As a Fridge subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.
- The reason Timmy has to be the hero is that if Martin had been chosen, Timmy wouldn't care enough to do a Face–Heel Turn, breaking the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy. That makes Timmy's hero status even more arbitrary.
- The two cats survive the elevator falling, despite it audibly crashing a few seconds after Timmy escapes. They then come back to chase him (where they fall down the elevator shaft again). Timmy lampshades this turn of events, that they could come back unharmed after the fall. But the elevator is an explicit ACME product, and while ACME products are always failing in horrific ways they never actually cause long-standing or highly-disabling damage.
- When the lab catches fire and the firefighters break open a cage to free several labcoat clad men (presumably scientists) who act and move like dogs. It is not scary as a little kid, but once you know some history, several very unpleasant instances of human experimentation come to mind.
- There's also a "Quickthaw" variant of the same scene: Imagine showing up for work in NIMH one day and several other scientists who may have been your colleagues capture and forcibly experiment upon you. When it's all said and done you are left as a canine in a human's body. And it isn't a whole lot better to think they might have volunteered for this experiment.
- What if they made you a man in a dog's body?
- Another example of a "Freeze-by-Time" one, in which you have to know a bit about animal behavior, is especially terrifying; animals, even domestic species, don't just go to people naturally. You have to condition and imprint and handle these animals, especially at a young age, before they look up to a human as someone to trust. Wild animals will avoid people, even if they have food. Most people think the alley cats from before were just that; stray cats. But, their trust of a human, and their willingness to follow him, can only mean one thing; these were once someone's pets, and they're experimenting on them. Not only that, but the fact that all you see to try to bring in cats was a bowl of food for them, and they weren't wearing gloves in case the cats scratched them, meant that very docile, pet cats, were what they were after. After all, they've been studying mental health, and this has been known for a while.
- Another thing, NIMH burned down at the end of the movie, that includes whatever notes that were involved in the process of turning the scientists into dogs, sounds good right? Means no one else will go through the process? It also means that any evidence of what happened to the men who worked a NIMH can no longer be used to help them. Sure some of them probably deserved it, but there must have been some of them that didn't.
- There's also a "Quickthaw" variant of the same scene: Imagine showing up for work in NIMH one day and several other scientists who may have been your colleagues capture and forcibly experiment upon you. When it's all said and done you are left as a canine in a human's body. And it isn't a whole lot better to think they might have volunteered for this experiment.
- When the rats and cats are rescued from the burning lab near the end, you will notice (probably long after the credits roll) that none of the animals Martin mutated/spliced were rescued.
