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A new Vanity Fair article detailing the specifics of Joe and Anthony Russo‘s post-apocalyptic action film The Electric State reveals our first look at its baffling central antagonist: an animatronic avatar of Planters mascot Mr. Peanut, voiced by Woody Harrelson doing an impersonation of former president Jimmy Carter.
© Netflix/Vanity Fair Ostensibly based on Simon Stålenhag’s 2018 picture book of the same title, the Russos have added a number of their own flourishes to expand its intriguing locale to feature status. While the original story sees a young woman searching for her lost little brother among the ruins of society (with the help of a cute robot), the Russos’ Electric State is set in 1994, after the animatronic robots of Disney World have waged war on society.
In the film, our hero (played by Millie Bobby Brown as an alt-grunge riot grrrl type) does indeed set out to search for her lost brother (Woody Norman) with the help of a cute robot (voiced by Alan Tudyk), though she eventually teams with a long-haul trucker (Chris Pratt wearing a Dead Milkmen t-shirt) and his robotic frenemy, Herman (voiced by Anthony Mackie), who are able to ferry them both across the “hostile territory” inhabited by animatronic freedom fighters.
Among the top brass of these robot insurrectionists is Penny Pal, “a cheerful mail robot” voiced by Jenny Slate, and Popfly, “a malfunctioning baseball-pitching machine who has perhaps taken one too many line drives to his central processing unit” played by Brian Cox. However, their numbers are led by Harrelson’s Mr. Peanut, “a sentient device once created for marketing purposes who evolved into a battle-weary elder statesman.”
Co-director Joe Russo told Vanity Fair he believes Mr. Peanut and President Carter are kindred spirits. “[Mr. Peanut] almost has this bit of a shared history with Carter in the sense of he was more concerned with the ideals than the practicality, and things didn’t work as well as he hoped,” Russo said.
However, getting clearance to use the monocled mascot required convincing the head honchos at Hormel Foods. According to Anthony Russo, “We pursued it for a long time, and it was a process for the Hormel folks to come around to it, but eventually they did. It took a lot of middlemen and conversations through middlemen about what we were trying to do, and it eventually all worked out.”
Joe Russo added the film’s depiction of the character is largely positive: “They gave us creative reign. It was a delicate balance because you don’t want to overwhelm the movie with commercialism or a level of reality that pulls you out of the fable, but we felt like Mr. Peanut fit the tone of the design of the other robots, and we thought it funny that he was essentially their Atticus Finch. The most well-spoken and thoughtful of the robots is a peanut with a cane and a top hat.”
Readers are highly encouraged to investigate Vanity Fair’s full profile of this peculiar-sounding film, whose stacked cast additionally includes Giancarlo Esposito, Ke Huy Quan, Stanley Tucci, and Terry Notary (the latter as Mr. Peanut’s physical form). The Electric State is currently scheduled to premiere on Netflix in March.
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