If the Disney+ Throwbacks rollout sends a new wave of viewers to the original Brave Little Toaster, a lot of them are going to discover something they didn’t realize existed: there are two direct-to-video sequels, and they came out in the wrong order. Not “wrong” in some critical sense. Wrong in the literal sense that the third installment chronologically was released in the US before the second one. The Brave Little Toaster Goes to Mars hit American shelves on May 19, 1998. The Brave Little Toaster to the Rescue didn’t get its US release until May 25, 1999, a full year later, even though the latter is the story’s middle chapter and was completed first. To the Rescue did premiere in the UK in May 1997, but the American window flipped.
You can guess why. Late-’90s Disney was in the middle of its direct-to-video gold rush. The Return of Jafar, Pocahontas II, Belle’s Magical World, an endless production line aimed at the rapidly growing kids’ VHS market. Studios were prioritizing release windows that hit the May holiday and back-to-school sweet spots, not narrative continuity. By the time To the Rescue finally arrived in American stores, the audience had already sent Toaster to space. Imagine watching Avengers: Infinity War and then Age of Ultron and you’ve got the right vibe, on a much smaller scale and with way more singing kitchen appliances.
So what about the actual movies? Look, they’re not great. That’s the obvious thing to say and the true thing to say. Neither sequel reaches the original’s emotional pitch, neither has the original’s animation budget, and neither dares to be dark in the way Jerry Rees and his team did in 1987. Where the original gave you a junkyard sequence about industrial obsolescence and a clown nightmare animated like a horror short, the sequels give you talking lab animals (To the Rescue) and helium balloons floating in interstellar space (Goes to Mars). The juniors got the brand and not the bones.
But here’s the thing nobody who dismisses these films mentions. The songs are weirdly good.
“Floating,” from Goes to Mars, is the case in point. It’s a goofy interlude where the appliances meet a chorus of anthropomorphic balloons drifting through the void of space, singing about how they got there. On paper that sounds like a punchline. In practice it’s a genuinely hummable, melancholy number with a hippie balloon verse that namechecks Woodstock and worries that “you can’t relive a one-time thing.” (Released in 1998, the lyric’s wistful reference to a failed festival revival hits different after Woodstock ’99, but that’s an accident the movie didn’t earn.) Whatever budget cuts touched the animation never reached the music department. Composer Alexander Janko and the late Tony-winning songwriter William Finn (yes, the Falsettos guy, the 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee guy, who died in April 2025) wrote the music across both sequels, with lyrics by Ellen Fitzhugh, and the work is craftier than the films around it.
That’s the recurring frustration of both follow-ups. There are real moments of charm and real songcraft, surrounded by direct-to-video plotting that never tries to scare or move you the way the original did. To the Rescue sends the gang to a veterinary lab where animals are headed for testing, which sounds dark on paper but plays like a Saturday-morning cartoon with the edges sanded off. Goes to Mars puts a literal baby in jeopardy on a literal alien planet, then forgets to make either the baby or the planet interesting. The original was a movie about appliances learning to die. The sequels are movies about appliances learning to be plot devices.
There’s also a strange thing the sequels do that the original didn’t. They soften everything. The Master’s old fears get replaced by domestic warmth. The appliances stop having existential dread and start having adventures. Even Toaster, who in the original is essentially a working-class hero willing to throw himself into a metal compactor to save the others, becomes a peppy team leader in the sequels. The sand has been kicked off the playground.
Critics noticed. The film fandom community has long argued that the sequels were an attempt to cash in on the brand without understanding why the brand worked. The TV Tropes “Contested Sequel” entries on both films are candid about it. IMDb user reviews from 1998 and 1999 are a wall of “remember to watch this last” warnings. The kindest reading from longtime fans is the one the songs earn. These movies have a few minutes of real heart in them, mostly when somebody is singing.
The good news is that with the original landing on Disney+ on May 25 alongside its already-streaming sequels, the trilogy can finally be watched in the right order for the first time in a long time. Brave Little Toaster. To the Rescue. Goes to Mars. The way the story was supposed to go before Disney’s release calendar fumbled it.
Watch “Floating” once. You’ll have it stuck in your head for a week. That’s not nothing.
