<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

Brave Little Toaster Soundtrack. Thomas M. Disch’s 1982 novella The Brave Little Toaster was originally optioned by a young John Lasseter (now at Pixar), who was then at Disney Studios, for development. The film details the quest of a number of common appliances to find their beloved owner, whom they call the Master.

David Newman (who later scored Ice Age and The Cat in the Hat) then a newcomer to film scoring, provided themes for each appliance: an electric blanket, a vacuum cleaner, a desk lamp, a radio, and of course a toaster. The music here isn’t quite what one would expect for a film about talking toasters. Instead, it’s a full-blown serious score, performed with gusto by the New Japan Philharmonic and conducted by Newman himself. There’s plenty of exciting music to go with the journey the appliances must undergo and the obstacles they overcome, but also some moments of high humor – especially in “The Pond” where Newman makes a melody (see below) out of the noises of the creatures living in the water.

The opening cue, “Main Title,” is a pastoral in keeping with the dream the appliances are sharing of life with their beloved young Master. But soon “They All Wake Up” to find themselves in the family’s summer cottage, where other used appliances have been relegated. Before long the appliances, headed by the brave toaster of the title, resolve to set out through the forest in search of their Master.

Throughout the score, Newman conveys complexity and brightness with his busy orchestrations and accomplished use of tritones in his melodic passages. The serious “quest” theme of the storyline is kept in spotlight.

The score also boasts four songs by Van Dyke Parks (and orchestrated by Newman). They’re pleasant enough if not exactly hummable, and sound rather Broadway-ish. Newman does well by Parks, bringing some of the songwriter’s themes into the main body of the score, most notably in the above-mentioned “The Pond” which, in nice contrast, utilizes the main melody line of Parks’s “City of Lights.” The cleverest Parks song features the late Phil Hartman doing a spot-on Peter Lorre as a hanging lamp, providing lead vocals on “It’s a B Movie,” with its apropos use of pipe organ and skeletal xylophone.

When at last the toaster and its travel-worn companions make their way to the Big City, they are too late – their Master, now an adult and off to college, has already departed – back to the summer cottage to pick up his favorite appliances! But, this being a movie for kids, all’s well that ends well – although not until after a terrifying visit to a junkyard during Newman’s rousing seven-minute “Finale.”