The Scream/Laugh Canister is an object in the Disney•PixarMonsters, Inc. franchise. Its purpose is to store up the scream energy of human kids that the Scarers collect upon entering a door and successfully scaring the child in question. Each scream canister would be taken to a room, where the screams would be extracted and refined into clean energy.
Later, when Monsters, Inc. additionally began collecting children's laughs, scream canisters could easily collect them, but their maximum capacity was not enough to accommodate because laughter was ten times more powerful than scream, meaning there was an excess of laugh energy that got wasted. After all the scream canisters got used up, larger Laugh Canisters were created courtesy of MIFT, which featured larger meters indicating the greater energy storage capacity.
It is also shown that the canister can collect both scream and laugh energy at the same time. However, scream and laugh energy are polar opposite much like matter and anti-matter and can cause huge explosions if they are mixed with each other. As a result, Jokesters must be careful to not accidentally make children scream during laugh harvesting operations.
Furthermore, Randall Boggs reveals that by wiring some circuits in the canister, the energy input can be faked. It is clearly shown during Randall's sabotage operation in Monsters Inc., which he manages to make empty canisters look full.
A notable scream canister belonged to Dean Abigail Hardscrabble, the Dean of the School of Scaring at Monsters University. This canister contained the scream Hardscrabble collected during her old career as a Scarer, which broke the All-Time Scare Record. However, it was accidentally knocked over from its pedestal by Sulley when he and Mike were trying to scare each other. The canister clattered on the ground, loosening its containment-lock, and unleashing the scream inside, causing it to fly about the Scaring School's lecture hall until the scream ran out and it broke. At first, Hardscrabble "appeared" to take the loss of her "one souvenir from a life-time of Scaring" rather well, citing, "Accidents happen," and amending the situation since "the important thing [was] no one got hurt." However, Hardscrabble then retaliated against Mike and Sulley by testing them on the spot personally, finding fault in each of them and judging them unfit to continue with the Scaring Program: Mike because she deemed him, in her professional opinion, not scary; and Sulley for disregarding the study of Scaring.
It is unknown what became of Hardscrabble's canister afterwards.
The amount of scream energy a child can output is enough to fill one canister, while the amount of scream energy a group of adults outputted in the climax of Monsters University was enough to fill the canisters (even ones not attached to the door) and overload them. However, due to the obvious risks that human adults are more likely to attack monsters, it is totally not possible to harness scream energy from adult human.
Scream Canister voice recorder from the film's premiere
This page uses Creative Commons Licensed content from the Pixar Wiki. The list of authors can be seen in the page revision history (view authors). As with Disney Wiki, the text of the Pixar Wiki is available under the CC-BY-SA license.
.png "MAW - 2x10 - Powerless (6).png (1.63 MB)")
.jpg "Lightyear (91).jpg (160 KB)")
