Door Problems

Monsters, Inc. has that humongous door vault, right?
Well does it include every child’s door in our world? We know it at least includes parts of the human world (France,Japan,ect), but then what would that mean power-wise for other areas/countries of the monster world? Would that OTHER company have another copy of that door? Likely not–that would mean every kid would have like a thousand monsters.
I think some Pixarians mentioned that there could be other forms of scaring besides the closet doors: under- the-bed and such, but can you create power for a world using only scaring (and now laughter)? Perhaps there are other techniques of creating power for them. Perhaps the monster world is extremely small. I hope some of these questions are answered in the sequel.
Any thoughts?

Good question, since there are many parts of the world where most bedrooms still don’t typically have a closet, anyway, so how would monsters even access those children’s rooms? Yeah, they could SCARE by hiding under a bed, but GETTING into the room would be the problem; heck, getting into the HOUSE would present a dilemma, especially for those really big guys like Sulley, who’d be sorta hard NOT to notice trying to sneak into a house! My bedroom, as a young child, didn’t have a closet, and neither does the one I have now, since both were originally intended to be other rooms, the first was a washroom for clothes and the one I have now used to be a living room. Most older houses don’t have closets, but people still use portable or folding wardrobes to keep clothes in.

I’d suspect that the company that owns MI, “Scare, Co.”, probably has a monopoly on scaring kids for energy in much of the “developed” parts of the Monster World, and that there are other parts of their world which still do depend on other energy sources, like the burning of fossil fuels or wood/charcoal, to heat, cook and provide electricity, if they even have the latter. Given the other similarites between their world and ours, there most likely would be places where electricity is a rare luxury most cannot afford or have any access to, so the monsters there would have to rely on whatever form of energy they could obtain for heating, cooking, etc.

pitbulllady

These are very interesting questions 1986, and I’ve pondered over these ideas for some time, but it seems like there’s no straight answer - at least, not one that we can infer directly from the film.

One possibility is that there are lots of Scream Factories like Monsters, Inc. all over the Monster World, and that every one of them has a copy of every door in the human world in their door vaults. But that isn’t to say that they are all used, as in Monsters, Inc. we only ever see Scarers scare in America, and so it might be the fact that the Monsters scare in whatever part of the Human World correlates to them. So, Chinese children are scared by Monsters from ‘China’ (i.e. the Monster World version of China). But then that would beg the question of why the door vault we are shown in Monsters, Inc. has doors for all over the world. The only answer I can think of is for some sort of safety reason- having access to only one area of the Human World could lead to all sorts of problems if a Monster accidentally enters the Human World and wants to return to their own scream factory. I’m not really sure if this whole idea works, though.

Perhaps other energy creating techniques are more plausible. The idea of the Monster World being very small is a reasonable one, but for some reason I’ve always thought of the Monster World as almost being a sort of warped mirror image of the Human World (I’m sure there was some sort of a short on the origins of Monsters) and so part of me doubts that this is true.

It’s definitely something I’d love to see answered in the sequel, though!

Everything seems to indicate that the Monster World mirrors our own exactly, with the notable exceptions of the “dominant” life form being monsters, rather than humans, and the primary energy source at least in the “developed” parts of the world being Scream(and now, Laugh)energy from human children. Like our world, there is the indication of different countries/ethnic groups/nationalities in the Monster World, as we see with Tony the Grosser, who has a distinctive Italian accent, and the “expert” interviewed on the news, who speaks with a German accent. If countries like Italy and Germany exist, along with the Monster World version of the US, then places like Bangladesh, Haiti and the Sudan probably do, as well. We DO actually see evidence of monsters from the Monstropolis factory scaring children in other parts of the world, since this is how Sulley managed to escape from the Himalayas(and presumably, Mike did the same later). He remembered the Abominable Snowman telling him about the “cutest little village” with all those kids, and figured out that someone would tap into that resource of Screams, and once he got down the mountain and arrived at the edge of said village, he just followed the sounds of terrified Tibetan children screaming and was able to catch an employee from his very factory in the act of scaring a child, and return to the factory via that child’s closet door(do they have closets in Tibet?).

pitbulllady