![]() ![]() Nicholson’s ambience took place before my awareness, while I was still in the early stages of sponging up the culture I suppose that’s how ambience works. I wonder how often my parents recognized them, and how often they were assumed to be a strange new character in a harem of scribbled freaks. When my parents were children, cinema legends like Peter Lorre (another film star lampooned by Hartman in Toaster, he as a bag-eyed light fixture), Katherine Hepburn, and Humphrey Bogart often turned up the cartoons they watched. It would take years, both of caricatures like Hartman’s and the opportunity to see the original himself in other movies, for me to pick up on the homage. But for me, Air Conditioner didn’t register as a cameo, as it were, because I didn’t recognize the source material. From the raspy voice to the idiosyncratic cadence to the plasticine brow, there’s no missing the resemblance. Sneering and leering like the Great Pumpkin of New Hollywood himself, Air Conditioner’s filtration design suggests Jack’s shining cupid’s bow, broadly and brightly dimpling and from which point gravity’s obligate rainbow drags his facial excess down into cinema’s original Jokerfied grin. Voiced by the late, great Phil Hartman, the cruelly sarcastic Air Conditioner is obviously a caricature of Jack Nicholson. Taunted by a malevolent air conditioning unit who claims that the little boy will never return to the vacation cabin where they all live, Toaster and its friends accuse Air Conditioner of jealousy (Master doesn’t play with HVAC, you see), triggering it until it overheats and explodes, leaving behind a smoking corpse wedged into the windowsill. Toaster 's first kill happens just a few minutes into the movie. Such is the fate of the dubiously-gendered sentient consumer good. Following the adventures of a group of household appliances searching for their “Master,” the young boy they live to serve, our inanimate heroes are animated by creamy colors, cheerful singalongs, and the ever-present threat of obsolescence, physical destruction, and ultimately psychic death. Smothering though our bewitchment by “generation,” as an organizing principle, may be, I think it’s safe to say that The Brave Little Toaster - Toy Story’s darksided 1987 ur-text-is a millennial touchstone.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |