Remember Cars? It has probably lingered in the abyss of your childhood memories - the story of an arrogant race car who learns the meaning of community and becomes the best racer. But if you've revisited this franchise recently you may have been haunted by very different concerns.
Turns out, the world of Cars is a capitalist nightmare (relatable) that implicitly endorses eugenics (not relatable and very stressful). Join us this episode as we delve into the class politics, labour ethics, and everything else that kept us awake in the dark about the worldbuilding in Cars. Life is a highway, and we gotta drive it all night long...
Music by Max Elliott
Bibliography
Bacchilega, Cristina. Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt3fhs88.
Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. 3rd ed., Novato, Calif., New World Library, 2008.
Cars. Directed by John Lasseter, Pixar, 2006.
Cars 2. Directed by John Lasseter, Pixar, 2011.
Cars 3. Directed by Brian Fee, Pixar, 2017.
choopo. “The Worthless Worldbuilding of Pixar’s Cars.” YouTube, 8 June 2024, www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJX_fms_2NM.
Jack Saint, “Oops! Disney’s Cars Did Eugenics.” Youtube, 30 Apr 2020, www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6qMgiA-VY0.
National Human Genome Research Institute. “Eugenics and Scientific Racism.” National Human Genome Research Institute, 18 May 2022, www.genome.gov/about-genomics/fact-sheets/Eugenics-and-Scientific-Racism.
Kilmer, Alyson. “Moving Foward: Problematic Ideologies in Twenty-First Century Fairy Tale Films.” Central Washington University, 2015
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. “Manifesto of the Communist Party.” Marxists.org, 1848, www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/index.htm.
Yorke, John. Into the Woods: How Stories Work and Why We Tell Them. London, England, Penguin Books, 2014.