Discussion WesternAnimation / TheIronGiant

As the Iron Giant nears it's twentieth anniversary, I would like to propose removing spoiler tags on this page given how long the story has been part of popular culture.

Instead the page would simply carry the banner "This page contains unmarked spoilers for The Iron Giant. Please read at your own risk."

Can someone please give me proof, maybe a screen capture evidencing that blood was added to the deer's death scene in the Signature Edition? I tried to find that myself to no avail.

Deleted the following Natter:

Berserk Button

• While the Giant does hate guns, it's not entirely his choice. He has a built-in defense mechanism where he attacks anything pointing a weapon at him, even if it just looks like one. When Hogarth points a toy gun at him during a game, the Giant (and everyone else) is terrified when he nearly kills Hogarth unconsciously.
  • In other words, the "Berserk Button" is fairly literal in this case.

Giant Robot Hands Save Lives

• Well, considering he had the potential to absorb the force of their fall and lower them gently to safety, I'm pretty sure anyone would prefer that to a panicked fall to the ground and the potential broken bones to go with it. Even without that logic, it was an Establishing Character Moment demonstrating the Giant's heroism and gentility (at least in non-Death-Mecha mode.)

Deleted the following incorrect information (and the Natter response to it) from the Artistic License – Military example.

• ...; the most heinous of these mistakes is launching a nuclear warhead without the proper codes from the proper authority...
  • One can reasonably assume that President Eisenhower (shown briefly, albeit from behind), gave General Rogard command of all forces in the area, including nuclear capability. In The '50s, responsibility for nuclear weapons wasn't quite as formal as it is today, and it was fully expected that any future ground conflicts would be fought with tactical nukes deployed by the Army.

The following incorrect information (and the Natter that was added to dispute it) was deleted from the A Nuclear Error entry.

• ...While the sub would NEVER launch on ANY target (let alone the mainland United States) in response to someone who was just screaming into the radio to fire, after seeing the giant nearly take out a battleship we can reasonably assume extremely poor judgment by the sub commander.]]
  • While the first part is true, the second part might not be an error. Mansley had already suggested that they lure the Giant away from the town, then nuke it, so it's entirely possible that the General already cleared the nuke for firing, and they were just waiting for the general to give the order when the Giant was in the right place. When the Giant was revealed as harmless when he wasn't being shot at, Rogard was about to tell the Sub to cancel the launch, when Mansley grabbed the radio and yelled at them to launch it.

I've always felt (thinking of Superman as a modern god-hero, in the same sort of spirit that we make Trope Pantheons) that Clark/Kal would be pleased, honored, and gladly give his blessing to the Giant's invocation/emulation of him. "In the finest tradition", and all that.

Nuclear missiles don't detonate on contact, they at a pre programmed point or by a signal. When the giant hit the missile it wouldn't have been armed, therefore they shouldn't have been a nuclear explosion.

not sure where (or if) this goes in the article.

Am I the only one who thinks that the iron giant is a self replicating machine? It would certainly explain all the metal he eats and why their are loads of him in the deleted dream sequence destroying that planet but only one arrives on Earth. Maybe a number of iron giants were sent out by some people on another planet to wipe out every one else in the universe so they were programmed to land on a planet, consume lots of metal, create more of themselves, destroy the planet, then each one goes to another planet and starts the process again. Does qualify for Wild Mass Guessing?