How did they not see... MAJOR SPOILERS

It looks like only Mike's meter was busted. The last meter on the right and Mike was the last one up.

It's not a "plot hole", not if you were paying attention, and you have to pay attention to really "get" a Pixar movie because there are lots of subtle things that are still important, but easy to miss. If you'd read my earlier post, I explained that Sulley didn't tamper with the meter while the competition was taking place. He did that the night BEFORE the competition, and his suspicious behavior and guilty-looking face as he and Mike are getting ready for bed strongly hints that he's been up to something, that he knows something that Mike doesn't. By the time that competition had started, he already knew what order the competitors would be going in, so he knew which meter was Mike's, and that's the one he tampered with. He didn't break it; he just set it on the most-sensitive, lowest setting possible so the "kid" would "scream" at the least little thing.

pitbulllady

it would have been too suspicious for Everyone to have their scale to full

Sulley could NOT have tampered with Mike's Scare setting when it was his turn to compete. Everyone in the entire stadium would have seen him because there were closed-circuit cameras inside the Scare Simulators, broadcasting each competitor's every move on wide-screen TV's, remember? Scares were also timed, so that left no time at all to do anything BUT pull off the best possible Scare. Sulley's suspicious behavior the night before that competition, as he and Mike are getting ready for bed, indicates that he's either already done something or he's planning to sneak out as soon as Mike is asleep, but by the time the competitions started, he'd already rigged the settings.

pitbulllady

Here's what Randall knows about Sullivan: He's a jerk. He is a privileged rich kid who gets whatever he wants because of his family name. He has no regard for others. He started that fight in the class with Mike that resulted in Mike getting kicked out of the Scare Program(and Randall knew how important that was to Mike)and almost got several students(including Randall; the Scream canister actually grazes his chin)killed or hurt. Now, why WOULDN'T it be logical for Randall to assume that Sulley caused him to mess up on purpose AND got away with it, again because he was a Sullivan? Randall does not strike me as a "sore loser". If he thought he lost legitimately, beaten fair and square, he's have had no problem with it. But knowing what he did about Sulley, he had every reason to assume that Sulley had cheated, and when Randall later would have found out that Sulley did indeed cheat, that would have sealed forever in his mind that Sulley was a cheater and got everything he wanted because of his family name. MIKE actually still believed that, too, right up until that talk with Sulley out at the lake, and he expresses what Randall was actually thinking. I don't know how many people realize what a profound game-changer that scene at the lake was, because had it not been for that, Mike would have come to hate Sulley every bit as badly as Randall did, maybe worse. Randall's obsession was not so much to make sure that he was better than Sullivan, but to make sure he never lost to a cheater again. That is why he reacts so strongly in MI, when Mike accuses HIM of "cheating"(which he wasn't); Randall loathes cheaters and he's been bested all this time by someone he knows to be a cheater.

Speaking of Randall's fall in the Scare Games, though, it is true that not everyone could see all that was going on in that Simulator. Looking at the hi-def screen caps from the movie, it is clear that no one in the audience would have been able to see that rug on the floor, the one with the pink hearts, because it was on the opposite side of the bed from the audience. Not even the other ROR's would have seen it, because all of them approached the bed from the foot, and they would have had to lean way over to the left side of the bed to see that rug. There was no reason for them to have done that. Only Randall goes around the foot of the bed and climbs the wall on the left, so only he was in a position to see the rug at all. I doubt that the other members of ROR were aware that Randall could not always control his color/pattern changing ability, or that he sometimes spontaneously changed color to match some random background whenever he was stressed or nervous; he even still does that in MI. From THEIR perspective, it would have appeared that Randall just deliberately changed to that hearts pattern, and the only reason they would have thought of to explain him doing that was to sabotage their win, and perhaps to show support for Mike and his team. Johnny had noticed that Randall was trying to befriend Mike, as well as noticing that Randall was the one who helped Mike study to get those high marks in class, and when Mike and Randall are approaching the steps of the Scare building on the exam day, Johnny is watching them like a hawk. He KNEW that Randall liked Mike, so when Randall popped up with those cutesy hearts, it must have seemed like an intentional show of disrespect for his own fraternity and proof that he was being disloyal to ROR, which is why they kicked him out. None of them knew about the rug at all.

pitbulllady