I think he had trouble seeing where he was going when he was stranded on the highway. As Lightning himself said, he doesn’t need headlights because the track is always lit up. He didn’t expect to be in a situation where he really needed them.
I’m glad I’m not the only one who imagined cars around me with faces as I walked out of the theater.
Take a peek at Mater’s license plate (he won’t mind) 
And speaking of Mater, can someone with a better memory than me help me get this quote down? I find it dad-gum funny, but don’t want to quote it until I get the wording exactly right:
McQueen: “What are you doing here?”
Doc: “(something something something) And besides, Mater didn’t say good-bye.”
Mater: “GOOD-BYE! Okay, I’m good now.”
The something something something is I knew you needed a crew chief but I didn’t know how bad.
Yep, lieu, that’s exactly right. Race nerds call those little rubber pieces that wear off the tires “marbles.” There’s a ton of them just off the usual racing line - they get blown there by the passing cars. If a racer “gets up into the marbles,” he or she’s in definite trouble as they mess with your traction and make the road slippery. Lots of crashes caused by getting in the marbles.
Well, just got back from seeing the thing. Guess I’m not going to have much original to say, but hey, why should that stop me?
Firstly, to me the story was the most cliche-ridden and predictable of any of the Pixar films I’ve seen so far. Nevertheless, it still has some relatively original things to say about what defines success in America, and how the building of the interstates has changed our landscape and lives. Alongside that, the beauty and sheer artistry of the images was simply beyond belief. This was pure geek heaven, from the enjoyment of recognizing the different types of cars in the film to the in-jokes about the NASCAR hype machine, to the amazingly realistic yet always car-themed environment, to the surprisingly effective emotional content, particularly the wonderful evocation of the lost American landscape of the '50s and '60s. As with so much of Pixar’s output, the makers keep finding ways to stun you with visual wonders while still putting those wonders to the service of the story.
From the trailers, I did not expect the voice characterizations to be all that effective, but most of them (except perhaps Michael Keaton as the evil stock car) turned out to work quite well. I’d say Bonnie Hunt and Paul Newman did best in this regard, but Radiator Springs came off in general as a real town populated with real (automotive) people. I was fascinated by how far the animators went to work out the interiors of the homes and offices of the anthropomorphic cars (the motel setup, to name just one, was utterly brilliant), and by the great care taken to have the vehicles perform according to a plausible physics model while still putting across distinctive, human character traits.
This doesn’t strike me as that big a draw for kids, but hey, I loved it from beginning to end. Goes into my DVD collection the instant it comes out.
Maybe I haven’t seen as many of these sorts of movies, but I was fully expecting the plot to focus solely on Lightning’s efforts to win Sally’s heart. I was surprised when the storyline suddenly shifted to Doc Hudson’s secret past and the real reason for his animosity toward Lightning. Maybe it was still another cliche, but for me it was an unexpectedly interesting cliche… plus it gave Paul Newman that much more of a chance to shine, which can’t be bad.
It is, but it’s typically limited to Westerns. Old guy turns out to have been a famous gunslinger at one time but now hides from his past because of a mishap, until a young quickdraw hotshot rides into town.
That part wasn’t a surprise, IMO, since the various reviews and teasers have practically given it away (anyone with a “mysterious past” automatically raises a flag, IMO). What surprised me was the revelation that
Doc left the racing world because he got abandoned by his sponsors for the next hot rookie to come down the road. I was expecting him to do the dumping, not the other way around. Thematically, though, it fits the movie’s theme of loyalty and commitment better.
It’s also historically accurate: although almost forgotten today, for a brief period post WWII, Hudsons - notably the Super Six - were some of the most advanced cars in the world, and the Hudson Hornet, introduced in 1951 was the hottest thing on the block and completely dominated stock car racing. However, it was expensive to produce compared with the superficially flashier offerings of Ford, Chrysler and GMC, and by 1957 the marque had ceased to exist. Nice piece of casting, for Paul Newman, too. More on Hudson and the Hornet here.
MAD Magazine had a somewhat amusing article in this month’s issue with purpoted fun facts about Cars. They’ve done funnier stuff with Disney and/or Pixar and the past (epsecially Sergio Aragones’s cartoons based on The Incredibles), but these were kind of funny. My three favorites:
-There was originally a prologue in which all humans are killed in a nuclear holocaust.
-The original title was Sorry About Herbie Fully Loaded, Here’s A Movie About A Car With A Mind of Its Own You WILL Like!, but that didn’t fit on the poster.
-The reason the film’s release was postponed for a year was because there was a mysterious knocking noise on the film’s soundtrack. Naturally, when they had a professional come in to check it out, the noise stopped.
There’s a kit car that looks a helluva lot like Lightning, but I can’t think of the name of it, so I can’t find it via a Google search.
I gotta say that Cars has to be one of the best films I’ve seen this year. Something that no one’s mentioned so far, is that Newman used to be a race car driver, so his casting was inspired. (IIRC, he still has a team.)
One of the best bits was when Lightning spots the pinstriping on the back of Porsche and mentions it. This is obviously a reference to Wedding Crashers 
Last Thanksgiving I went to visit my dad in Phoenix. This was my first trip ever to the Southwest, so I wanted to get out, see some of the big sites, even meet up with an old friend in Las Vegas for a couple days. Dad let me borrow the car; a red Porsche, no less. I pulled out of Phoenix at 3:00 in the morning, and was at Grand Canyon just in time for sunrise. A couple hours on the South Rim, and then on to Nevada.
Now, take a look at a map. The shortest, and fastest way is on I-40. Meandering a little to the north of that is Route 66, from Ash Fork to Kingman. You can guess which one I took.
I just saw Cars tonight. Damn, it looked familiar.
I didn’t like it at first. It suffered from the same problem as Revenge of the Sith; the protagonist was so insufferable I wanted to see him get his ass kicked. But when Mack is hauling him cross country, it started to come to life. There’s a certain look out the side window as the perfectly straight rows of crops go flickering past. I first saw it when I was 7.
Radiator Springs was gorgeous. I’m embarassed to admit that it took me two or three looks to notice the hoods-and-fenders in the rock formations, or the Cadillac tailfins in the mountain range. Pixar has moved light-years (sorry) beyond just being a technical shop. They tell good stories, get the details right, and they are just beautiful to look at.
At the end, the big race in California, I remembered my first law of sports movies. The best ones are when the ending goes against type. The movie would have been worse if Lightning had won, it would have cheapened everything that led up to it. Except that they still went too far. He stopped inches from the finish line. It would have worked better if he’d just gotten beat, or gone to help the King when there was still just a chance to win. Throwing away a sure thing was just too much.
The Pixar guys did their homework; the car-culture stuff was almost dead on. The engines sounded right. Luigi and Guido were passionate Ferrari fans. (And how did they get Michael freakin’ Schumacher to do the voice?) Dead center in the mountain range was the '59 Eldorado, unmistakeable. Ramone is a different color everytime we see him, and at first nobody mentions it. A motel made of traffic cones instead of tepees? Brilliant! And, brianjedi, I think the King’s wreck at the end was a closer match to Richard Petty’s accident at Darlington in 1970, and he was driving a Superbird then, too.
Just a couple things, though. Sally should have been silver. The version of Route 66 they used just didn’t pop like that song is capable of. (I noticed the same thing with Under the Sea in Finding Nemo, which led me to create another movie law; when using a Bobby Darin song in a movie, use the Bobby Darin version.) A Paul Newman movie where someone vandalizes a town and has to serve his sentence doing road paving and they couldn’t slip in a Cool Hand Luke reference?
And would it have killed them to have an MG in there somewhere?
I dunno. I didn’t like this movie. My girlfriend fell asleep while we were watching it (and she had a nap earlier.) I found it to be rather boring, uninspired, and predictable. The cars’ eyes were spaced too closely together. This gave them a very awkward, unsympathetic look, like a lousy drawing by a third grader. The soundtrack was terrible. They could have used Gary Numan’s Cars but they chose super-cheesy pop songs. I could do without Larry the Cable Guy and his lowbrow redneck persona, as well as the fart-exhaust jokes.
I keep hearing that “this is a movie for car people.” Like hell it is. This is a movie about cheesy archetypes of cars. They could have done SO much more with the gearhead stuff and with simple references that would be crystal clear to anyone who was actually into cars. There could have been a rotary-engined car like an RX7 who was constantly hassled because he was “different” or something like that. There could have been a Mustang and a Camaro constantly feuding with each other and trying to one-up the other. They could have had a Pinto or a Delorean or an Edsel or any number of infamous cars about which there is tremendous humor potential. Car culture thrives on the understanding and knowledge of specific models of cars and the characteristics thereof. This could have been elaborated on much more - could Pixar not get the licenses to talk about specific kinds of cars?
There are so many awesome cars out there in the world. Instead they decided to make a movie about the dowdiest and cheesiest of the cars. Generic old 40s and 50s sedans and lowriders with Hispanic accents and a rusty tow truck. I understand that the setting of the movie was a dusty, dead town where the technology was outdated and the cars were old. They should have used a different setting. A city, for instance, where all the types of cars would have been well-represented. This movie needed more car diversity!
The plot of the movie was a rip-off of Doc Hollywood. This is a fact that is being widely acknowledged by critics. But even if Pixar had thought up that plot all on its own, it would still be a generic, predictable one.
I feel sorry for Joe Ranft, the Pixar animator who the movie is posthumously dedicated to. (He died in a car accident, by the way.) It’s a shame that his tragic death has been commemorated by this movie.
When I saw Toy Story for the first time, as a kid, I was completely captivated and enthralled by the magic of Pixar’s animation. It blew my mind. The characters had such heart, they felt like real friends - and the detail of everything was just astonishing! I mean, remember the “One Man Band” short before the feature film? THAT is the kind of clever animation that Pixar is capable of, something that just sweeps you away with the creativity of it and the design of the animation. I wish that had been the whole movie, instead of the boring drivel that was Cars.
I’m embarassed to say that I forgot what happened after the credits were done rolling. Can anyone refresh my memory, please?
While everyone is entitled to their opinion, I can’t possibly see how they could have added ALL of Automobilia in a normal length movie, Doc Hollywood copied someone else, and this movie was a helluva lot better than I (or you) could have done.
Sorry you didn’t like it, I’m glad I (and a bunch of other folks, apparently) thought differently.
Unintentionally “Owned an RX-7 and likes Depeche Mode’s Route 66” Blank
Mr. & Mrs. Minivan are still looking for that onramp, causing Mr. Minivan to go insane.
Ramone’s paintjobs were created by Chip Foose.
If he’s got kids, grandkids, and/or young kin, I imagine he’d never hear the end of it if he passed up an opportunity to do a voice for a Pixar movie.
Two kids, according the IMDB. (And this is his first and only entry there.) Checking Wikipedia, they’re both under 10.
I’d do a voice in a Pixar movie for free. (Hell, I’d probably pay them to let me do it.) But I’m a geek. I don’t know how famous the Pixar movies are in Europe. I don’t know what Michael Schumacher does for fun. But it seems like it would be hard to impress a guy who has lived his wildest dreams of glory and money, and whose schedule must be booked into the latter half of this century.
If he did it because he likes the movies, and thought it would be fun to be the voice of Ferrari, then that’s just incredibly cool.