How is babby formed? How does car get pragnent?

June 30, 2016 1:52 AM

Beans, meet plate. Have you ever been curious about what is going on inside the cars in Pixar's Cars? Want to know where baby cars come from or how cars can die? Look no further.
posted by Literaryhero (25 comments total)

And when the cars retire, they go to the Old Volks Home.
posted by jonmc at 4:18 AM on June 30, 2016 [14 favorites]

I applaud the author's devotion to plumbing the unanswerable questions of the Cars universe (though they don't seem to realize that the cross section of Lightning McQueen showing his organs is not official Pixar concept art), especially the part where they try to figure out which car parts they have sex with.

Bonus points for this from the comments, where the speculation goes off the rails: "And I'm sure the cars have sex like dogs and have private parts like dogs. I mean, Mater had a mom and dad once. They could of gave birth to him or laid him as an egg like sac."
posted by ejs at 4:24 AM on June 30, 2016 [6 favorites]

I was actually going to use that as a pull quote, but decided that it was too ridiculous.
posted by Literaryhero at 4:44 AM on June 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

Pfft, (Metafilter's own) Eyebrows McGee had them scooped by three years
posted by Mayor West at 4:50 AM on June 30, 2016 [3 favorites]

This is a great rabbit hole link and I thank you for bringing it to my attention!
posted by wyndham at 4:50 AM on June 30, 2016

This is horrifying.
posted by blue_beetle at 5:11 AM on June 30, 2016 [4 favorites]

I hope this doesn't lead to Cars slash fiction.
posted by TedW at 5:49 AM on June 30, 2016 [2 favorites]

This is horrifying.

The illustration of McQueen's organs makes me feel a little ill.
posted by andrewesque at 5:56 AM on June 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

I saw a Tex Avery documentary about a pair of taxicabs that have a baby that wants to be a hot rod, and from that I learned that baby cars come from the motor'nity ward. Also, under the hood they have motors, but if you open the trunk you'll find surprisingly human-looking butts.
posted by amarynth at 6:07 AM on June 30, 2016 [14 favorites]

I always believed (my... Headcanon? Ugh) that the world of Cars is one where humans had only recently been overthrown and subjugated, and as such the infastructure was still being shifted to one that makes sense for a car-shaped dominant species. Of course this ignores the decades-old backstory present in even the first Cars movie, but that backstory doesn't really make sense anyway because it follows the development of cars in our world so that means their entire civilization is about 100 years old? I figure flashbacks are revisionist history. Cars are still made in automated factories (See 2005's Robots for a depiction of a nuclear family where the members are still mass-produced) and they grow corn to be processed into Ethanol.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 6:41 AM on June 30, 2016 [2 favorites]

I feel like Cracked's Pixar Apocalypse Theory explains Cars well enough.
posted by emjaybee at 6:53 AM on June 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

Maybe there are shriveled vestigial humans embedded in every Car. Kind of like mitochondria, or gut flora.
posted by Iridic at 7:38 AM on June 30, 2016 [14 favorites]

The illustration of McQueen's organs makes me feel a little ill.

They made me think about what it would look like if you recreated the scene from Reservoir Dogs where Keitel uses two guns to shoot through the windscreen of a police car and kill two police men, but with McQueen getting it right between the eyes and into his car brain.

Perhaps I need a nice lie down.
posted by biffa at 7:46 AM on June 30, 2016

Pfft, (Metafilter's own) Eyebrows McGee had them scooped by three years

Actually, a belated hat tip. Her comment in the population of Westeros thread made me Google cars reproduction which led me to this.
posted by Literaryhero at 8:06 AM on June 30, 2016 [3 favorites]

I always believed (my... Headcanon? Ugh) that the world of Cars is one where humans had only recently been overthrown and subjugated, and as such the infastructure was still being shifted to one that makes sense for a car-shaped dominant species.

So Cars is really a sequel to Maximum Overdrive?
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:27 AM on June 30, 2016 [2 favorites]

I predict this article well get far fewer complaints than the Westeros one did, and far fewer comments of It's just fiction!"
posted by happyroach at 8:31 AM on June 30, 2016 [2 favorites]

Well that's the distinction between fantasy and science fiction. Game of Thrones has dragons and long winters, so it obviously could never happen. Cars is a horrible dystopian future that's honestly quite plausible.
posted by RobotHero at 8:47 AM on June 30, 2016 [3 favorites]

Guys, I explained all this back in 2009.

Cars is a metastory. The Cars world is our world, but viewed through a filter, as if by aliens who don't recognize organic life as real, who only see the cars, and watched an adventure had by some of them. There is another story going on, involving human beings who ride in these cars, that we aren't privy to. It's sort of like one of those time lapse videos of a city where the cars move as if they have a life of their own, but the tiny people are too blurry to make out. We could consider this deeper, underlying tale, the story of those little people, to be the first derivative of Cars. Let us call this movie Cars 1'. (Notice the apostrophe)

Cars 1: A Doc Hollywood-style story about a race car who learns the value of friendship and how there are more important things than winning.
Cars 1': A Doc Hollywood-style story about a race car driver who learns the value of friendship. He has a vehicle, and so do all the other important characters, who could be seen to appear to behave and interact as if they were characters.

Cars 1'', by the way, is a documentary about the deterioration of Route 66.
posted by JHarris at 9:13 AM on June 30, 2016 [9 favorites]

And Cars 1''' is Luxo Jr., as is the third derivative of all of Pixar's movies.
posted by JHarris at 9:15 AM on June 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

TedW: "I hope this doesn't lead to Cars slash fiction."

Lead to? You're new to the internet, aren't you? :)
posted by Splunge at 9:53 AM on June 30, 2016 [3 favorites]

I hope this doesn't lead to Cars slash fiction.

Where does Ballard's Crash fit in?
posted by a lungful of dragon at 10:53 AM on June 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

Kai Pindal and the National Film Board of Canada was already on this back in 1967
posted by quartzcity at 11:46 AM on June 30, 2016

I'd like to thank this post and this Wikia for introducing me, as someone who has not seen the Cars movies, to the intriguingly bizarre concept of a Popemobile that transports a Pope who is also a car.
posted by Pfardentrott at 12:26 PM on June 30, 2016 [8 favorites]

I seem to remember reading a Frozen fanfic that explains the economy of Arendelle given that Elsa can create snow slaves at will, and what would happen if she could make intelligent Olafs that could make other intelligent Olafs ... anyway I can't find it now, which is probably a good thing.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 8:54 PM on June 30, 2016

Territory already covered, I believe, by Calvin and Hobbes.
posted by JHarris at 9:25 PM on June 30, 2016