The Brave Little Toaster

The Brave Little Toaster: A Bedtime Story for Small Appliances (1980) is a novella by Thomas M. Disch, later published as a children's book and adapted into an animated movie. It describes the quest of five appliances leaving their cottage, whose owner has been away for several years, to find him in the city.

This was Disch's first work for children (the others are The Brave Little Toaster Goes to Mars, A Child's Garden of Grammar, and an autobiographical essay in the Something About the Author series), but it originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Book publishers were uninterested at first; according to Disch, they felt kids would not care about talking inanimate objects. Fifteen years later, Toy Story thoroughly disproved that theory—and this was a precursor to Toy Story in more ways than one: the Disney employee who had read the novella and convinced Disney to buy the film rights was John Lasseter, later a co-founder of Pixar, who originally pitched it as a computer-animated project.

Once the movie was in production (funded by Disney but made by Hyperion Pictures, more cheaply and without computers), Doubleday published the book. These notes refer to the 1986 Doubleday edition, with illustrations by Karen Lee Schmidt.

Major characters

• The toaster
• The vacuum cleaner
• The radio alarm clock
• The lamp
• The electric blanket

Epigram

The epigram is a take-off on a stanza from Sir Walter Scott's The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), which begins:

Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,

Who never to himself has said,

This is my own, my native land!

Whose heart hath ne’er within him burn’d ...

Disch's version is:

Lives there a man with soul so dead

He's never to his toaster said:

"You are my friend; I see in you

An object sturdy, staunch, and true;

A fellow mettlesome and trim;

A brightness that the years can't dim.

Then let us praise this brave appliance

In which we place this just reliance

And offer it with each fresh slice

Such words of friendship and advice

As "How are things with you tonight?"

Or "Not too dark but not too light."

The final line refers to toast, but is also a reasonable description of the story. While the movie version has a reputation of being unusually dark for its time, a lot of the parts that give it that reputation were added by the filmmakers (or expanded from a brief bit in the book: for instance, the narrator mentions in the first paragraph that the old miserable air conditioner has stopped working, but in the movie it gets a full death scene). There's relatively little physical danger in the original, but still plenty of existential dread in terms of the prospect of getting discarded at the city dump.

Notes

the vacuum cleaner, being the oldest ... it was a Hoover

(p. 9) How old is this oldest of the appliances? This story begins on March 8, 1976, and the appliances were abandoned in the cottage on September 25, 1973, after having been brought from the city "years and years and years ago" (except for the toaster, who arrived at some point after that). Appliances did generally last longer in those days than now, so "the master" (who isn't as young as he is in the movie) could've had some items from 20 years earlier—but then he might've been more attached to them as antiques and wouldn't have left them behind. So let's say they're early '70s or late '60s devices.

Hoover Dial-a-Matic Model 1170 (1969)

However—if one really cares about being historically consistent (which I have no reason to think Disch really cared about, but he might have done so for fun)—the vacuum, and therefore all the other appliances, arguably can't be older than 1969. That's the year when Hoover released its first self-propelled vacuum, the Dial-a-Matic Model 1170 (shown at right); the vacuum being able to roll around via its own motor is an important plot point in this story. You might argue that all of these appliances seem to be able to crawl around on their own anyway, but since we're told that this vacuum is envious of newer vacuums for their other design features like disposable dust bags and not for being self-propelled, I feel confident that it does have that as a mechanical feature and not just a magic/anthropomorphic one.

The vacuum cleaner portrayed in Schmidt's illustrations doesn't seem to be any particular Hoover; it's kind of a cross between the 1170 and later '70s models that didn't have such a tall center piece.

an off-white plastic alarm clock/radio (AM only)

Digital clocks were already around in the '70s, but I think we can assume this is an analog one since Disch would've been likely to mention its glowing numbers otherwise. FM radio was also around, but FM took a while to catch on in the US. Here's a slightly older analog AM-only model.

General Electric C4245 clock/radio (c. 1968)

a cheerful yellow electric blanket

Northern Electric blanket (1970)

Assuming the unseen "master" is an adult of average size, the blanket might be something like the one in the relaxing scene at right.

a Tensor lamp who had come from a savings bank

The Tensor lamp was popular throughout the '60s and '70s, with many different styles but always having a smaller-than-usual bulb ("the lamp could never regard an ordinary 100-watt bulb without a twinge of envy") and a movable arm. Schmidt's illustrations show one with a curved gooseneck, like the one at left; older models would've more likely had a jointed arm.

Tensor lamp model IL 355 (early 1970s)

the toaster, a bright little Sunbeam

Sunbeam toasters were made from 1949 to 1997. The main thing that made a Sunbeam different from other toasters, besides being especially brave and optimistic, was its fully automatic system: instead of pushing down a lever, just dropping in the bread triggered a mechanism that lowered the bread and started the heating element, and after reaching the right temperature it would smoothly raise the bread up again.

A common early-1970s model was the AT-W:

Our hero?

Another distinctive feature of Sunbeams—all of them, as far as I know—is that the toast slots were crosswise, as shown above. Schmidt's artwork shows a toaster with the more familiar lengthwise design, but clearly she was taking artistic license anyway since she also drew a push-down lever. So what kind of toaster is Thomas M. Disch gazing at his reflection in on the back cover photo—with lengthwise toast slots? We may never know, but the biographical note at the end of the book says his toaster "has been working with the author for over fifteen years."

taken back to the city ... [like] the Water Pik

Water-Pik (1975)

(p. 10) This brand of tooth-cleaning device is still around; in the ’70s it looked like the photo at right. I’m not sure if I really would lug the thing around with me on vacation, as this guy apparently had been doing.

a tiny knife sharpener that worked by being rolled

(p. 17) Many variations on a rolling knife sharpener, both modern and vintage, are easy to find online... but we're also told here that it has "a single wheel ... one and a half inches in diameter." All the ones I've seen are either bigger than that or have two wheels.

ELECTRICITY IS VERY DANGEROUS ... ask a major appliance

(p. 21) While there's an obvious public service here for any human children who might be reading the story, the way this passage is written is also a reminder that the book's intended audience is, allegedly, young appliances.

whenever human beings are observing them they must remain perfectly still

(p. 23) Such rules develop naturally in any story about inorganic objects being alive, to explain why we normally don't see them walking around, so the Toy Story movies probably would've included a similar idea even if John Lasseter hadn't read this. In that series it's never 100% clear whether it's a law of nature that the toys are physically unable to resist, or it's voluntary and they're just very consistent about it. But in this story it does seem to be a law of nature, since a bit later the toaster finds itself unexpectedly frozen ("the same force preventing it from moving prevented its speech as well") even before it notices that there's a human nearby. Later developments indicate that they can work around this via various loopholes like being under a sheet or on the phone.

the danger of pirates

(p. 23) Disch declines to explain what kind of "pirates" might be found on land until quite a bit later, when we learn that to an appliance "pirates" are any "people who take things that belong to other people"—which, since the things are secretly alive, is the same as kidnapping and forced servitude.

a long comic jingle about Barneys' Hi-Styles for Guys and Gals

(p. 24) It's unclear whether this is the Barneys department store chain or a fictional store, but I'm guessing it's the former (even though Barneys was still writing its name as "Barney's" in 1980). Barneys in the 1970s had just finished remaking itself from a discount outlet into a fancier place full of designer brands. Here's a 1975 TV spot with a goofy quality similar to what's described here, aimed at convincing young professional "guys and gals" that they could now afford nice things.

a rough sort of octosyllabic doggerel

(p. 26) The daisy is exclusively using iambic tetrameter (sometimes cheating by dropping the first beat) in rhymed couplets, AA-BB-CC etc. as boringly as possible despite the very flowery language. Disch, in his other career as a poet, would be among the "more evolved species" that the narrator says prefer "sestinas, rondeaux, and villanelles of the highest order."

You tell him .... Tell them

(p. 33) The whole scene of the comically old-fashioned squirrels refusing to understand that traditional gender distinctions are irrelevant to appliances may seem ahead of its time now, but ideas about alternatives to gendered language were already around in the '80s—especially in science fiction. Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) depicted a world of intersex people where "he" was the only pronoun; later, the society in Samuel Delany's Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984) used "he" and "she" in a completely different way that depended on the speaker's level of attraction to the person being described.

The joke in this passage is a sly one about using English grammar in a passive-aggressive way. Marjorie the squirrel refuses to acknowledge that "it" is the toaster's preferred pronoun, but Marjorie hasn't decided to use a singular "them" here—since just a minute later, she's referring to the toaster as "he." Instead, she's decided to just change this sentence to refer to the whole group of appliances.

From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs

(p. 49) A socialist motto popularized by Karl Marx.

humming the poignant theme song from Doctor Zhivago

(p. 52) Also known as "Lara's Theme", from the score by Maurice Jarre. A version with lyrics added was extremely popular in the '60s and then became a hit again in 1973—so the fact that it's described here as a film theme, instead of as the tune of "Somewhere My Love", suggests that either the narrator or "the master" might be a bit of a film nerd who isn't very into pop music.

listened to the radio sing song after song

(p. 54) The idea that the radio is always performing, rather than just passively conveying other people's performances, is used heavily in the movie adaptation where the dialogue voiced by Jon Lovitz includes a lot of free-association medleys of songs and commercials.

One thing Lovitz sings in the movie, very briefly, that viewers who recognize it might find a wee bit odd or inappropriate, is not from this book: the Al Jolson version of "My Mammy". However, there is a Disch connection there and I strongly suspect it was an inside joke by the filmmakers rather than a coincidence. Disch's science fiction novel On Wings of Song—published in the same magazine as The Brave Little Toaster, one year earlier—was a bitter satire involving the rise of a pop star who is famous for a combination of bel canto opera and blackface minstrel songs, including that one.

the toaster's own favorite melody, "I Whistle a Happy Tune"

(p. 54) This song is from The King and I (1951). Its lyrics aren't quoted for the reader, but if you know them, they cast an ironic light on the title of the book, and the character of the toaster... since they're about pretending to be brave and hoping to convince yourself:

While shivering in my shoes

I strike a careless pose

And whistle a happy tune

And no one ever knows I'm afraid ...

Make believe you're brave

And the trick will take you far

You may be as brave

As you make believe you are

listener-supported radio station KHOP

(p. 75) A California radio station has been using that call sign since 1996; I don't know if there was one anywhere in 1980. "K" stations could be anywhere in the midwestern or western US.

KL5-9120

(p. 75) Using letters for the first digits of a phone number was a relic of the old exchange name system, and would've still been recognizable in 1976 when the story takes place (although maybe not for children in 1980; Disch may have been hoping to make readers curious enough to ask a major appliance about it). KL5 is the same as 555, the US standard for fake phone numbers in movies and TV.

Whether or not it's against the rules ... many appliances ... do use the phone system regularly

(p. 76) Unlike the rule that forces them to freeze if a human being "observes" them, this one is more of a guideline that they can choose to break, and it seems that being heard (by someone who can't see that they're appliances) doesn't count as being observed. Toy Story 4 makes use of a similar loophole, when the toys' speech can be heard by a human as long as they're pretending to be a GPS system.