Shelby Forthright

Shelby Forthright is a character in the 2008 Disney/Pixar film in WALL-E. He was voiced by Fred Willard.

Role in the film
Shelby Forthright was the CEO of Buy n Large Corporation in the early 22nd century. It was his idea to evacuate Earth, as it was too choked with trash. He also proposed Operation Recolonize, in which trash compactor robots and mobile incinerators would clean up the Earth while humanity stayed aboard starships like the Axiom. However, after a few years, Forthright was convinced that the operation had failed. He ordered all planetbound machines turned off (though one was missed), and secretly sent Directive A-113 to all Auto units.

History
Shelby Forthright was probably the corporation's only CEO. He constantly kept pushing his company to expand its efforts to make humanity's world easier, more comfortable and pleasant. As decades passed, the Buy N Large Corporation was successfully becoming the world leader of every conceivable field, including the government. BnL became a powerful corporation, where its main goal was to keep humanity satisfied with new ideas, innovations, and automated gadgets. BnL also alternated the use of fossil fuel energy to solar powered, where, as seen in the film, hundreds of electric produced innovations are powered by solar energy where everything can be powered in a very very long period of time.

It seems that Shelby has made the world a very happy place; however, the corporation showed no interest of fixing the increasing garbage problems due to the very mass consumerism facilitated by the corporation. Until the year 2105, the world now noticed how massively effective the problem had taken in earth, now humanity questions where are they going to dump their trash, now that every known landfill is now fully covered in garbage. Shelby Forthright hired BnL scientists, sociologist and growth management consultants to come up with a plan to fix the current situation. Eventually, they proposed a plan of evacuating the population of earth on the all new BnL Starliners. where hundreds are launched each day. Shelby Forthright is confident that Operation Cleanup will only take five years while humanity is exploring distant galaxies. Thousands of WALL-E robots were designed to clean up the planet along with a few mobile incinerators to simultaneously obliberate the garbage from each tower. Unfortunately, the cleanup took longer and even worse, Earth was becoming too toxic, thus making it unsustainable to support life killing vegetation. Shelby Forthright is now convinced that Operation Cleanup has failed, and decided to cancel Operation Recolonize. He secretly sent Override Directive A113 to all BnL autopilots, to not return to earth no matter what. Shelby Forthright along with a few who stayed behind, fully abandons earth and they probably secretly aboard a spaceship, without informing the other BnL pilots. This ended the era of BnL, but Shelby Forthright's fate is unknown.

Trivia

 * Forthright is the first live-action character to appear in a Pixar film. Director Andrew Stanton shot Fred Willard's scenes personally.
 * Several people have pointed out similarities between Forthright and American President George W. Bush including the line, "Stay the course."
 * Stanton described Forthright as "[a] lovable car salesman."