Some Of The Cars Of Roku City, Which May Well Be In Your Home Right Now: Cold Start

Last night, as I was rooting deep into my sleeping litter of old rags and bits of partially-masticated foam rubber, the videophone buzzed, loudly. I squeezed the “answer” bulb, and saw that it was Peter, our managing editor, clearly intoxicated. He had an idea for me. An idea for a Cold Start.

“The purple city – on the TV!” he yelled, pausing to take long, thirsty gulps from what appeared to be a bottle of Woolite. “The city, she comes on the screen when we’re not looking, not paying attention, they think we don’t know, but we do! WE DO!”

Peter then seemed to start an involved set of mouth and throat motions and sounds that would likely end in a long, protracted vomit, but before this theory could be confirmed, Peter’s head dropped down heavily to his desk with a deep, resonant thud, and the feed from the video phone ended, the screen returning to static before blinking off.

I then heard a second thunk, this time from the pneumatic tube by my bed. Inside, I found one of the SyQuest cartridges we use for data transfer, and on that cartridge I found a number of image files of cars that were seen on the Roku City screensaver – you know the one, that purple city animation that shows up on Roku TVs when left idle. This one:

This cityscape gets seen by a metric crapton of people every day, so you should probably know the name of the artist who made it: Kyle Jones. Bang-up job, Kyle.

These are known to be full of visual Easter Eggs, usually referencing movies or other entertainment properties, but there are also a good number of cars in this thing, and it’s your right, as a human, to be informed of what those are. So here we go:

First, I think this hardtop muscle car seems to be referencing the Dodge Charger one of the muscly bald guys drives in the Fast and Furious movies:

It’s got the big hood scoop and everything. It must really be out there, terrorizing that grape-flavored cityscape, pulling unlikely heists or whatever the hell the F&F people do. Was it heists? Were they solving crimes? I can’t remember.

There’s more mundane stuff lurking around, too, like this:

A box truck. A plain, white box truck, based on what looks to me like a GMC Savana or a Chevy Express workhorse platform. I suppose these are very entertainment-related, because they’re all over the place when some studio is shooting something in LA. 

Hey, look it’s whatshisname’s dad’s Ferrari 250 GT from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. I thought whatshisname’s dad didn’t want to drive it, hence the idiotic attempt to roll back the odometer by driving in reverse; what changed? Maybe after the car’s accident, the dad wasn’t so precious about it anymore?

Oh and this one,

Wait that’s just Vin Diesel again. Go home, Vin, stop cruising around, no one needs a “ride.” Oh hey, is that a glowy-eyed Oscar the Grouch in the background? He looks scarier than usual.

Speaking of scary, who’s driving around in this white Ford Econoline with shapes painted on the side? I wonder if there’s any free candy in there? Probably, definitely worth checking out if you’re outside at night and in the mood for some candy! You’ll probably want to go right in!

I’m pretty sure there’s a dog’s head peeking out of the window there, on the other side, which makes sense, as this appears to be Cruella DeVil’s car, which is based on, at least in the live-action movies, a Panther DeVille.

They only made 60 of these things, so I’m especially surprised to see one in Roku City, which I had always thought was a difficult place to get and register unusual cars.

This flame-jobbed 1959 Impala-looking thing above there with the dramatic reverse-raked stance I think is actually a sentient car named Ramone, who runs the body customizing shop from the Pixar movie Cars. Maybe he’s on vacation? I’m not sure how travel and tourism works between fictional cities?

What we can infer from this car above here is that there is some manner of espionage and spycraft because that is definitely British intelligence agent James Bond’s Aston Martin DB5. You know, for a spy, he’s pretty noticeable and identifiable, which feels like a detriment.

Look at that thing tooling around, all obvious – what kind of spying is he doing, exactly? And why? Is Roku City a city-state, like Singapore or The Vatican? Do they have a lot of international intrigue? Or maybe he’s on vacation, too? Possibly with Ramone?

In a different version of Roku city that was coming up on one of my telescreens, I also noticed this famous bicycle, which I always thought was stored in the Alamo’s basement? I guess it’s on loan to someone in Roku city?

And then there’s this car, which looks like the dream-version of the car from the movie Grease‘s Greased Lightning song, which, I just recently learned, contains a reference to the use of plastic wrap as an ersatz prophylactic when John Travolta confusingly rubs a huge roll of the stuff on his crotch, mid-song:

I guess the dream-version of the car can exist in Roku city because of its fictional status? Again, I’m unclear about how all of this fictional location logistics works.

I think there’s more identifiable cars in the Roku city screensavers, so next time you try to watch TV but realize you forgot to pay every one of your subscriptions, spend some time in the purple metropolis and see what you can find, why not?