Fridge / The Phantom Tollbooth

Fridge Brilliance

• Officer Shrift's ridiculous prison sentences and nonchalance about seeing someone out and about well before the several million years are up make perfect sense when you remember he's an authority in Dictionopolis, where numbers don't matter. He has no idea just how big or little any number, be it two or six million, really is.
• Of course Canby jumps to Conclusions all the time. The way that he gives hints about his name ("I'm as stupid as can be", etc) is chock full of them! Because even after he grows to giant-size when he says he's "tall as can be", it'd still be hypothetically possible for him to grow taller still, same as Milo's guess at the number of greatest possible magnitude can still be added to.
• Film only: There are two easily-missed moments hinting that Azaz and the Mathemagician aren't as irreconcilable as they like to pretend. Azaz says "Things which are just as bad also are equally good," a mathematical idea. And in the Mathemagician's song, he refers to numbers as "Dewey Decimal dearies," referring to the Dewey Decimal System of organizing books.
• Film only: While the other characters have smooth designs as expected of Jones' later works, with the exception of the Terrible Trivium- who looks inviting because it suits his manipulative nature more, the Demons all have rough and sketchy lines to their designs- symbolizing their chaotic nature.
  • Additionally characters like the Lethargians and the Awful Dyne both have unstable designs because they lack order for different reasons- the former are too lazy to remain in one shape and the latter is a cloud of dissonant noise.

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