MovieChat Forums > Monsters, Inc. (2001) Discussion > Effects of the Scream Extractor?

Effects of the Scream Extractor?


So what would the short term or long term effects of the Scream Extractor be?

We only see Fungus get stuck in the machine, but it is clearly not designed for monsters, so we won't take that as the proper example. Boo was meant to be the first test of the machine.

So imagine there's an alternate version of the film where Randall/Waternoose are not foiled and they successfully test the machine on Boo. What would have happened to her? Would she have only suffered emotional trauma from being afraid?

It wasn't made clear how long she would be put in it, or what the effects are, if any.

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The Scream Extractor was designed to extract screams from children who were not afraid of monsters. And yes, Boo was the first test subject. Most people assume, without logic, that the machine was designed to kill children, and base that assumption on what happened to Fungus. Something that they fail to realize though, is that the Scream Extractor had different settings on it, on the control panel. When Sulley put Fungus in the seat, he pushed the controls all the way up to 100%, and left him there. When Randall put Boo in the seat, he set the controls at just 15%, and had them set at 30% for Mike, to scare him into revealing where "the kid" was. It would make no sense whatsoever to design the machine to kill, or even cause harm, to human child subjects. Parents will shrug off a child's claims of monsters as nightmares or overactive imaginations, but it's hard to shrug off thousands of children turning up either dead in their beds each night, or disappearing completely. THAT is going to raise a lot of suspicion, and lead to a monster getting caught coming into a room to grab a child, and that will lead to the existence of the Monster World being discovered by humans. Randall chose Boo intentionally because she was already afraid of him, so he knew he could count on her to scream, regardless of whether the machine actually worked or not, so he was hedging his bets quite a bit there. If she screamed, then it would at least appear that the machine was working, so Waternoose would be satisfied that Randall had owed up to his end of the deal. Boo was also young enough that she could not articulate to her parents what had happened to her, and she would also soon forget the whole thing. It's a proven fact that the majority of human children undergo what is basically a brain "re-wiring" when they are around four years old, and forget everything that has happened to them prior to that save for "muscle memory" skills and people and things that they are exposed to on a daily basis. Boo's memory of the whole event would have soon faded. That would all explain why Randall was so adamant that he had to find THAT one particular child, and couldn't just choose a replacement from his many assigned "Scare kids".

pitbulllady

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