This '80s Disney Classic Remains One Of The Scariest Kids Movies Ever Made

If you showed someone the poster for "The Brave Little Toaster," you'd probably get one of two polar opposite reactions. Someone who's never seen this animated tale of a motley crew of abandoned, outdated appliances would think it's just another colorful kids cartoon. That little toaster is as adorable as he is brave, and so they would assume the film is similarly lighthearted. However, as anyone who actually sat down one fateful day in their childhood to watch the VHS version of "The Brave Little Toaster" will tell you, this thing is pure nightmare fuel.

If you're in the former camp, that might be hard to believe. After all, it's just a kids movie about a toaster, an electric blanket, a lamp, and a vacuum cleaner on a quest to be reunited with their owner. It's essentially the same plot as "Toy Story," right?

That comparison isn't completely unwarranted: "Toy Story" director John Lasseter pitched the adaptation of the "Brave Little Toaster" novella to Disney before being unceremoniously fired, and much of the early Pixar animation team helped bring the film to life. But aside from a brief venture into Sid's room filled with misfit toys, "Toy Story" is as wholesome as movies come. So, how scary could "The Brave Little Toaster" really be?

Let me put it this way: In your typical kids film, there's always a moment towards the end where it looks like the heroes are set for certain doom. Think of the climax of "Toy Story 3," where Woody (Tom Hanks) and the rest of the gang descend towards the fiery maw of the incinerator at a garbage dump before, at the last minute, being plucked to safety by the alien claw machine toys.

"The Brave Little Toaster" asks, "What if you made a film ENTIRELY out of these horrifying moments?"

Here's a brief rundown of all the perilous, life and death situations these wayward appliances find themselves in on their odyssey:

First, they run out of battery power for their makeshift vehicle, and the sweet electric blanket Blanky (Timothy E. Day) is blown away by a storm. Then, they try to cross a waterfall and nearly drown in the roaring water. The curmudgeonly vacuum cleaner Kirby (Thurl Ravenscroft) uses every last bit of power he has to save them, and they have to drag his powerless body through a swamp that nearly swallows them all alive. They're then "saved" by Elmo St. Peters (Joe Ranft), a scrap dealer who tries to rip apart one of the gang for parts while his disfigured appliances taunt our heroes.

Fortunately, they manage to escape and track down their now-grown-up owner Rob (Wayne Kaatz), only for Rob's new appliances to chuck them into a dumpster that takes them to a scrapyard. This then leads to the film's most harrowing sequence, wherein a villainous electromagnet carries them to be crushed to pieces. Luckily, with a little help from the heroes' old buddy TV (Jonathan Benair), a black-and-white TV set, Rob arrives just in time to take them safely home ... but not before he's nearly crushed to death himself, forcing Toaster (Deanna Oliver) to throw their body into the scrapyard crusher's gears, seemingly sacrificing their life to save their friends.

Yes, the film ends with Toaster being repaired by Rob and reuniting with their friends, but after all the pain and suffering inflicted on them, it's a cold comfort for the impressionable kids who just spent the previous 90 minutes being traumatized for life. (And I'm only now mentioning the dream sequence where Toaster is terrorized by an evil clown.)

What makes "The Brave Little Toaster" so much more harrowing than any other kids films is that these moments of peril actually do cause our heroes tremendous pain and suffering. It's not just a jolt of fright to give the climax some stakes: The Toaster literally dives head-first into the gears of the crusher and we watch as their body is mangled in agonizing detail.

"The Brave Little Toaster" made history as the first animated feature to premiere at the Sundance Film Festival and, creatively-speaking, helped pave the way for similarly challenging animated films like "The Land Before Time" (as well as the future of Pixar animation). But perhaps its biggest legacy will be the PTSD scars it inflicted on a generation of young film lovers who get flashbacks any time they see a VHS copy of "The Brave Little Toaster" at a local thrift shop.