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• His insistance to say his name at almost any time is the result of his short-term memory loss causing him to forget he ever said it to the people in question. Thus, he finds it important that he introduces himself with his customary greeting, "WAAALL-EEEE"
  • What? He only says his name to every character once.
• WALL-E keeps himself in check and is the only remaining WALL-E due to the fact that he keeps himself in a routine naturally, something the other WALL-E's couldn't do. Naturally, these WALL-E's too must have suffered from anterograde amnesia.

• The Axiom became the Ark.
• As more and more of the technology was lost, a trip into space became a trip into the ocean, and the great garbage pileup became the great flood.
• EVE is obviously the Dove from the Great Flood story, but was also later split into a woman in the tale of the Garden of Eden.
• WALL-E of course, is Jesus. He died to save you and rose again. The crazy robots are the apostles.
• The sprout that grew out of the boot is the Tree of Knowledge.
• Mary and John were obviously inspiration for the Virgin/Magdalen and the Baptist/the Beloved respectively.

• Fun theory, but there needs to be an explanation for how Hello Dolly! exists in the distant past.
  • Literary Agent Hypothesis. Albeit pulling the Literary Agent Hypothesis on a theory which is essentially about the same thing.
    • The actual video/song was lost in the annals of time (how could they preserve it forever?). Hello Dolly! was the best analogue they could find.
  • Because Hello Dolly! transcends time, space, and indeed humankind.
• Alternatively, WALL-E is both the future and the past, and we're in an endless loop of repeating civilizations. All the dinosaur bones and stuff were faked by BuyNLarge before they left, because they're dicks.
  • So this is the fifth age? Sixth? Seventh?
  • Faked isn't the right word. Dinosaur bones were tacky decorations for people's lawns. We're still stuck in the flamingo and gnome fad.
• All this has happened before, and all this will happen again

However, the humans on one of these smaller ships ended up differently than the Axiom's passengers. These humans managed to stay in shape and even colonized other planets in a galaxy far, far away. What does this lead to? You guessed it...

• You're kidding, it's obvious from the evil AI that is AUTO that it leads here.
  • Nonsense, AUTO is jettisoned from the ship, breaks in half, and goes through a wormhole. Since he got split in half, he not only went insane, but each "robosome" which comprised his "male" identity separated. The "X" robosome went into an alternate dimension where it was discovered by an Aperture Science research pod and developed into a robot for experimental weapons testing, whereas the "Y" robosome half was used to build HAL. (incidentally, his eye was a separate piece entirely and drifted off with the Y robosome.
    • Furthermore, these universes exist entirely in the XKCD universe◊. And now to make sense of the BG and SW tie-ins. After the simultaneous events of Portal, Portal: Still Alive, any other Portal sequels, and 2001: Space Odyssey, the X and Y robosomes recombine, to once again be AUTO, which then creates BG. Oh, and, the SW thing happens uninterrupted because one of the smaller ships didn't have AUTO.
• Likewise, C-3PO, R2-D2, and the rest of them were based on robotics technology originally developed by Buy 'n' Large before they changed from a Mega Corp into something else entirely. This organizational metamorphosis was marked by a name change from Buy 'n' Large to The Galactic Empire, which market research proved would be 130% more memorable on planets with no form of commerce, and, thus, no concept of "buying." Plus, the "BnL Death Star" would have just sounded odd.
• Considering that there was a Republic before the Empire, which lasted several thousand years, it must be concluded that after a few millennia, people rebelled against BnL, forming their own government. BnL remained as a tiny dot on the galactic map, and over the centuries of Republic rule became the Corporate Sector, as you can't call yourself "Large" when you're a minority.
  • Relatedly, the fall of Buy 'n' Large occurred due to the rise of the Jedi- once people discovered a resource/Force that could not be controlled or regulated by BnL, its control started to slip as people looked to the Jedi for stability. Being peace-loving and minimalist in methods, the Jedi went on to support democratic self-rule

The timeline we see, where WALL-E finds the plant, leads to the events we see in the movie. However, in the timeline where he doesn't find the plant, he gets lonely after EVE leaves (as her findings were negative) and builds other robots to keep him company. For the other robot's bodies, he uses the most widely available mechanical devices: cars. Hundreds of years after this, the movie Cars takes place. This explains why said movie has both sentient cars and a complete lack of humans.

• This, of course, means that WALL-E is the god of the world of Cars.
  • This troper always thought it'd be fun if Cars was a sequel to Stephen King's Trucks.
• Could have been Robots, considering WALL-E's obsession with the music video. He built them to reenact the Hello Dolly film when the tape fell apart. (The darth vader voice chip was actually Vader's, from the example above; it fell out of his helmet while being transported to the moon of Endor's surface, and, by the laws of narrative probability, floated to the new, robot earth, where it was found by the speechless robot.)
• Does that mean that in the timeline where the plant is found, and Earth is recolonized - maybe the remaining toxicity in the Earth's atmosphere causes sped-up mutations, allowing humans to develop superpowers eventually, which means the robots don't need to be mass-distributed anymore, and in a few generations.... The Incredibles.
  • Along with the Marvel universe, several decades before Mr. Incredible is born.
  • Does this mean Team Fortress 2 is descended from Wall-E too?
    • Of course. The announcer is GLaDOS, who is AUTO. Transitive Property here.

Picks up after the above theory leaves off with Wall-E building other robots. He first starts off building simple robots out of the junk around him, salvaging the circuitry from other Wall-E robots, giving them the same characteristics he has including his ability to "transform" into a box. Unbeknownst to him, he also transfers a "spark" of sentience to each of these robots. Eventually he starts making more and more sophisticated robots out of the abandoned cars lying around, once again building in a "transforming" capability. You can probably see where this is going too....

• This would mean Earth becomes - no, not Cybertron, but rather the Junkion planet. The upstart robot race decides to leave the Earth just as the humans did, settling on a large asteroid that does become Cybertron, while other robots stay behind to become the Junkions.
  • However, one of the sentient robots leaving for what eventually becomes Cybertron is somehow left forgotten in Earth's orbit. With nothing but a bunch of old space junk to keep him company, he naturally begins to brood a lot of resentment. After the pasage of much time, he eventually learns to manipulate all the junk in orbit into a new, much larger body. ''Much'' larger, scarier, and with a deep Orson Welles-ish voice.
  • And eventually, a new planet is colonized by the humans, and society begins anew. That would explain some..."inconsistencies" between earth in Transformers and earth in the show.
• Furthermore, if WALL-E is the source of the Transformers, he is Primus, and was sealed by his descendants inside the asteroid that became Cybertron because his aging circuits could no longer handle running his world.
  • It follows, of course, that The Matrix is a crystal version of WALL-E's Hello Dolly video, to which minds have been added over the years. It can destroy Unicron because, being his children, all Transformers have a love of Hello Dolly, and that love touches something buried deep in Unicron, specifically, something buried right around where the self destruct button is.

That rabbit was clearly thinking with portals.

• On top of that, he was being strung along by an obviously sadistic authority figure with the promise of food after he finished his job, only to use said authority figure's "technology" against them in the end. Sound familiar?

A Dalek may have landed on pre-BnL Earth. The humans decided to kill it and harvest its technology, resulting in spaceships and robots. However, some of the machines acted like their technological ancestors with death rays, singular eyes, and phallic appearances. And the Dalek legacy is still seen in the form of a pink robot that shoots out make-up.

• And the humans were slowly becoming Daleks. Honestly, they were just fat blobs in chairs that only communicated with technology. They are almost always in that chair.

They will soon start marketing real WALL-E robots.

• That is, unless Disney/Pixar beats 'em to it...
  • I doubt it was just silliness that Pixar decided to have the BnL logo and jingle play after the Disney and Pixar logos after the credits.
• They're already here, and they're called ROOMBA.
• Dude, it's Virgin. Check out the red and white colouring. Not to mention the commercial spacecraft.
  • Okay, THAT thought is Nightmare Fuel because I've been eagerly following their spacecraft development.
    • They actually have an aircraft named EVE, BTW.
• At some point they're going to eat Toyota for their fantastic wheel chairs couches.
• There's actually a real group called the WALL•E Builders and they have built many different robots from the film including WALL-E, EVE, M-O and Auto.

No reason for an organism (even a cockroach, as "invincible" as they seem) to survive those things OR run as fast as it did.

• This troper disagrees, given that she once crushed a cockroach under a bookend at least a few times the cockroach's weight, only for it to scamper on its merry way once the bookend was removed. Also, it did move extremely fast.
  • The cockroach had clearly mutated and evolved thanks to all the toxicity, and developed dog-level intelligence and self-awareness. Its descendants go on to become a favourite kind of pet for robots and possibly humans.

Both involve humanity abandoning Earth due to pollution & leaving robots to clean up.

• Buuut! The timeline splits before the movie, at whether BnL becomes the dominant company or not. If BnL does, than they use older technology. If BnL doesn't, then we discover the Orbot technology.
  • Though come to think of it, EVE might be some kind of prototype Orbot, what with the floating body parts and ridiculous firepower.

Regardless of your political beliefs, this idea will scare the shit out of you if you think too long about it.

• It actually makes more sense that Buy is a government/corporate hybrid. It's virtually impossible for a corporation to gain monopoly status and hold it for very long without government sanction; once the corporation's profit margins reach a certain point, other companies pile into that particular industry. Most likely, Buy&Large was a GSE that was "too big to fail", and kept getting bailout after bailout, using government funding to buy out competitors until it was the only corporation left.
  • Which means that this is not about "Wal-Mart and the United Nations." It's about "communism and communism." Hope and change, my friend, hope and change.
    • That was pretty much my interpretation. Specifically, although the film gives a specific meaning to the acronymn, the name WALL-E certainly sounds like one which a robot made by Wallmart might have.
  • I always thought Buy-N-Large was a little too benevolent for a corrupt megacorporation. Building a giant fleet of spaceships to cart the entire human race offworld, with plans to stay there indefinitely, while zillions of robots you designed and built stay on earth to clean up after yourself? All on the company's dime? Come on. Merging with the government explains this plot hole pretty well.

Seriously, I swear I've seen a droid in one of the Star Wars movies that looked almost exactly like Wall-E.

• Were you perhaps thinking about Luke's Treadwell farming droid from A New Hope? If that's the case, then yes, the resemblance is quite uncanny. The only real difference is that Wall-E has a much shorter neck and a more substantial body...

Several hundred years later, however, he is found by a Sirius Cybernetics Corporation spaceship. Impressed by his highly developed personality, they bring him onboard and use his altered programming as the basis of their Genuine People Personalities technology. For the prototype, they simply transplant WALL-E's personality into a more advanced robot model, resulting in...Marvin the Paranoid Android.

• Marvin's pains in the diodes down his left side are caused by a failure to adjust some of WALL-E's programming code to the new robot body.
• Oh, and needless to say, this is all based on an alternate Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy/WALL-E timeline in which a ship in the BnL starfleet reached Alpha Centauri before the destruction of Earth.
  • Eddies in the space-time continuum. While trying to compact a particularly ugly couch into garbage, WALL-E is dumped onto prehistoric Earth. With no garbage and no Hello Dolly he develops a split personality: his aforementioned "Marvin" personality, and his new obsessively happy mode towards anything that looks human and/or speaks english. The Sirius Cybernetics Corporation comes to ZZ 9 plural z alpha to see if any of the planets have useful robot-building materials, find the Golgafrinchan "civilization", and run away as quickly as possible. Having a vague recollection of Eve being taken away in a spaceship, he hitches a ride on a stabilizer fin, but his outer shell is totaled by the time they reach the next star system. Sirius Cybernetics salvages what they can for their AI prototypes, and eventually, after several million years of delay from drunkenness before the future H 2 G 2 founders are fired, Marvin and the automatic doors are finally made available for purchase. (There's another bit where an unretrieved EVE unit goes even further back and inspires the makers of the Krikkit robots, but I think you can figure it out from the premise.)
    • Furthermore, the Earth regains plant-life, and even more humans. And then the original humans, now living on Planet Golgafrincham, send the useless middle men back to Earth, for they think that Earth is still a giant garbage dump. this is 1 million years after the creation of earth by Deep Thought, so Arthur was wrong about when they were, and the question is true, proving that everyone and everything in the universe is as thick-headed as a lead brick.
• Actually, he just remains as he was originally, and as he was just after EVE repaired him. Kind of boring, really.
• And there's also the qestion of what would have happened if he had found a totally different film...
  • This Troper has now been thinking much of this idea...say, what if WALL-E found a porno? (Yeah-I-Went-There)

The world of Wall-E has some minimal similarities with the world of Mega Man X, especially as the X universe approaches an apocalyptic state. Also note the superficial similarities of design between the earlier Mega Man games, BnL products, and the Axiom- steamlined, shiny, and smooth with few visible moving parts and lots of highly-advanced technology. What may have taken place is this:

Thomas Light was one of the majority stockholders of BnL prior to his death. After going public, BnL decides to sideline anthropomorphic robots, though they are still produced steadily, in favor of ever-more-abusive consumer products. Shortly after using up most of the earth's resources and thoroughly trashing it, BnL begins its Axiom project. Those humans left behind form the basis of the cleanup crews and residual society, while other city-spacecraft are constructed. During this period the works of an obscure researcher, Doctor Cain, result in the creation of Reploids, and the cleanup crews left behind by BnL rejoice to have relatively durable, inhuman assistance to do the work for them. A few genuine Mavericks quickly seize upon the resentment Reploids feel at having to clean up humanity's mess as their first acts in life, and the wars documented in the X games take place. Eventually, all remaining humans flee from the planet in various directions, and the Reploids, fed up with Earth altogether, do the same thing. A few crippled mechaniloids are left behind but gradually begin to die off, eventually leaving Earth a dusty, barren world devoid of most human or mechanical life.

After this epic struggle, a lone Wall-E unit, still following his original directive for lack of anything better to do, begins to scavenge parts from mechaniloids and Reploids alike to keep himself working. (Perhaps even from older-generation robots, such as....possibly Mega Man himself, long-since retired?) In the process he comes across a form of the Maverick virus, degraded from corruptions in the code. The virus jumpstarts his own natural turn towards sapience, sentimentality, and emotion, and also allows him to impart this evolution toother Mechaniloids, thus explaining how he seems almost supernaturally able both to feel and to make other robots feel and act more human-like.

He does.

• So it's not just me!
  • Hey, hang on...

• confirmed by word of god, his neck and eyes were taken from E.T.
  • Citation? Because I clearly recall Andrew Stanton saying that the idea for WALL-E's eyes came from a pair of binoculars someone gave him to follow a baseball game.

The timelines coincide too much to ignore it. "Earth got used up." Literally, becoming a trash planet as its resources were depleted. The Axiom was just left behind because of an engine stall or something. Along the way to the new giant solar system, a few crews separated and mutinied based on their original cultures before they were diluted by BnL. The ships changed as western and eastern culture returned. The Corrupt Corporate Executives of BnL became "Key members of Parliament" and formed the inner planets with the alliance, as the richest and best because they had the most money. Also, whoever built WALL-E also built R2-D2 and was the first reader (and a timelord, which might explain the schizo tech.) It has something to do with metal. The Tams are his descendants. River gains her psychic abilities by an interface with the needle they stab in her forehead at the beginning of The Movie. This needle might contain nanoprobes with the same personality as WALL-E. These nanoprobes are also used through an alternate universe against species 8472, who die to it from pure annoyance at Hello Dolly constantly playing through their heads. Or maybe I'm reading into this too much.

• Also, if you look at the doors by the repair lab(and a few other places), you'll see that the letters on them are Chinese. This probably means that the Asians are also powerful in WALL-E, which furthers the evidence that the two shows take place in the same universe.
  • That only means you have one of the glitched copies of the DVD; in the standard US release, the letters are in English.

After many years of helping the humans settle on Earth, WALL-E and EVE (and their many, many newly-built, er, descendants) set out in a ship to find other planets capable of supporting life. Presumably, that'd be where some of the other Buy n Large ships (see below) may have gone. Along the way, they meet an alien race who help them with their advanced technology, including the ability to integrate cybernetics into biological bodies. The resultant new creatures set up a base on a Green Planet and head off to explore the galaxy. Over time, their search extends to studying the botanical life of each planet they visit. Centuries pass and one of the binocular-faced plant-obsessed beings is stranded on Earth and befriends a little boy and...

• This goes a long way in explaining why bits of E.T. light up, why he can levitate things, why he collects plants...

As pointed out to this troper by whiny people, the population of the Axiom is mostly white English speaking people. This is because dozens of massive spacecraft were sent out from all over the world, and the Axiom is just the one carrying the descendants of, say, the US East Coast. There may or may not be some sort of mutated survivor race lurking in the third world regions of Earth that couldn't afford to build huge spacefaring luxury resorts, and most of Earth's bloated population is still drifting aimlessly through space.

• This makes sense, because as large as the Axiom is, there's no way it's large enough to comfortably hold a couple of billion people — and that's assuming that only members of the middle and upper classes were able to afford tickets.
  • Confirmed by Word Of God in the DVD extras: the Axiom can hold 600,000 humans and 500,000 robots. They'd need roughly 4 to 5 ships to contain the population of a city like New York City.
• Well, the president of BnL had to have had some ship of his own for he and his staff to leave.
• This isn't a mad theory, this is confirmed by the movie. The Axiom is specifically said to be 'the jewel of the Buy 'N' Large Fleet', and dozens of ships are seen taking off.

BnL being a fierce capitalist force cared only about money and sent on the ships only the people that could pay the price to enter, everybody else was left behind and died

• It would explain the overwhelmingly white, English-speaking population of the Axiom.
  • The initial disaster only took place within the confines of North America, as evidenced by the focus on the Americas whenever Earth was shown, and the fact that everyone in the film speaks English. The rest of the world is just fine.

When the Captain asks for a report on the population, the ship says "unchanged". If the Axiom's been floating around for hundreds of years, that must mean that (A)Certain people are killed off immediately (by population-suppression bots) as others are born or (B)The people (even the babies) never, ever age.

• Or it was unchanged from the previous "day".
• In a spaceship, the population has to be strictly controlled: too many and you run out of supplies, too few and you don't have a viable gene pool. But considering the population didn't exactly have libidos (or the ability to go through the motions), robots taking control of cloning or test-tube babies seems much more likely.
  • ThisTroper would like to remind you that Soylent Green is people. Have a nice day! ^_^
  • This troper would alternatively like to suggest that, corollary to cloning, they might not have killed off passengers when babies were born so much as cloned babies when passengers died.
    • So the Axiom is like the controlled city in The Movie of Aeon Flux except the people just don't care? Would that make AUTO Trevor Goodchild?

If you look at the BnL news site, the economy seems to be some kind of giant game/sham. Massive chunks of the population have nothing better to do with their lives than shop incessantly. Robots are in the process of replacing even the most human of jobs. Obviously, at some point BnL developed technology that made the cost of manufacturing anything from food to spaceships virtually nil. Like any reasonable company, they tried to (and succeeded at) make a profit from this technology...and things rapidly spiraled out of control as virtually free goods and a lack of constructive activities caused the culture of hyper-consumerism we saw in the movie.

• This would also explain the self-sustaining population of the Axiom. Star Trek-style replicators and the advances of robotics technology have eliminated the need to work at all, and people bought into the BnL lifestyle of doing absolutely nothing- their descendants found it incredibly boring, but by then it was too late as they knew nothing else. It even makes the ending better, since humanity is restoring Earth not out of necessity, but because they want to rediscover their humanity.
  • Or maybe it was out of necessity of rediscovering their humanity.

We know by Word Of God that our Wall-E was the only robot that actually worked. Why? Because this takes place in the future of Toy Story. 700 years ago, not everyone was rich enough to flee in the BnL ships. One poor family that stayed behind to eventually suffocate survived long enough for their child to find a malfunctioned Wall-E and take some final comfort in playing with him. This made him come alive. When the child died, Wall-E's core programming was able to interact with his Toy status enough to keep him running.

• All other Toys either went with their owners on BnL ships or died when there were no more children left on the planet.
  • Well, they "died" only in the sense that they were no longer sentient, as shown by WALL-E's Hamm doll.
• This theory explains how Eve's "Kiss" Reversed WALL-E's memory wipe. The power of love restored Wall-E's "Toy" status, restoring his personality.

The similarities between Sumdac's machines and BnL's are many; semi-sapient, autonomously functioning, produced in the 22nd century, and posssed of a limited "transformation" ability that lets them convert into more compact modes. At some point, BnL will purchase Sumdac systems.

• You do realize this makes for two Transformers tie-ins, right?

After... whatever happened at the end of "Evangelion", there were only two humans left. The Axiom and other ships like it were full of the people who could afford to leave Earth, thus escaping Final Impact. Meanthile, on Earth, Shinji builds a little robot for company and integrates some of his personality into it. Buy N Large just took all the credit.

• Alternatively, E.V.E. is the "ancestor" of all E V A units.
  • But Lilith is the ancestor of the Eva units. Unless... E.V.E. added biological components, eventually becoming Lilith.
    • Given that Rei is sorta kinda Lilith, this means she really mellowed out over the years
    • This also means that WALL-E, as EVE's counterpart, also added biological components, becoming Adam. It follows, of course, that the Angels are what is left of the various other ships of humans, reduced to mad mutants by millenia in space. WALL-E/Adam's whole "explode upon contact with Lilith and Angels, taking out most of planet" thing, then, is a really misaimed attempt at restoring them to the way he remembers by destroying all that extra stuff, badly overcharged because he still isn't used to his new body, and his mind is going. Hey, he's pretty battered under all that junk and biological stuff, you'd be senile too.
    • Alternativley, the 'splode on contact' is just the 'sparking kiss' turned Up To Eleven

Eve, Mo, and the other robots from the Axiom have personalities so they can interact with humans as needed, at the very least the captain. But why Wall•E? Why would he need a personality? (And indeed, at the end, why does he seem to have none again?)

My theory is that Wall•E was built around some kind of base code, which was used to make all sorts of robots. Those who needed personalities had the personality code 'linked' into their operation, those who didn't need them (like Wall•E) had it just locked away rather than actually deleted. (This is common programming practice; it takes more work to delete than to just lock away.) Wall•E, over years of operation far outstripping the intended usage, has had corrupted code that's linked back into his personality coding, but the unpredictable nature of it has made his personality somewhat neurotic.

• Or, alternately, you can believe this little oneshot.
• The robots in WALL-E are shown to be very intelligent and capable, especially WALL-E himself. I assume that robots designed to work for long periods of time alone on planetary surfaces are equipped with strong problem-solving and awareness modules, which effectively develop into sentience.
• Wall-E gained a personality from his constant exposure to Hello Dolly. Not because of Hello Dolly itself, but because it was the only external stimuli that would appeal to higher brain functions. AI functions. Whatever. Also, the songs and their core values helped to develop his personality. If he had been exposed to some other song over the years, his personality would have changed accordingly:
  • Girlfriend by Avril Lavigne: Wall-E would have taken a much more direct approach to courting EVE. Unfortunetly, EVE would be so terrified by the horrifying trash beast and his sounds that she would have blown him up right then and there, and the movie would've ended.
  • Caramelldansen: everyone in the audience while watching the movie would get diabetes.
  • You've Got the Touch: Wall-E would be very, very Bad Ass. Also, his collection of stuff would be bigger.
  • Never Gonna Give You Up: Same as above, only he would try to court MO instead of EVE>
  • I shudder to think what would've happened if Wall-E had found Miley Cyrus' "Best of Both Worlds".
    • Annihilation of mankind for its crimes. We got very, very lucky.
  • The Katamari theme: He would have acted the same as an a sentient WALL-E, but peppier. And EVE would have been rolled into the Big Ball of Garbage.
  • It's A Wonderful World: The movie never would have happened because something would wind up killing him by the time the song finished playing.
  • Ha ha, now you've got me amused thinking what would have happened had the film been The Wall and Wall-E had been listening to Pink Floyd. I find that a twistedly delightful notion.

After all, we only see a tiny part of the world in the movie. And as pointed out only white English-speaking people live on the Axiom. Every reference to 'the world' or 'global' is a part of the American tendency to abuse the word ('World series baseball, etc.)

• Perhaps. But possibly the Axiom's population is simply because it was based in the US, and the other ships launched from around the world would have different ethnic groups and populations. I think the history pictures did show a black captain of the Axiom; possibly the test tube reproduction and 700 years of stagnation caused the gene pool to meld together, and English became the dominant language out of convenience.
• Why does everyone keep saying that there are only white people? If you look in the background and at the babies, you can see black people. Other ethnic groups are probably on the ship too.

This troper found it funny how despite being bored, spoilt and terminally lazy, the inhabitants of the Axiom as a whole seem to be rather good-natured, and quick to refer to WALL-E as 'that guy' rather than 'that robot'. Since they haven't been paying attention to robots for centuries, and by the time they notice them they've become ridiculously human, quite possibly they don't see any reason not to treat the robots with the respect they'd give any other human. The robots seem to fade out of the picture in the end sequence, but one is seen alongside a human as they try to catch fish with a net. Possibly while the humans are busy rediscovering culture and civilisation, and bringing life back to Earth, the robots are helping them but also continuing to explore their own humanity. Who says you can't get away with Happily Ever After anymore?

After an entire lifetime spent in low gravity without seemingly using their leg muscles at all, they shouldn't be able to walk off the Axiom, especially considering the amount of flab they'd need to carry. Heck, it's surprising they haven't all died from heart disease. Unless the original planned five-year cruise catered for the effects of years in space, and featured an artificial health regimen, sort of like those electrical-stimulus "Work your abs while you sleep!" devices except not total rubbish. This kept their muscles and cardiovascular systems in good shape despite their increasingly atrocious body mass index.

• So all the humans are like Sumo wrestlers (or Kingpin)?
• Very likely, in all seriousness. The captain manages to hold on to AUTO when it's flailing around wildly, even with one arm, and the dates for the different captains show them living progressively longer lives.
• This could tie into the Gattaca Babies thing on the main page: Eventually the humans stopped reproducing on their own, so AUTO would've had to take things into his own spokes, so to speak. In doing so, he would've probably tweaked human genetics so they'd live healthy and long lives even with the lifestyle they were forced to lead. This could either help them out or screw them over on Earth.
• They live twice as long as modern humans do, so this theory is a go.
• AUTO directives probably force him to take care of humans the best way possible, Earth colonization is not a option, but there might come a time where the humans would need to defend themselves, so he keeps them in a "good" condition that works for both keep them controlled (and less likely to risk themselves), but also that would allow them to face problems and emergencies.

After the Earth's clean-up was finally finished, WALL-E didn't need to be a trash compactor anymore. The Axiom's scientists swapped out WALL-E's trash-compactor torso for a sleeker model, improved the power of his laser, and replaced his treads with thrusters. They gave the same treatment to the other WALL-E models, and changed his acronym, since he is no longer a waste allocation robot. Many years later, WALL-E lives on a floating island (courtesy of the Axiom's tech) with his fellow WALL-E units. This explains why we can have two similar looking robots that are so painfully woobieish. The reason why he ended up doing what Tabuu wanted is simple. He took EVE hostage.

• Because EVE is never seen in the game, it means that she was held in Subspace... which was essentially erased from existance. Shortly after the ending of the game, WALL-E/R.O.B., realising that all the other robots are gone and there's no reason for him to continue existing, starts a fighting tournament in which he will eventually be destroyed. This tournament is, essentaially, all normal Smash Bros. gameplay.
• Alternatively, when Ganondorf shows up to control all of the other R.O.B.s, he makes an offhand comment about EVE being destroyed for scrap. This is why WALL-E/R.O.B. has to be carried off the island — he cannot comprehend a world without her, so simply becomes catatonic... but then decides to avenge EVE by destroying Tabuu. This then leads to the conclusion of the above theory.

The ending of Metropolis is eerily similar to the setting of WALL-E. Humans have left in a space ship, robots are left on Earth and the planet is a dump.

WALL-E is The Doctor, EVE is his companion, Hal the cockroach is Jack Harness the Immortal, and AUTO is The Master.

... what? Don't look at me like that! Better than AUTO WALL-E Foe Yay.

Exactly What It Says On The Tin. At the very end of Airplane! We see OTTO pilot, resurrected, now with an inflatable girlfriend and a functioning eyelid, taking command of the now wheelless plane and sending it soaring. Clearly he has big plans, having gotten a taste for humanity, a taste for control, a taste for... fish.

Alternately, Airplane! is WALL-E from AUTO/OTTO's point of view.

EVE was being sent to the same place (the Axiom's launch station) because it was convenient and/or a good PR move (BnL: "The Future Begins Where We Left Off!") and/or because AUTO knew that area was basically sterile - that way he could follow both his orders to send probes to Earth and not have to return to it (the other EVE units were sent to similarly sterile areas).

Alternately...

Like in Titan A.E. or Trigun.

But they all die anyway. Oh, come on: The earth is a wasteland with frequent intense dust storms, and the sole life is some bugs and a single plant. The humans who are trying to live here are fat tourists who've never stood up before and think they can grow pizza. Do you really think a bunch of badly programmed robots and a copy of wikipedia is going to save them? If they're smart, they'll flee back into space before that rusty landing pad collapses.

• One problem with that idea. At the very end, right before the stylized credit sequence starts you see a large hill covered with plants. This part is clearly not a fantasy as it is rendered in-universe (CGI rather than stylized). Likewise, the humans don't just have a futuristic Wikipedia. The computer gave the captain very simple, clear instructions on how to initiate Operation Recolonization. It's not hard to imagine a similar set of tutorials for the rest of the mission.
• Also, it doesn't matter how long they take to successfully grow enough food to feed themselves- the ship isn't going anywhere, and it has ample food supplies. Plus, chances are VERY good that the computer has directions to the Doomsday Seed Vault, from which they basically have a "instant agriculture, just add water and lots of labor" kit.
  • You mean the G.E.C.K.?
• They also have a veritable army of highly intelligent, adaptable robots to help them out. (as shown in that sequence)
• And once they die, the robots start their own independent society (any unexplained robots-only setting can be linked here)

The fact that, at the end of the movie, the camera pans back and reveals a bunch of green sprouts over a hill close to WALL-E's destroyed city invites the fact that the rest of the Earth either got better or was never obliterated in the first place; in fact, WALL-E (and originally the rest of the army of them) were not intended to clean the earth, but instead to keep it, or at least this city, in constant disrepair as scaremongering tactics in order to extend Buy-n-Large's corporate takeover of the world. Images of the desolate area were broadcast across the earth in order to convince people that Buy-n-Large was their only hope for survival.

Sadly, the denizens of the Axiom were killed off shortly after landing by factors beyond their control. However, their work had made their area the only safe area on Earth. When an EVE probe from another ship came back positive, the captain of that ship got everyone aboard to develop a plan for returning to Earth. His name? Captain Andonuts. Through his inherited mechanical prowess, he was able to reprogram the ship's autopilot to override Directive A113. Most of the robots were shut down and scrapped to avoid interfering with their plan to reset humanity's lifestyle after the havoc wrought by Buy n Large. However, since the autopilot was a critical part of developing the plan, they reserved a part in their story for him as a holder of memories, and implanted his core programming into a a part-biological cyborg form which, through a glitch, became very, very tall (becoming Leder). The Captain soon built an item he called the Hummingbird Egg, which blanked the entire ship's memories and replaced them with the roles designated in their plan, leaving only the Captain and the Autopilot's memories intact.

Upon landing, Captain Andonuts discovered two robots who had apparently survived (Take a good guess who they were). He was about to scrap them, but soon took pity on them after seeing how much emotional capacity they had. Not wanting them to interfere with the plan, he used the technology he had used to make Leder to install their personalities into biological forms. However, due to a mix-up, WALL-E was planted into the female body, and EVE in the male. This didn't seem to bother them, so nothing was done to reverse it. Their memories of life as robots was deleted, but their personalities and affection for each other was left as-is. To fit them seamlessly into the community, they were ret-conned into the memories as the children of childless people who filled no other role. They became Flint and Hinawa (And for what it's worth, Hal became Boney). However, the process had...odd effects on their twin children, giving them different brain wave patterns and allowing them to learn PSI. Shortly after, Porky had come along through time and kidnapped Captain Andonuts and forced him to work for him, which is why when WALL-E/Hinawa was killed, she was unable to just be fixed.

Now I just need an explanation for the Magypsies and the Dragon...And for that matter, what happened to M-O and the rest of the rogue robots...

Due to a programming error, she's the only EVE unit ever sent to the annual investigation of Earth, while the others remain in permanent stasis. Thus she's had to endure centuries of constant failure, becoming increasingly more snappy and irritable. She remains vaguely hopeful at the start of every mission (thus her little flightshow), but subconsciously fears (quite rightfully) another futile trip. Thus, as she first time encounters something moving on the surface, having landed in a different location every time, she promptly throws all her frustrations at it - namely Wall-E by attempting to blast it into bits. Wall-E might have ended up just as grouchy if he hadn't invented his collecting hobby and found the video and music clips to keep himself entertained.

EVE and GO-4 have Syndrome's forcefield thingies, and he did say he was going to commercialize the designs... Maybe his successor did?

• Not to mention the electronic voices of the pool robot and help kiosk being exactly the same as the sentry bird and Manta plane on Nomanisan.

After Amber took over, it was expanded into a company that provided everything the ailing planet needed, not just organs. A few generations later (with a new CEO), the organ failure crisis got worse and it was blamed on the level of pollution, which had skyrocketed. By sending up the spaceships, Geneco got what it had always wanted: control over the entire human population.

Of course, the Earth they left behind still looked rather similar, with Big Brother-ish TV screen advertisements for the all-powerful corporation everywhere.

]] The Mystic Eyes of Woobiness! Truly, one of the most powerful of them all!

They wanted to see what made their robots tick, and used them for their Genuine People Personality Project. Of course, Marvin was based on Wall-E's programming, and he's so depressed because there is only one EVE.

Even though she doesn't speak much, her voice is pretty human-like and she was shown to be able to pronounce new words that she hadn't had in her Vocabulary before (because it wouldn't have made much sense for her to have a broad vocabulary) like when she learned Wall-E's name. Then, why didn't she ever speak in full sentences, not even to calm down the humans? Because it's difficult to make spoken text not sound like Creepy Monotone with these programs. (Yeah, you heard right, singing is easy, but speaking sounds creepy.) Eve needed a few tries to get Wall-E's name in the right pronunciation and pitch. Doing that for long junks of text would probably take up to much time. Since, given her personality, she probably didn't want to sound like a soulless Terminatrix, she just avoided talking altogether.

• Alternative theory: EVE is Miku Hatsune. No clue how that works though...

Explains the Anachronism Stew involving much of the culture and technology, how Old New York became abandoned, and why all the robots have personalities and genders. All the famous heads in jars were stored somewhere on the Axiom.

• What about the D & D-esque Uberwald that rises and is later razed by War Of The Worlds-style aliens? The end credits show the city going from scrapyard to San Francisco... unless Wall-E's city isn't New York...
• Don't you remember? Bender destroys it after being chased by Sweedish police.

• Also explains why they now have a mental institution for Criminally Insane Robots.

Considering how obsessed that society was with happiness and extreme consumerism, they used up the world eventually and had to leave. Also somewhere between those two points in time, robots were developed and eliminated the need for lower caste humans.

• Also explains how there can be babies in the future, when mankind is way too fat to reproduce.

The Captain isn't confused. BnL genetically engineered actual pizza plants.

WALL-E is strongly built, easy to repair and modify, utilitarian and not designed with aesthetics in mind (despite being cute). EVE is sleek and postmodern, packed with all kinds of gadgets and features (plasma cannon, hover ability) even if they're not really necessary for her function. A forklift and an iPod. Of course, neither of these are portrayed as a bad thing- WALL-E can achieve much despite his simplicity, and EVE makes the most of everything she can do.

The people had a hard time accepting the robots as sentient beings, and continued seeing them as an underclass. Eventually the robots demanded equal rights, rebelled and founded their own nation. The humans refused accepting them, started a war which they lost, and we all know what happened then.

As a conservative, this is how this troper interpreted the movie. BnL completely intended the earth to be filled up with garbage. Once the Earth was full of garbage, the governments would die. Them, being the largest corporation in all categories, crushed the other corporations by military force and continued filling the world up with garbage to continue delaying the cleanup time. Then, they declared themselves the government and took everyone off the planet.

• All the WALL-Es (save one) failed because they were sabotaged by someone who thought eternity in space was better than life under a BnL dictatorship.
• Well, their website seemed to imply that they already took over the governments in a big corporate buyout.

Seriously, they're both things that take garbage and turn it into cubes of garbage.

This explains how the BNL people could expect plants to grow spontaneously after hundreds of years of dust storms and polluted soil. They stockpiled a huge amount of plant seeds, and set it so that the WALL-Es would plant a portion of the seeds allotted to them once they found soil. If the soil was usable, the seeds would grow for the EVEs to find. After a WALL-E used up all of the seeds it was set to plant, it deactivated. This explains why all of the WALL-E units except the sentient one were inactive (aside from the possibility that they were all sentient, and died, which would be sad), because WALL-E went from programmed actions to assuming his directive was whatever he had been doing in the first place (garbage control), as well as why the hill was covered in live plants: A WALL-E nearby had planted the seeds on the hill and in the boot in the refrigerator, and a dust storm blew the refrigerator door shut after the plant had grown some and the planting WALL-E went away and deactivated itself. WALL-E's interest in the plant was a vague memory of his mostly-overwritten secondary programming. The WALL-Es that found dirt and planted seeds sent a signal out to the ship so the EVE probes could be dropped in roughly the right area without wasting resources sending them all over the planet every few years.

Think about it: the hellish, dust-storm-plagued wasteland, the tattered remnants of civilization, the complete lack of green and growing things, the barely-habitable conditions... it all seems oddly familiar, doesn't it? Furthermore it's been hinted in the Fallout games that the American government was in fact trying to find a way to get its "essential" people off the planet before everything went to hell, and the Vaults were only a coverup to appease the rest of the population (in addition to giant controlled experiments). The media used in the movie is also in keeping with the 1950s "feel". I predict that shortly after the movie's ending, all the passengers of the Axiom are devoured by Radscorpions. MUAHAHAHA.

• However! It's safe to say that the city WALL-E was living in had to have been a major American city, and we know that parts of the US have been reclaimed by human settlements. Some are violent, but some are willing to work with other settlements to rebuild humanity, especially if the newcomers have valuable technology to aid in the effort. While the humans would be vulnerable to outside aggression, they're also accompanied by robots and a ship that undoubtedly has weapons, as EVE does, not to mention the considerable armor of the ship to protect them until walls or something go up. If that city was, for example, New York City, it's likely that they'll come into contact with the Commonwealth, who appreciate high technology and would accept the humans in return for getting the jump on the tech, although their attitudes towards sentient robots might cause friction. The Radscorpions would have shown up at some point during the credits, since it covers an exceptionally long period of time (as evinced by the plant's sprout becoming a huge tree). I propose that the Axiom came down somewhere near Oasis, perhaps carving a wider ravine, and the Oasis denizens taught the Axiom crew how to survive the Wasteland, while the Axiom's tech (and helpful robots) spread the greenery of Harold, resulting in all the meadows and such we see in the last part of the credits. The only problem might be that the humans from the ship might have to adjust to the residual radiation of the Wasteland, but that's about it.

They've been returning for years. Or weeks. But Rule Of Drama.

• There must've been some thinning of gravity for a giant dust storm to blow from wherever they landed all the way to WALL-E's city.
  • Butterfly effect. Storms can go thousands of miles in Real Life. And the storms could have been picking up dust the whole way, with no plants to keep the soil anchored. Also, we don't actually know how far away they landed, maybe just over the horizon.

And that's why they create robots with seemingly unnecessary features and products that last forever.

...or rather, the WALL-Es. The EVE units were meant to go find plants on Earth BUT Earth was full of progressively malfunctioning WALL-E units. It's plausible that some of these malfunctioning WALL-Es might even become violent. Hence the need for the EV Es to be able to take care of themselves and be on the lookout for trouble. It's just lucky for everyone involved that they weren't simply programmed to destroy any WALL-E on sight.

• The fact that the elevators like the ones in portal... doesn't help.

Upon reaching Earth, M-O is still extremely neurotic without any way to deal with his OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Directive). So instead of having to be brutally reprogrammed, he chooses to adapt to his environment, solving crimes as an outlet. By utilizing his cleaning infrared camera to detect evidence he becomes M-ONK, world renowned detective bot.

• Er... Master Of Nitpicking Knowledge...?
  • Meh, It's a Jungle Out There.

Especially if that virus includes the alteration of their behaviors. The bot that WALL-E waves at the first time he is headed for the bridge first practices the motion, and then uses it effectively when he sees WALL-E leaving. And later on, the bots in the ship's garbage dump are seen waving at WALL-E, despite the fact that WALL-E never waved at them. This means that either the robots of the ship have spread the "waving behavior" through their actions, and passed it on that way, or it was disseminated through some sort of internal code. Either way, it spread, virus-like, through the whole of the ship's robot population in a matter of hours.

• I wouldn't say that their program is susceptible to viruses, but they can be easily over ridden.

WALL-E makes the Apple Chime and EVE looks so similar to an iPod that it's almost a design infringement. So its more than possible that all of the robots are built with a Mac computer. Plus it's more than likely Windows has become extinct.

• Which means BnL has consumed Apple.
• Actually, Steve Jobs got Apple's lead product designer to go down to Pixar and help with EVE's design. Seriously.
• And AUTO uses MAC OS Machine Talk as his voice...

In response to the WMG above, if Rayman and the iPod were to have a baby, it would be EVE.

This troper was half expecting Sulley to pop out at any minute from one of the hats.

Having spent all these years with humans as his main companions, Auto may be able to understand their desires to return to Earth, and would be willing. He has picked up a few human characteristics such as shrugging when given a question he doesn't know the answer to, and knowing how to turn the pages of a book. However, the keep-em-there directive was written into him too strongly, and made him act against his will. The directive/virus might be triggered by the plant. After all, he didn't HAVE to alert the captain about EVE's plant. He could have just done away with her without the captain seeing. So alerting the captain/opening the book and so on were all Auto's doing, but the plant-snatching and general evilness was the virus taking over. Because I hate computer viruses!

• This troper is confused. Are you saying that the order given to Auto was a virus or it created a virus? Either way, its just an order, and unless something is being downloaded into Auto's interface, it can not be a virus.

As was pointed out somewhere above, a human future where everything is scientifically possibly wouldn't result in egg-shaped humans; that technology would go into making it easier to be fit and good-looking without actually working at it. It doesn't matter if, over the generations, it became easier to be fat: Standards of beauty, especially in the modern day, are hard to dispel. Plus, BnL would know that there's much more money to be made in diet treatments and surgeries to make you youthful-looking than in just encouraging the humans to be fat. So, if there's no real reason for the future-humans to look like pears, why did they?

Clearly, part of AUTO's directive was to carefully pare away the human instinct for creativity and action, since trying to control such a large group of people is like herding cats. So the food was increased to make them rotund, and slowly the treatments that kept them fit were replaced by heavy foods that made them lethargic. At this point, the original motive of Buy'N'Large wouldn't count, since the company would have been destroyed along with Earth. Distracted by games and virtual activities which required little to no movement, the humans failed to notice their degradation even as it stared them in the face (as in the line of Captains' portraits). This succeeded for a long time, because no-one could take the trouble to walk off the marked lines, and no-one even thought of doing so.

Alita takes place on a junked earth filled with humans and cyborgs. In the sky looms Jeru and Salem, filled with both of the above as well as sentient yet goofy robots. Additionally, Salem is in contact with the Venusians, who modified themselves into "Humpty Dumpty" forms and get around on hoverchairs, their arms and legs nearly useless and their faces taking up about 95% of their bodymass. Clearly, the Venusians were on a starliner that didn't return to earth but continued to evolve/mutate. The leader of Salem's robots, Landa Namnam, claims that a human gave them knowledge, but all he did was show them the information — the robots were already intelligent. Jeru is the remnent of the Axiom, filled with the people who weren't ready to leave the ship and continued their blissfully wasteful ways and using nanotechnology to become slim again.

OK, so this troper really has no idea if there's ever going to be a sequel, so this is really more of a hope than a guess. But in the off chance that there is one, I think that Luxo Jr. would make an awesome addition to the cast. Him and WALL-E already have a great rapport together (what with Luxo's bulb being replaced by WALL-E, and WALL-E joining him to form PIXAR), so how cool would it be to have them in the same film? Plus, I think it would be awesome just to see both of them again.

The two mega-corporations, US Alliance and Team Advantage, eventually merge, becoming the Buy-n-Large corporation. In the face of such economic power, the Government wilts and disappears. With no Government oversight, Bn L trashes the planet, and takes all of it's happiest consumers to space, leaving the WALL-Es behind mainly as a token and to pander to the investors.

Single source that can fill in all plot hole and give continuity. The evidence? Read this page!

The scout ship didn't have a hyperdrive, so it must have traveled at below the speed of light to get to the Axiom. The long travel time, both going to Earth and coming back, explains why no humans were aboard (they would have died of old age, if boredom didn't kill them first). Thus, the early scenes of Wall-E on Earth was much less then 500 years since the launch of the Axiom.

When AUTO realized he was expected to keep humanity on the ship indefinitely, he had to find some way to deal with the problems of micro-gravity on the human body. Note that the message from the Bn L CEO clearly shows that he expected the human-ball-of-dough effect to occur within the original span of the Axiom's mission, instead of the generations where it did occur. Auto found a suitable source of external gravity and put itself over the object to keep the Axiom positioned so the body could produce a close to 1-Earth G field on the Axiom. It kept the thrusters firing on a rotating pattern, so that at least one set of thrusters was on at any given moment. This explains why everyone was aboard when the ship 'tilted', since AUTO had changed the ship's angle to the gravitational source.

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