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

How old is the oldest appliance? Assuming the story is set in 1980, you could assume that these are mostly '70s products. Except for the toaster, they all came to the cottage "with the master from the city years and years and years ago"... although we have no way to know how old "the master" is (unlike in the movie, where they knew him as a child).

Hoover Dial-a-Matic Model 1170 (1969)

The standing models of this extremely popular brand of vacuum cleaner didn't change drastically in appearance from the '50s through the '60s. The biggest change was in 1969, when the Dial-a-Matic Model 1170 was released with motorized wheels; the vacuum in this story being self-propelled is an important plot point later on, so if Disch was really trying to be historically consistent (which I have no reason to think he was), the vacuum couldn't have been older than 1969. Anyway, a Model 1170 looks like this.

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 the '70s models that didn't have such a tall center piece.

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

Digital clocks and clock/radios did exist in 1980, but current models would've had FM too, so if it was AM-only it was probably a pretty old analog clock like this one.

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 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 late 1970s model was the AT-W:

Our hero?

This is one case where Schmidt clearly took some artistic license, since she drew not only a push-down lever, but also toast slots that run lengthwise. All Sunbeams had toast slots crosswise, as shown above.