It's a given that a Pixar film will include a "blooper reel" -- the joke being there's no such thing as a blooper in the painstakingly planned animation industry.
And the most "inside" joke in the Cars blooper reel has Mack (voiced by John Ratzenberger), flicking disgruntledly through scenes of other Pixar films on TV -- all of them featuring characters voiced by John Ratzenberger.
In fact, Ratzenberger -- the once and future Cliff Clavin of Cheers fame -- has voiced a character in every Pixar feature.
He has been Hamm the Piggy Bank in Toy Story and Toy Story 2, P.T. Flea in A Bug's Life, the Yeti in Monsters, Inc., a school of moonfish in Finding Nemo and the villain The Underminer in The Incredibles.
But it was his role as Mack that proved how far Pixar boss John Lasseter would go for his "good-luck charm."
"See, my father was a truck driver and John knew that, and that's why they gave me the part of a truck," Ratzenberger says. "And halfway through the process, (producer) Darla Anderson said, 'What kind of truck did your dad drive?'
"I said, 'Mack' and they'd already started talking to another truck company. And they stopped that process and started talking to Mack. It meant a lot to me that they did that.
"I never take anything for granted," he says of being the Pixar pick. "I realize how lucky and blessed I am to get the call."
Mainly a producer these days, Ratzenberger produces and stars in Made In America, a roadshow profiling factories on the U.S. Travel Channel. "I actually travel around in one of those rigs you see at NASCAR. That's my audience, the people whose jobs are at stake in America today.
"At some point as a parent (he has two college-aged kids) I said,
'I only want to be involved in projects where I can sit with my kids and not be embarrassed.' "
He says the turning point was when "my son learned his first swear word -- the S-bomb -- when he was five. I said, 'Jim, that's a new word ... where'd you learn that?' And he named the film."
