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 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 book publishers were uninterested at first; according to Disch, they felt kids would be uninterested in talking inanimate objects. So it originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, August 1980, and was nominated for Hugo and Nebula Awards in 1981. This was 15 years before Toy Story, and it 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, and Lasseter 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

This is a parody of a stanza from Sir Walter Scott's The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805):

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,

As home his footsteps he hath turn’d,

From wandering on a foreign strand! ....

Notes

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

(p. 9) How old is the oldest appliance? 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)—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 an 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, and so was FM radio, 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 a grown-up, 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. What 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 depicts 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."

a tiny knife sharpener that worked by being rolled

(p. 17)

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, this is also a reminder that the book's intended audience is, , young appliances.

the danger of pirates

(p. 23)

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

(p. 24)

a rough sort of octosyllabic doggerel

(p. 26)

You tell him .... Tell them

(p. 33)

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

(p. 49)

inexplicably, something made it stop

(p. 51)

humming the poignant theme song from Doctor Zhivago

(p. 52)

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

(p. 54)

Some, like the Water Pik ... were old friends

(p. 68)

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.