Pixar may be known for making some of the most emotionally resonant animated movies for kids and families, but the Cars franchise sticks out like a sore thumb. Aside from being the most blatantly merchandise-driven of the Pixar movies, Cars brings all the attention to itself by just being weird.
The more anyone thinks about its world, the more Cars either unravels as a make-believe vehicular world or it could make a strangely disturbing amount of sense. This is best embodied by certain characters that, unsurprisingly, have toys that you can buy right now.
Rocket Racing Lightning McQueen
Cars has a couple of playsets, with a good chunk of them appropriately being Hot Wheels-styled race tracks. Lightning McQueen has one in the Rocket Racing set, where he has rockets strapped to his bumper that help him get a needed speed boost when on the loop. The problem here is that the rockets’ mere presence contradicts Lightning’s entire personality.
Cars 3 reveals that Lightning is such a stickler for tradition that he hates vehicular modifications. The movie all but frames them as steroids even if by its setting’s logic, upgrades would be more in line with improving one’s life expectancy than doping – which is a literal plot point in Planes. Maybe Lightning is alright with “cheating,” as long it only happens in the toys.
Pixar’s Pixar Cars
The primary joke of Cars is that everyone and everything is a car. This was made clear in the first movie’s ending credits. Here, the cars are shown at a drive-in theater watching Pixar movies like Monster’s Inc. and Toy Story, but every character is a car.
This raises two equally weird possibilities: the cars are somehow capable of animation despite having tires for hands, or they’re doing live-action remakes of Pixar’s movies. But that aside, the car versions of Pixar’s famous characters like Woody and Buzz bear the kind of uncanny design that one might find being sold by a street-side vendor for a Dollar or less.
The Star Wars Crossover Set
Some still can’t get over the fact that Disney owns Star Wars, which technically means Princess Leia and Darth Vader are Disney royalty. Cars pays this no heed as the 'cast' of Cars dresses up as Star Wars characters – regardless of how little sense it makes.
Want to see Mater don Darth Vader’s armor and the wings of this TIE Advanced? Or see Sarge become Emperor Palpatine? How about Ramone as Han Solo encased in Carbonite? What about the tractors as any of the Empire’s henchmen? The Star Cars crossover has it all and more. What would the Death Star look like, though?
The Tractors & Frank
A rule of thumb for Cars is that the vehicles are basically people… except the farming vehicles. For whatever reason, the tractors are cows and the combine harvester is a giant bull. Why the farming vehicles were exempted from the gift of sentience and the human experience is never explained. At best, Mater teaches Lightning how to tip a tractor and make it fart.
If the farming vehicles are cattle, does this mean that there are more vehicular parallels to other animals? Are the tractors harvested for car beef and milk? Also, wouldn’t a bull the size of a small house be both dangerous and terrifying? The fact that these cattle with barely any plot relevance got toys is as surprising as finding out that, literally, everyone in Star Wars has an action figure.
Dusty Crophopper
Planes is the airborne spin-off of Cars that unsurprisingly features airplanes. It stars the ambitious crop duster cleverly named Dusty Crophopper, who wants to become a world-renowned flying ace. But before that, he works at a cornfield. A crop duster doing what a crop duster should do isn’t the weird thing here, but why he’s doing it at all. First of all, why would cars need corn?
It’s been established that the cars feed on gasoline since they are machines, and it makes sense that human food won’t sustain them. With that in mind, why is there an agricultural sector in the Cars world that Dusty is clearly a part of? What purpose does this industry have in a world of talking cars, where fossil fuels are the primary food source? What kid wouldn’t want a farming plane from the racing car franchise?
Todd
The famous Pizza Planet delivery car cameo is a longstanding Pixar tradition, so it’s unsurprising that it resurfaces in Cars as Todd. While it’s nice to know that Pizza Planet will never skip a Pixar movie, it does raise more questions about the almost nonsensical Cars world.
Since Pizza Planet exists, does this mean the cars can actually eat processed and/or handmade food like pizza, let alone make it? If they don’t need to since gas is their food, why does Pizza Planet exist here and what does Todd deliver? What is Cars pizza made of? Does it come with double gassy stuffed crust?
The NASCAR Cars
Toys based on actual athletes isn’t anything new, nor is getting one to voice their cameo in an animated movie. Cars takes this up a notch by literally naming two big shot characters after two real life NASCAR stars: Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Michael Schumacher - who are a Chevrolet Monte Carlo named Junior and a Ferrari F430, respectively.
What’s weird here is that Earnhardt and Schumacher don’t play any random car in the movie; they voice their literal car-sonas. This all but implies that NASCAR exists in Cars not just as a famous racing league, but as a company where every person there has a respective car-sona in Pixar’s world. Their die-cast Cars cameos will make for a weird addition to any serious NASCAR collector out there.
Jay Limo
Carrying on with the NASCAR stars, another celebrity being turned into cars is talk show host Jay Leno, who also has a car-sona. Aptly named Jay Limo, the late night celebrity is the Luxomobile Limousine seen clowning Lightning McQueen after his big loss.
According to the supplementary materials of the Cars Blu-Ray DVD, Jay Limo was also a traveling stand-up comedian before he got a big break on TV. He soon took over the show and became its main attraction, which is exactly how Leno became The Tonight Show’s star. If Leno and Limo are one and the same, does this mean Limo went through the same controversies his human counterpart did? Do today's kids want a Jay Leno toy, let alone know who he is?
Skipper Riley
At first, all Planes does is show what planes do in Cars, but it also confirms that World War II occurred here. Skipper, Dusty’s mentor, is a veteran not just because he’s a specifically wartime fighter plane (a Vought F4U Corsair), but because he has PTSD.
At one point, Skipper talks about his dead squad, whose memories understandably haunt him decades later. Not only does this mean that the horrors of the Second World War happened in a talking car cartoon, but does that mean vehicular versions of wartime figures exist too?
Pope Pinion IV & The Popemobile
The weirdest Cars factoid is the revelation that its world has religion. Not just any religion, though; it’s Catholicism, one of the most influential religions in history. This was confirmed in Cars 2, when Pope Pinion IV drops by the big World Grand Prix to watch. One would think that Pope Pinion would be the “Popemobile,” but that name belongs to the truck he rides on. Of course, the two are sold separately.
The Catholic Church existing in the Cars world only means that its history is also the same, for both good and bad. Not only that, but saints and other religious figures also have motorized versions. What did the Cars Crusades look like, anyway?