Mater (Mater, Private Eye)

Created by John Lasseter, Rob Gibbs, Daniel Chong, Valerie LaPointe & Matthew Luhn

Lord knows I’ve seen plenty of private eye spoofs in my day, with private peeper permutations from the sublime to the obnoxiously ridiculous. I’ve seen cats and dogs and robots and demons and cavemen stepping into the gumshoes of the Shamus Game, and more than a few humans who have just embarrassed themselves.

Here’s a clue: the genre’s a little deeper than a hat, a coat and a bottle of hooch in the desk drawer, and if you have to defend something by declaring it a parody or a satire after the fact, you should probably consider why it wasn’t apparent to everyone in the first place.

But “Mater, Private Eye,” an animated short from the mighty Pixar/Disney money machine, is something else again. It  was originally presented on various TV channels and  theatrical shorts, as part of Mater’s Tall Tales, a spin-off from their lucrative Cars franchise, built around an entire cast of anthropomorphic automobiles.

MATER, of course, is the beloved dilapidated old tow truck from Radiator Springs with the folksy drawl, and each episode of the  Tall Tales series features him telling a story about his past, with his spin as a hard-boiled private detective one of the funniest spoofs of the genre I’ve seen in a long time; short, sharp, to the point and completely fat-free. It gets in and out and does laps while some alleged lampoons are still warming up their engines.

Clocking in at little more than five minutes (if you don’t count the end credits), this baby hits the ground running (and in full color), with Mater telling Lightning McQueen, the self-obsessed young racecar from Cars, about his time as a hard-boiled private eye. Like a reverse Wizard of Oz, the short then fades to noir-appropriate black-and-white, as Mater spins his yarn. How he got a visit from Tia, a very cute little roadster, who wants him to find her missing sister Mia, and how he ends up bringing down a counterfeit tire gang. There’s a nightclub scene, a betrayal, a voiture fatale, a showdown on the docks and all that private eye good stuff, as well as some spot-on winks to Chinatown, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and… Carmen Miranda?

THE EVIDENCE

• “She was wearin’ those whitewalls. The ones that used to drive me crazy.”
  — Mater (as narrator)
• Carmen: Mia? (SCOFFS) That ragtop. I don’t remember.
• Clyde: [flips his pocket knife] You’re a very nosey fella, kitty cat, Huh? You know what happens to guys who shine their headlights in the wrong places? Huh? No? Wanna guess? Huh?
• Tow Mater: I dunno. Free car wash?
• Clyde No! They lose ‘em. [He removes one of Mater’s headlights it]
• Tow: Ow!
• Clyde: Next time it’s the blinkers! Understand?!
• Tia: I’m not bad, Mater. I just drive that way. Come on, let’s pick up where we left off. (GASPS)

TELEVISION

• MATER’S TALL TALES
  (2008–12; Disney Channel/ Toon Disney/ABC Family)
  11 episodes
  Premiere: October 27, 2008
  A series of animated shorts, based on the Cars franchise, featuring Mater spinning tall tales about his past. The shorts were also released on home media and/or as theatrical shorts.
  • “MATER PRIVATE EYE”
    (November 2, 2010)
    Mostly black & white
    Story by John Lasseter, Rob Gibbs, Daniel Chong, Valerie LaPointe, Matthew Luhn
    Directed by Rob Gibbs
    Starring Larry the Cable Guy as MATER
    With Keith Ferguson as Lightning McQueen
    Also starring Carol Bach Rita, Torbin Xan Bullock, Lindsey Collins, Josh Cooley, John Cygan, Jess Harnell, Elissa Knight

HOME VIDEO

• CARS TOON: MATER’S TALL TALE | Buy the DVD | Buy the Blu-Ray | Watch it now!
  (2010)
  Includes all nine episodes of Cars Toons: Mater’s Tall Tales.

MERCHANDISE

• MATER, PRIVATE EYE DIE CAST SET
  (2012, The Disney Stone)
  Of course there’s merch! It’s Disney, after all, and I’m sure there were T-shirts, coffee mugs, sippee cups, backpacks, hats, socks and a zillion other gewgaws. This three-piece set, very collectible of course, included Mater P.I. as a tow truck, Lieutenant McQueen as a patrol car and Big D as a big-ass, bad guy Deusenberg, all painted in appropriately film noir blacks, whites and grays. 

FURTHER INVESTIGATION

• “Oh mama I got dem cosmic anthropomorphic P.I. blues again…”
  Going to the dogs, the cats and worse…
• Let ‘er Rip!!!
  Some of My Favourite Spoofs, Parodies, Essays and Articles

Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.