have been left behind by their Master, a young boy, and have been waiting for him to return for years. When the cabin is put up for sale, the appliances determine to go find the Master (who, unknown to them, is now a young man getting ready for college) by making a journey to the city.

Though it didn't get much of a theatrical release, it's still fondly remembered by many kids of the late '80s and the '90s, thanks to its airings on the Disney Channel and its home video release, and it's proved to be a popular enough film to grant two direct-to-video sequels, and neither of them really sucked. As a side note, some of the people behind this film (such as John Lasseter and Joe Ranft) went on to go work for another company specializing in heartwarming animated features...

WARNING: If you plan on seeing this film, please make sure you're not going to be replacing or throwing out any old appliances in the near future. You will regret it.

This film contains examples of:

Adaptation Displacement: Not everyone remembers the book this was based on.
Big Lipped Alligator Moment: At one point the movie successfully pulls off a BLAM within a BLAM.
Conveyor Belt O Doom
Crowning Moment Of Awesome: Kirby leaping off a cliff straight into a waterfall in order to save the other appliances from drowning.
- Lampy's and later Toaster's Heroic Sacrifice
Dark Is Not Evil: The appliances in Elmo Saint Peter's parts shop may be broken, tinkered with, and twisted by the events they have seen, but they are by no means evil.
Department Of Redundancy Department: Sometimes Lampy speaks a little like this sometimes.
Lampy: All of a sudden, you're being so darn nice to him all of a sudden.
Disney Acid Sequence: "The Cutting Edge (More More More)"
Disney Death: The Toaster
- This might also apply to Lampy and the air conditioner.
Family Unfriendly Death: Both the "B-Movie Show" and "Worthless" numbers. And in a particularly Nightmare Fuelerrific scene, Rob just misses being added to this list.
Five Man Band
- The Hero: Toaster
- The Lancer: Lampy
- The Big Guy: Kirby
- The Smart Guy: Radio
- The Chick: Blanky
  - If you're watching the German version, Lampy is The Chick, probably.
Getting Crap Past The Radar: In one scene, the TV, playing up his Insane Proprietor act, pulls some pictures out of a cabinet. They're pictures of a topless woman, with stars over her breasts, but they're only visible for a second.
- Also in the song "Worthless", the beach car originally sings the line "there were bikinis and buns filled with weenies". While it could just be reading too much into it, in the official soundtrack the line is changed to "there were bikinis and hot dogs and weenies", so apparently someone higher up caught on to the Double Entendre.
  - This troper thought that they put that in specifically because of the redundancy making the line slightly more obvious, while doing exactly what the executives told them.
- The radio says "damn" and "hell".
- One of the sequels gave us this scene. They even managed to sneak in a few seconds of Sexophone.
Gossipy Hens: The sewing machine
Grumpy Bear: Kirby
Heroic Sacrifice: Hey, there's a reason this movie's called the Brave Little Toaster...
- Again, Lampy gets one of these too.
Insane Proprietor
Leitmotif: Each character has their own theme, making the film's underscore one of this troper's favorites.
Lightning Can Do Anything: Like recharge a battery.
Living Toys: More like living appliances, actually...
Monster Clown: One shows up in the Toaster's brief Nightmare Dream.
New Technology Is Evil: Literally. The "cutting edge" appliances try to off the main characters.
Nightmare Fuel: This movie is packed full of nightmarish scenes. These include the air conditioner's blow out, the various nightmares, the deeply unnerving and upsetting flower scene, the various Family Unfriendly Deaths, etc. In fact was haunted by this movie when he was five, and he first saw it
- The magnet. Oh, god, the magnet.
  - Forget the magnet, how about the Toaster's graphic mutilation in the inner workings of the trash compactor!? This troper saw the movie around age five and was unable to watch it again until about fifteen years later because of that scene.
No Celebrities Were Harmed: The air conditioner (a Jack Nicholson soundalike) and the hanging lamp (a Peter Lorre soundalike). Of course, what did you expect, what with impressionist extraordinaire Phil Hartman doing their voices?
Some Anvils Need To Be Dropped: The song "Cutting Edge" is a pretty blantant Stealth Parody of the consumer culture of the 1980's. Given the kind of people that particular avenue spawned...
Staggered Zoom
Tear Jerker: If the flower scene does not tug a few heartstrings, than you probably have none.
Thank The Maker
Viewer Gender Confusion: The Toaster. Just...the Toaster.
- In the Latin Dub, that applies to Blanky too.
- JUST the Latin (American?) dub? I STILL don't know what Blanky is supposed to be.
- For the record, we are not the first to wonder about this. And yes, we will admit that debating the gender of machines is a bit silly.
- This is actually brought up in the original book. The Toaster specifically claims to be genderless, when asked (by squirrels). I don't remember what they did about pronouns.
Villain Song: Both of which are Crowning Moments Of Awesome:
- While they aren't exactly villains, the insane machines in "Like A Movie" (aka "It's a B-Movie") do a wonderful job of showing the horror of waiting to be taken apart for spares. And they aren't bad shadow puppeteers either.
- A more directly evil example is "Cutting Edge", where the new appliances sing an egotistic preview of their superiority to the main characters.
Vindicated By Cable
What Measure Is A Non Human: Don't. Get us. Started.

Bolt

« Film »

A Bugs Life

Main Tropes Index

Troperville

Editing

Tools

Toys