The Russo Brothers’ new sci-fi film sounds electrifyingly strange

A new Vanity Fair article detailing the details 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 the Planters mascot Mr. Peanut, voiced by Woody Harrelson, playing an impersonation of former President Jimmy Carter.

Ostensibly based on Simon Stålenhag’s 2018 picture book of the same name, the Russos have added a number of their own flourishes to turn the fascinating setting into a feature film. While the original story has a young woman searching for her lost little brother (with the help of a cute robot) in the ruins of society, the Russos are Electric state is set in 1994, after Disney World’s animatronic robots wage war on society.

In the film, our heroine (played by Millie Bobby Brown as an alt-grunge riot grrrl type) actually sets out to find her lost brother (Woody Norman) with the help of a cute robot (voiced by Alan Tudyk). She eventually teams up with a truck driver (Chris Pratt wearing a Dead Milkmen T-shirt) and his robot enemy Herman (voiced by Anthony Mackie), who manage to transport them both through the “enemy territory” of the animatronic Freedom Fighters.

The top brass of these robot insurgents include Penny Pal, “a cheerful mail robot” voiced by Jenny Slate, and Popfly, “a malfunctioning baseball-throwing machine that may have delivered too many line drives to its 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 became a battle-weary elder statesman.”

Co-director Joe Russo told Vanity Fair he believes Mr. Peanut and President Carter are kindred spirits. “[Mr. Peanut] “That part almost has a shared history with Carter in the sense that he was more concerned with the ideals than the practicalities and things didn’t go as well as he had hoped,” Russo said.

However, in order to get approval to use the monocle mascot, the brass at Hormel Foods had to be convinced. Anthony Russo says, “We worked on it for a long time and it was a process for the Hormel people to get into it, but eventually they did it.” It took a lot of middlemen and conversations with middlemen about what we were trying to do, and In the end everything worked out.”

Joe Russo added that the film’s portrayal of the character was largely positive: “They gave us creative freedom. It was a delicate balance because you don’t want to overwhelm the film with commercialism or a level of reality that takes you out of the fable, but we felt that Mr. Peanut fit the design of the other robots and we found it strange that he was essentially her Atticus Finch. The most articulate and considerate of the robots is a peanut with a stick and a top hat.”

Readers are strongly encouraged to examine Vanity Fair’s full profile of this strange-sounding film, whose star-studded cast also includes Giancarlo Esposito, Ke Huy Quan, Stanley Tucci and Terry Notary (the latter as Mr. Peanut’s physical form). The Electric State It is currently scheduled to premiere on Netflix in March.

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