Oh, then it becomes obvious why WALL-E could know, who of the turned off EVEs was his, and why he didn’t change his mind, if all them appeared to be equal.
I really wouldn’t be surprised if that were the case. But then there could be like a grumpy WALL-E, and a happy, insane WALL-E, and a schizophrenic WALL-E… It’d be like Snow White and the Seven Dwarves! And Snow White is EVE. 
I think the reason Wall-E knew which EVE was his was the plant symbol on probe one’s chest. None of the other EVEs had it.
Wasn’t it a 5-year project to clean things up? And wouldn’t they have sent any kind of ‘kill’ or deactivate message in the year 2110, once a decision had been made? I’m going to have to reread quite a bit, including the dvd BnL shorts. But it seems to me that any malfunctioning Wall-E just wasn’t that important over those few years. If he actually rated an error on the report and they figured he would mess things up in that city over a long period of time, wouldn’t they have sent a special mission to fix the problem, i.e. shut him down?
bleep Probe1 EVE stop New Directive stop Terminate errant Wall-E Serial#678001 stop Order cannot be countermanded stop Report to Axiom Supervisor when completed stop bleep
I’m thinking along the lines of what lizardgirl said, that it might be an entirely different set of problems.
Edit: I wanted to bring up an issue that has always fascinated me, related to this thread but doesn’t really belong here or in the very successful ‘Observations…’ thread either. So I put it in the Advanced Wall-E 101 thread. View it if you dare…
Something that Andrew Stanton said, that I didn’t pick up on until the dvd came out or much later, seems to influence me as to whether the other Wall-E’s died from a STOP signal or just died out. He said something to the effect that an important turn in the fate of the world and supposedly Wall-E too was related to some random act of kindness. A seemingly insignificant gesture or gift…
I believe that there wasn’t any Kill signal or malfunction like a rock hitting Wall-E. I’ve been reading the comic book too and seeing how the malfunction thing is so important there: it’s in the first few frames of Issue #0 (the first issue). I think you guys are barking up the wrong tree. Well, need to verify Stanton’s quote, wherever it was… And anyways, this makes it more interesting, a malfunction is kinda random and boring.
Stanton says that it can take a little thing to knock us out of life’s programming, and that it doesn’t matter what it is. Altho i would guess, for the sake of the story, it could be something of importance, small but significant, and related to the story in some way as to make it a wonderful revelation: just my take on this.
I have a before the axiom sketch on how Wall-E became the ‘forgotten robot to be turned off’. he did in fact get turned off and the main character just came back to revive him, after finding out the truth about Operation Recolonize.
Another possibility could be that it was plain old wear and tear that killed them off one at a time.
The proof of that theory is the fact that WALL-E had to Change his treads because they were getting old and falling off.
My assumption is that most of the WALL-E’s died off before the president of B&L left and the rest (except our hero of course) died off afterwards.
Over time the same reason why the other robots died off could have effected WALL-E and therefore caused him to have a personality.
That probably wouldn’t explain EVE or M-O or even BURN-E (so in light of their case, maybe by the time WALL-E was created, they installed a personality chip or so).
If what you say is true, than wouldn’t Wall-E have a much darker side to himself than what we know from the movie? He seemed so happy, with his life, even his job, but he truly found his happiness in EVE, so i can’t see him having such a positive personality from all of his ‘brethren’ dying off. I say that his curiousity got him a personality, and with a personality, gave him a free mind, once Forthright called off the shots for Operation Recolonize and the Wall-E’s were free to do whatever they wish. Wall-E didn’t notice this, but he had the most opportune time to use it, and he was able to scavenge off of his fallen companions throughout the years with his creative, curious mind. If he did get a personality from the loss of his pals, he probably wouldn’t degrade them by taking contraptions from them as they were corpses, in lamence terms, ‘grave robbing’.
Oh, I never thought of that.
Don’t mind yourself. Also, kudos for your new avatar!
Thanks! Image my avatar using a freeware 3D computer graphics software called Blender.
Here is at least one of the interviews where Stanton talks about this “random act of kindness”:
QUESTION: “Apart from being great entertainment is WALL∙E quite profound?”
ANDREW STANTON: “To be honest we try to do that to all the films. I was trying - through this little robot - to answer the question of what is the point of living. I did not have an environmental agenda or an obesity agenda…or any of those things. But I am not stupid; I saw that as the movie was finishing that in a very eerie, prophetic way it was matching the headline. But it was all more metaphorical. It was all about loving the idea of telling the point of living through two programmed machines and that got me thinking that humans can be more robotic than machines, depending on how they choose to live their life. So I ended up on a premise of irrational love defeats life’s programming. That it takes a random act of kindness and love - whether it is in a one on one relationship or on a global scale - to kick us out of our habits and routines that unconsciously keep us from connecting with one another. So everything else is just abstract or fictional devices used to support that premise.”
Read more: blog.beliefnet.com/moviemom/2008 … z1FygG8q4X
Huh? I pasted this and the “Read more” was attached on somehow. Anyways, the creator did say that Wall-E was the last thing alive on earth and had been forgotten to be turned off. That was in 1994, and by 2004-2006 when he was finishing up on the story, it was probably irrelevant how exactly he came to be the last moving thing on earth. Either turning things off became irrelevant because the BnL chief had told the autopilots they wouldn’t be returning to earth anyway, or who cares if they kept working, or Stanton changed the story. My speculation is that he did indeed change the main story premise, slightly. He said in that interview that he came to realize that his story was about loneliness. So what better to make him more lonely than to add 700 years to his sentence? Well, you may say that those years were necessary to show how the gels/humans had evolved and changed - for the worse. And that’s true, the centuries did serve both purposes. And the other machines could have died out over those years.
The one time we see other Wall-E’s, there is a cluster of them next to the transit rail, clearing an avalanche from a tower of garbage. Did a sudden sandstorm blow in? Was a kill signal sent out at that moment? But most here who commented on this said it looked like they stopped in the middle of work. You have to ask tho, sandstorms didn’t happen until the plants started dying off and the incinerators wrecked the atmosphere and then all the plants and animals died. Incineration didn’t begin in earnest until the Wall-E’s had begun cubing. How would they know to avoid sandstorms? Weren’t they sorta dumb then? Why wouldn’t they just keep working and have their bearings worn out and parts rusted? We just don’t know.
Sky said “maybe it was his personality that overrode that command”, and that is an interesting idea, since Mo is shown overriding his boundaries programming to do an even more important function: microbe obliteration. Then he further overrode that to some extent while in the garbage scowl and finally capped it off while helping at the holo-detector. Most of the other bots in the Repair Ward, tho, had indeed malfunctioned. Is that why so many here think that a malfunction had to have occurred with Wall-E??
Finally, during the London premiere Sigourney Weaver said that Wall-E became sentient over the course of centuries, not due to some malfunction. Whether she received special tidings from the Director over this isn’t clear. Perhaps during the recording session he slipped a note to her, like 5th graders shuttle notes during class to each other and giggle. Miss Weaver indeed giggled, covered her mouth and tried to hide the note with the palm of her hand, and the Director broadly beamed and had that look on his face that one has when they are trying their darndest not to burst out laughing, while the Disney exec in a suit frowned and looked at his watch: recording studio time is costly…
I just assumed that overtime they were overworked.
Well, we can have many different solutions towards how the other wall-e’s had died, but, the real problem is, how did THIS Wall-E live? How did to become apparent to him, that curiosity would give him the reality of the world around him to live amongst his companions? If it did? Did the wall-e’s influence him to act differently, or was it the fabled cockroach Hal that brought him to safety, and thus gave him the incentive to act upon it?
My reasons in my prequel to the story seemed to make sense in some ways, how one human had that same human devotion that Wall-E had, 700 years later, to have this ‘irrational love’ he had for a artificial being, how effortless he was to bring the humans back home, back to their true lives to reincarnate the human aspects that they lost so long ago. Seems like a good conclusion to the original questions from the now in Wall-E.
Luck, perhaps. After all, one of them had to be the last!
Divine intervention - he was chosen for the task.
That’s what I stick with anyway 
I assumed they all eventually wore out
I just took it that their batteries died since nobody maintained them.
They’re solar powered.
Yes, but what would happen if Wall-E had forgotten to recharge one day, or it was cloudy, or if a windstorm lasted a particularly long time, or his low battery alarm went off just after sundown? Remember when it first went off, he went “oh”, like his memory isn’t perfect. I suppose that’s what all the car batteries are doing in Wall-E’s truck, (there was a huge pile of them) in case of a rainy day. Maybe that’s what could have saved our Wall-E, while the others died from a bad solar day, he knew enough to get a car battery.