Hello, internet! Welcome to Film Theory, the show where crazy ideas supported by detailed research always gets the checkered flag.

Now as many of you loyal theorists know, I love me some Pixar. Even if I do have a strange way of showing it.

And by strange way of showing it, I mean ruining your childhood memories of beloved characters.

Look, I'm not the one who decided that everybody in Wally is a cannibal. I just pointed it out, okay?

Don't kill the messenger, and then liquefy their body and drink them as creepy future food.

But never fear those of you who wish to have your childhoods remain intact, because today's Pixar theory isn't gonna have some deep dark twist.

Or is it? No, it isn't. Probably.

Instead, today we're simply going to consider the world of cars. A world that looks just like our own, except that there's no people and all the machines run themselves.

To catch you up, the first cars movie gave us the story of a young hot shot race car named Lightning McQueen who gets a shot at the championship, but then gives it up because he realizes how important the other people in his...

Uh, other cars in his life really are.

The sequel was the next obvious place that you take that concept.

A complicated spy thriller about car espionage and alternative fuel source conspiracy theories.

Because, why not?

And Cars 3 looks like it's lining up to be a comeback story.

We've got a trailer which shows lightning and a catastrophic crash.

And if this series keeps following the trajectory of the Rocky series, the third installment will be about our heroes fight back up to the top.

And hey, if we're really lucky, we'll get a fourth one where McQueen races against a Russian muscle car and solves communism.

I must break you.

Sure, you laughed that that sounds ridiculous, but I bet you didn't expect the spy thriller plot either.

Long story short, the Cars universe has always been a weird one, filled with a lot of questions about the logistics of a world filled only with sentient automobiles.

But one question none of us have ever really stopped to answer is this.

Are the cars in cars really cars? I mean sure it's the title of the movie

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