miscellaneous
Kids media with crazy rabbit holes if you think about it
Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs - The spray on shoes are an establishing character for moment for Flint, which shows that he's very creative and imaginative with his inventions but not always effective, as he created shoes he can't take off. But if you stop to think about it, he somehow managed to create something that is light, can be sprayed on, is indestructible and grew with his feet at just 8 years old. Flint really was a misunderstood genius
Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends - Imaginary friends come to life simply by being imagined by a kid. Here's the thing, kids imaginations are wild and they can also be pretty scared. Who knows what kind of horrifying thing a child might imagine by being scared of the dark or in a nightmare
Cars - Quite a few things. One of them being the fact that in the second movie they are shown taking off their tires in the airport, which leads us to believe that 9/11 has happened in this universe. The thing is, planes are also living beings, so how were they hijacked?
There's also that one car that has an inside with seats and a steering wheel
Cars 2 – The Pope exists in the movie, so the Catholic Church must exist too, which leads me to believe that, millennia ago, a Car-Jesus was crucified.
Most people who do over-serious analysis of the Cars universe assume that humans went extinct or got kicked off the planet at some point when cars went sentient, or possibly that cars were always sentient like the toys in Toy Story and likewise either genocided or kicked humans out of the planet.
However... what if humans did exist in the Cars universe, but had some kind of global disaster where the only way they could survive was by transferring their consciousness into machines? Like, all the cars have the "souls" so to speak of humans? So that Pope doesn't imply the existence of Car Jesus, but regular Jesus, who's still worshipped by the artificial mechanical people who were once human?!
My own over-serious analysis is that Cars is set in a world where machinery has consciousness, but no awareness of its driver or manufacturer, and the personality of the driver imprints on the car. So Lightning McQueen has an actual driver, a hotshot who looks like Owen Wilson, but the car has no awareness of him. All the cars have the personality of the sort of people who might drive them - the minivan couple, the low-rider, the sporty import, the 1960's Detroit models; hell, Click and Clack cameo in the movie as a 1963 Dodge Dart and a 1967 Dodge A100 - cars the Magliozzi brothers famously owned and frequently mocked on their radio show.
Edit the humans out of any situation involving cars, and the cars perceive themselves as doing their own maintenance and operation. Repair becomes healing. It even shows up in the scenery - look at the posters, where clouds become tire tracks and geology looks like car features. We have pareidolia, seeing faces in inanimate objects. We anthropomorphize, they automomorphize.
If I were still in college, this would be an easy ten-page position paper summarizing the nature of free will and predestination - Lightning McQueen was clearly manufactured to be a sports car; he was never going to be a family car or a school bus or anything else. (A stock model like Doc Hudson probably had more options.) Did he have a childhood? What did that look like? Was he a little Power Wheels car driven by a six-year-old who yearned to be a race car, or did he spring fully-formed from the manufacturer? If they're manufactured, how and when do they become aware, and why do they act like the people that would theoretically drive them?
It helps explain why auto racing would be such a huge event.
I'm not sure why you'd have stands full of cars to watch the races, but maybe this universe just really liked the drive-in theater concept and expanded it to other events.
That's fun. Humanity became Necrons but our shittier technology meant we could only become something that we already had a lot of, and was ambulatory/could affect its environment would be cars, genius.
...Fucked up that we did it to cows too but such is the nature of the human race.
The Accord would be a great car for Jesus to be. "He was a man of sorrows" "He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him" "Is this not the carpenter?"
He was driving through a remote crossroads and ran over some nails. Four flat tires. Took him three days to limp to the nearest tire shop before he could rise again and hit the road.
It also introduces the hilarious implication that somebody tried to assassinate the Pope, since he's in the Popemobile with the bulletproof bubble. Somebody in the world of Disney and Pixar's Cars tried to shoot the head of the Cartholic church with some sort of car gun.
Keep in mind WW2 likely happened in the cars universe.
Planes are shown to also be sentient, so I would assume ships are as well. Imagine a sentient, living aircraft carrier bringing soldiers to take Japanese occupied Guadelcarnal, only to have his last memory being a fellow sentient Japanese zero coming down on a karmikaze attack
WWII canonically happened in the Cars universe. A WWII veteran corsair has a flashback of his entire squad getting shot down while divebombing a Japanese ship in the Planes movie.
It also features a Car Pope Mobile for Car Pope, which means this particular car was born just to risk his life housing the important holy car within him.
I'm thinking of the Robots (2005) explanation... where "making" the baby is the fun part, parts can be replaced, etc. Although if that's the case I'm sure some of the jokes intended for human audiences also hit the same ideas as the rest of this thread.
'Mater lives in an open scrap yard. Imagine living in a field of dismembered body parts. And I'm pretty sure the statue of the town founder was his actual body.
I would say there is a line in the trailer of the second cars movie where Mater is dressed as Dracula and says "I vant to siphon your gas!" Implying that siphoning gas is analogous to vampirism
My question is, since there was that military jeep in the first movie, this implies the existence of car armies and therefore wars wages by the cars in the past, and that opens so so many questions
In Zootopia there’s a brief scene where a polar bear makes the sign of the cross on himself, which implies there’s furry Catholicism, which implies a furry pope, which implies a furry Jesus, and so on and so forth
I like the concept of people having heated debates to what animal jesus was,
Maybe he was depicted by early roman christians as a Lamb (like christ the Sheppard) and then when the church became the main governing body he got cast as a Lion to sell the Idea of a strong and relentless power of god
The lamb and the lion I thought the idea out of how early roman christians depicted jesus as a very plain almost unnotable lamb sheperd so they could hide their belief in plain sight, while later romans depicted him similar to the older and revered greek philosophers (hince the beard and more imposing look)
The donkey part was a reference to THE OLDEST surviving depiction of Jesus Christ in the "Alexamenos Graffiti" that is a VERY old roman Graffiti depicting a figure praying to a donkey headed crucified figure, with the words "Alexamenos Prays to his god" etched right under it. It is theorised to be a anti Christian slander grafitti made by someone who knew that Alexamenos Person
The lamb and the lion I thought the idea out of how early roman christians depicted jesus as a very plain almost unnotable lamb sheperd so they could hide their belief in plain sight,
Wasn't this the fish actually? As for the lamb? I am more reminded of the role as the sacrifice to redeem humanity. For one a connection to the lamb of Abraham, which is sacrificed in Isaac's stead and thus represents Jesus as both the lamb and the sacrificed son, as well as the role of both the shepherd and the lamb for the church.
while later romans depicted him similar to the older and revered greek philosophers (hince the beard and more imposing look)
It happens pretty early, because a lot of early Christians were hellenized Jews, like Paul. There is also the influence of Platonism on Christianity.
The donkey part was a reference to THE OLDEST surviving depiction of Jesus Christ in the "Alexamenos Graffiti" that is a VERY old roman Graffiti depicting a figure praying to a donkey headed crucified figure
Yes I had this in mind as well, but the Alexamenos donkey goes further. The Egyptian god Seth is portrayed as donkey-headed in late antiquity as well. The donkey might not just be a mistake or a general slander, but a deliberate comparison to the Egyptian god in question.
He could also just be a lamb. In Islam, we're taught that all Prophets and Messengers (Peace be Upon All of Them) were shepherds at one point in their life.
I could’ve sworn Foster’s addresses that in the movie pilot with there being a bunch of dangerous imaginary friends locked up somewhere.
And then there was the one episode where Bloo discovers the room of imaginary friends made by babies that are just little scribbles, but because there’s so many they need to be locked away.
If anything, what little they do address makes the rabbit hole even darker.
there's one moment where the older brother and bad guy Terrance gets hungry and imagines an imaginary pizza friend. the pizza is happy to see him but then gets eaten violently..
how many friends are being imagined just to be tortured, eaten, or used as slaves to some economic idea!
I always imagined how there's probably an entire separate non-profit dedicated to housing the imaginary friends that are dreamt up by nerds obsessing over whatever seasonal anime waifu is airing
My kid (almost 4) invented something called The Hallway Cricket.
Long story short, when she was recently turned 3, believed due to a misunderstanding that crickets are something to fear. After showing her multiple pictures and videos of crickets and even finding a live one, she eventually got it that crickets are harmless little bugs.
However, she asserts that in our house lives an entity that is very large with a menacing beak, and it can only get you when you go down the hallway in the dark.
Feral pets in a posthuman world is really a good Speculative evolution idea. Imagine descendents of shepherd dogs keep herding sheep just without a shepherd. Having domesticates isn't that unusual in eusocial insects, but rare in mammals except humans.
There was an episode of Life After People that speculated on what would happen to pets. I was impressed by the creativity of the concept of cats developing flaps of skin like flying squirrels/sugar gliders and living in colonies within abandoned skyscrapers, gliding between towers rather than climbing down and back up.
I am a bit sceptical about the cats. I think cats would just go feral become like regular wild cats again. Felines are extremely successful carnivores. Say if humans wipe out all the big cats like tigers and lions. Domestic cats might grow in size and eventually fill in that vacant role.
With bats, well as as squirrels and other rodents I don't think cats will become the nect pterosaurs or something. Unless humans eradicate all rodents, but that's unlikely.
The Christmas stuff could just be a cultural carry over from when dogs lived with humans and its just so old they dont remember why and have made up new explanations for the same holiday.
Similar to how Christmas is around the winter solstice and was likely intended to replace it, (as a lot of christian holidays are).
'...deployed in Afghanistan during the War on Terror,' - Is there a source for this? We briefly see him at a military base of some sort, but no location or war is named.
DuckTales exists in a version of our world where multiple real people, locations, and historical events exist (but usually renamed with animal puns). This implies that other real world events such as the World Wars may exist.
Her mom, Denise, is a humanoid robin while her dad, Frank, is a human and it was never explained whether Margaret was hatched by an egg or came to the world through live birth. Granted, the show has a lot of weird stuff like Mordecai, Rigby and Benson being naked in public but this always appears in my mind for some reason.
There's the fact that Mordecai is embarrassed about the swimming trunks but he just walks around naked and no one bats an eye. Just swim naked, what's the big deal
They also acknowledge in an early episode that Rigby is walking around in the buff suggesting that many of the characters are just nudists. But in another episode Morto and Rigs see Benson "naked" after his towel slips off and it's just his normal appearance (though with the gumball slot open IIRC). Perhaps the answer is that there is a sort of invisible conceptional clothing that characters can put on that is often their normal state but then they take it off to get in the shower, etc. IDK man, I don't think this quite explains the speedo thing though.
Everything about Bright. Apparently Shrek exists in this world (did the in-universe Katzenberg equivalent get in trouble for peddling racist stereotypes?)
Bright really did not have any thought put into it past the premise. A complete alternate history yet so many things from our history are referenced. Off the top of my head there’s the Alamo, Black Lives Matter, and crip walking
Centaur cop makes me wonder if centaurs were enslaved to be transportation before engines were a thing, or if it's considered wrong for a Centaur to fuck a horse. Do horses even exist in the Bright universe?
Bojack Horseman did a whole episode confronting one of the biggest moral problems of furry and furry-adjacent worlds and that is, where does the food come from if the people are animals?
Well, they come from "less intelligent" versions of said animals that are basically mentally handicapped people who are raised and bred for food, its honestly a pretty bizarre and dark way to look at how a society that's largely like ours would function with anthro people in it.
Or how Beastars does it, where carnivores are allowed by the government to go to designated black market locations at night to get their meat fix from prey animals who either volunteer to be killed, cooked and eaten or, you know, they are trafficked there without their consent. Either way it somehow keeps predator animals’ urges in check enough to keep society at peace but during the day predator animals need to get their protein from more ethical places like chicken eggs, tofu and milk
Yeah that was actually a terrifying lore drop lmao. The ethics of cannibalism aside, I'd imagine meat is then an expensive delicacy unless they have a huge death row population.
The fact that they keep them in comfy jammies and give them toys is so much more upsetting then if they just kept them in cages lmao (also this is the second time in a few days this episode had come up)
If there was someone inside your body with a deadly weapon threatening to kill you unless you walked somewhere or did something, wouldn't you also do what they say?
I'm gonna take this thought to it's logical conclusion and say that crashing into the towers would kill the living plane anyways so why would he comply with the terrorist car's deadly threats? He could just crash in a field and save all those people.. uh I mean cars.. since he is gonna die anyways.
And the fact that the carpope was seen inside a popemobile (which was also alive) implies that someone tried to assasinate the carpope, and also raises the question of where this popemobile cane from. A religious fanatic which has modified its own body to serve? Or was it born/built to be a popemobile?
Also it appears like some cars are born/built for a specific purpose. I mean, Francesco is a Formula 1 car, which is a car designed specifically for racing
The use of the modern Italian tricolor flag without the Savoy Coat of Arms in Cars 2 indicates the 1946 Italian institutional referendum must have occurred. The referendum occurred due to the events of the Italian civil war. Therefore, a car Mussolini must also have existed in the Cars timeline. The modern tricolor flag also originates in a flag first used by Napoleon's Cispadane Republic. Therefore, a car Napoleon must exist.
The sheer number of stories found in the Pokédex—especially regarding Ghost and Dark types—makes that world fascinating and terrifying. There are Pokémon that can steal your life force or kidnap children by pretending to be balloons, among other tales.
It makes sense if you know Japanese Shintoism. The religious cosmology does have a lot of kami investiture into locations/objects. Like I guess the most recognizable is probably from "Your Name" the magic saki the Shrine Maidens prepare and that's where the magical realism/miracle of the story comes from.
But yeah what kami can be invested into is heavily debated by theologians/ philosophers/ believers. Like Ghost in the Shell was about could computers/digital creations be invested with kami? Like if a crafted Temple, Statue or Sword can have Kami, why couldn't a computer program? And that's where the "Ghost" in Ghost in the Shell comes from, it's spiritual entity that came into awareness in the digital world.
That's not all, even the regular pokedex entries are just detailing how pokemon hunts their prey. There was a lot of fanarts about pokemon doing realistic hunting behaviours based on the pokedex description.
So in their world, you can basically see a Bug type pokemon eating a incapacitated Pikachu using their venom.
However, we have to remember that not everything the Pokédex says is factual; otherwise, we would have to accept that Kadabra are transformed children or that the existence of Slugma is completely impossible. The entries often explicitly state that something is "believed" or "said" about matters that the games themselves reveal to be untrue.
It’s like explaining how many people believe crows bring bad luck, when in reality, they couldn't give a damn about your life. The case of Absol is a perfect example; the Pokédex itself explicitly states that the beliefs surrounding the Pokémon are completely false, stemming from a misinterpretation of perfectly natural, semi-conscious animal behavior.
Even Legendary Pokémon are a complicated subject; people talk about Groudon and Kyogre, yet the Hoenn region has featured the Oceanic Museum since its initial release, a place that explains the basic principles of sedimentation and fluvial erosion.
Nowadays, it is more complicated because there is no longer an effort to showcase this more realistic side of the Pokémon world; instead, we are inundated with gods and spirits in a very explicit manner (with the The Teal Mask being the most explicit recent example).
An offhand line in Bee Movie mentions Bee Columbus and Bee Gandhi.
Were they named after their human counterparts? Are there bee equivalents of both the Spanish and British Empires? Was there bee colonialism? Did Bee Columbus also sail on regular Columbus's voyage, or was it a separate journey? Was he a Christian? Was Bee Gandhi Hindu? Was he assassinated?
In the Muppets movie "It's a very merry Muppet Christmas", an angel shows Kermit a world where he never existed. And in that world, the twin towers are still standing. Which means somehow, someway, Kermit is either indirectly or directly responsible for the September 11 attacks.
As an aside on the Foster's one, we can assume that world has no concept of hunger/starvation.
In the episode where he creates Red to bully Bloo, Terrance gets hungry, and he imagines a slice of pizza. A sentient piece of pizza pops into reality next to him, and screams as Terrance eats it. Terrance then feels full/satisfied.
The implication of this is that, if at any point someone feels too hungry, they can imagine food into existence that will actually give them sustenance. They just have to be ok with eating food that's intelligent and screams for its life as its being eaten (or imagine it with no mouth/brain, i guess).
It also shows that imaginary friends are capable of dying, so that's nice too, I guess...
im entering rick and morty levels of ideas here, but im now thinking of an entire "imaginary planet" they has some guy ruling the place and imagining an empire to care for him
Entirely possible. We also see adults that still pal around with their imaginary friends (guy at bowling alley for example) so in the wider Foster's universe this is probably very plausible.
We also see in the first episode that kids will straight up copy something they've seen... does Foster's world have the flood from halo? Or zombies? Or Godzilla?
There was another Fosters Home Rabbit hole that I still think about and it makes me shudder. Imaginary friends are real beings in that universe who eat, sleep and poo like everyone else. Then you have a character like Goo who has an overactive imagination. There was an episode where she literally made the entire Foster's overcrowded because she just kept spawning new imaginary friends. She's literally been banned from Foster's for this exact reason.
And that was just one kid with a hyperactive imagination. How many other kids like her are there? Most kids would stop at 1 and be done with it, but she was like the imaginary friend equivalent of a Mother Bee spawning them by the hundreds. So she would essentially increase the population of imaginary friends indefinitely.
Another point that's not explored is that we see in the episode with the big clown imaginary friend (forgot his name) but he was essentially so old and changed owners so much that his original creator probably passed away. Mac did interviews with his previous owners, some of them were seniors. Which brings scary though number 2: Can imaginary friends not die? Do they just live indefinitely?
I know it's a cartoon but that universe would be really scary to live in IRL
Also, to OPs point, I think in one of the first episodes they go to a junkyard area where they're storing the dangerous friends, most of them designed by teenagers.
Honestly it was a lot more tame than I expected for friends made from the mind of teenagers, but it is a kid's show.
Also the idea of the scribbles (imaginary friends made by babies) always weirded me out and I never could quite place why. I mean, where the storyline ended up was a bit eek, sure, but their entire premise made me uncomfortable for some reason.
I think I saw a bizarre Car's fan theory on youtube that used the "Mater"shorts to hypothesize that Mater is some sort of omnipotent being and that the world was originally like ours but Mater wished it to be utterly car themed
The Cars Conspiracy. Completely unhinged but makes just enough sense to make you wonder if the people behind cars ever thought about it. 10/10 crackpot theory
Yeah... His feet have sweated since he was a child... OR the spray on shoes goo is so toxic that it scoured the sweat glands out of the skin on his feet... It won't come off because it's burned onto his skin...
As for trench foot... I think he would have passed that a while ago... What remains on the ends of his legs is the sort of thing that HP Lovecraft would write about. Some sort of unspeakable evil resides in those shoes. Should there ever be a breach the old ones shall once again walk the earth...
The Busy World of Richard Scarry is populated by sentient, intelligent, anthropomorphic animals.
They also have regular zoos with lions and elephants and stuff. Are the creatures in the zoo intelligent as well? Why are the zoo patrons wearing clothes, but the exhibit animal aren’t? So many questions.
This same thing comes up in the manga / anime "Polar Bear Cafe",which is about talking animals living & working alongside humans. One of the characters is a panda,who gets a job at the zoo,where all the animals in the exhibits are basically paid actors. In the morning they clock in,spend the day acting cute for the visitors,then clock out and go home lol.
My favourite thing about cars that I heard is that since there’s a car pope in this universe it means that there’s car Catholicism which meant that at some point cars developed Protestantism which would have inevitably lead to The Troubles in Northern Ireland. Which adds a whole new theory of what would car bombing be in that universe
Not only that, there is also a Car Popemobile, meaning that a.) there was somehow a car born that was specifically made for protecting the pope and b.) and assassination attempt has been made against the Car Pop within the Cars universe
The Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends example happened in One Piece:
One villain has the power to make people’s imagination and nightmares reality. So he takes the nightmares of the children of Elbath and turns them into Kajiu monsters, which attack the villages of the giants (those at the bottom are giants, who already tower over normal people, and those creatures are even bigger). Those nightmare represent Norse and One Piece mythology plus the mother of one of the children.
The spray-on shoes aren't indestructible. We see Flint reapplying them at one point during the movie, which implies that they do wear down over time, despite being highly durable.
Humanity is the 5th Great Civilization. Previous ones were destroyed with only remnants remaining.
1st: water aliens (Chaos is one of them)
2nd: the ones who built Gaia Temples
3rd: birds (Babylonians)
4th: echidnas
5th: humans
Also, Dark Gaia periodically destroys the entire planet before it gets reborn. Sonic only managed to beat it because it was awoken prematurely by Eggman.
the wizards of waverly place show is also full of these. how is it even fair in the context of the movie that max be expected to compete against his 2 much older siblings for the family magic??
I imagine everyone who saw the season with the revolutionary that wanted to stop the 1 wizard per family system thought the same thing. "Why are they acting like she's the bad guy?"
All Hail King Julien is basically this, taken to it's extreme and it's very much intentional.
For example, Mort is an interdimensional being, King Julien killed 7-6 people in highschool and crippled many more for life, Julien's uncle set up a government program that selected citizens from the Lemur Kingdom to be brainwashed into his slave assassins, Maurice is snail Jesus. etc
In this world horses don't exist, only horse girls (the titular Umamusume) do. While this has created some aspects of alternate history (ie there are religions and holidays specifically revolving around Umas), many aspects remain the same. For example many major countries like Japan, France, Italy, New Zealand and the USA still exist seemingly unchanged. The existence of the Statue of Liberty (now an Umamusume herself) implies that American chattel slavery still happened and was abolished, and holidays like Christmas with the same iconography indicate that Roman and Nordic religions, as well as Christianity, exist mostly unchanged to influence it.
The rabbit hole comes from the fact that horses were essential to hundreds of events and time periods in human history. How were wars fought in this world? Were different animals domesticated as mounts or were Umas, with their superhuman speed and strength, deployed as elite shock troopers? Did they follow the real world spread of humans or horses, were Umas extinct in the Americas until the 1500s? How about mythology and legend, were Pegasus and unicorns Umamusume? Fine Motion is a literal princess in the game (of an unnamed country in global, but of Ireland in the Japanese game); how did the existence of horsegirls affect law and government?
You see this kind of speculation a lot among fans.
It's not in print anymore, but the author of the original book series wrote an entire fictional history of sodor, including noble lineage for the barons that sat there and the formation and merging of its railroads up through the nationalization of rail.
For the Fosters example, I think its a matter of the name of the phenomenon: Imaginary Friend. As in they can only be made by people looking for a friend. Even the weird cases like teenagers creating monsters could fall into "wouldn't it be awesome if..." and Francis creating a pizza guy only to immediately eat him in a sense was there to be his friend.
So for fosters home they did explore that a little bit with the Extremeasaurs. They are monsters that have to be handled carefully due to the danger they pose if let loose.
5.1k
u/ComfortableFocus1702 6d ago
Cars 2 – The Pope exists in the movie, so the Catholic Church must exist too, which leads me to believe that, millennia ago, a Car-Jesus was crucified.