Trivia for
The Brave Little Toaster (1987) More at IMDbPro »

• The film was a smash hit at the Sundance Film Festival, but failed to find a distributor. It was aired on the Disney Channel in 1987, then had appeared in the Park City Film Festival in 1988, before finally having a brief theatrical release at New York's Film Forum in May 1989, but still failed to find a distributor. It was actually shown in parts at various theaters as a serial from week to week, and in 1991, it was distributed on video. In October 2003, it finally had a DVD release alongside its two sequels.
  
  
• Rob (The Master) and his mother's apartment number is A113, which is also the a room number of a classroom used by animation students at CalArt, the Alma mater of John Lasseter'. A113 also shows up in Toy Story (1995) and A Bug's Life (1998), which he directed.
  
  
• The main cast is The Groundling Group, comprised of Jon Lovitz, Timothy Stack, Timothy E. Day, Deanna Oliver, Thurl Ravenscroft, and 'Phil Hartman'.
  
  
• Two weeks after recording their dialogue, Jon Lovitz and 'Phil Hartman' joined "Saturday Night Live" (1975).
  
  
• Loudmouth (the Radio) directs the group "North by northwest" then cautions them to "watch out for low-flying aircraft". This is a reference to the Alfred Hitchcock film North by Northwest (1959) in which Cary Grant is chased by a low-flying biplane.
  
  
• The hanging lamp (voiced by Phil Hartman) is based on 'Peter Lorre' in both voice and appearance.
  
  
• The German dubbed version of the film swaps the genders of two main characters: Toaster is voiced by a man, and Lampy is voiced by a woman.
  
  
• Was originally in development at Disney, with John Lasseter set to direct. Lasseter planned to use a combination of traditional hand-drawn animation and computer generated imagery for the characters, making it the first animated feature to attempt it. Executives, however, lost interest when they found that the film would not have been any less expensive with computer animation (they were only interested in CGI as a cost-cutting measure) and pulled the plug on the ambitious project. Lasseter left Disney for Pixar, while the rest of the team took the film outside and managed to produce it independently (without any computer animation). The film was eventually bought by Disney, shown on the Disney Channel and became a cult hit. As for the animators, many of them eventually returned to Disney to work on such films as Beauty and the Beast (1991) and -The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)_, as well as some of Pixar's early feature films.
  
  

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