WARNING: To avoid large blocks of spoilered-out text, this page is spoilers off. You have been warned.
Sully the Snitch
Why would Sully tell Dean Hardscrabble he cheated on the final test? It would likely have just made things worse for Mike and the rest of Oozma Kappa; she could well have refused to let any of them into the scaring program because they hadn't fairly passed the tryouts.
He wanted to convince her that he held full responsibility for cheating and that they shouldn't fail because of him. After all, they did perform well during the final, something Dean Hardscrabble must have taken into account to not expel them. What's more is that the university was bound to find out about Sully's cheating before long, since the simulator was very obviously broken into and sabotaged. And for all the school knows, any one of the Oozma Kappas could've done it, so they all would've been punished.
This is a very common scare tactic (no pun intended) of authority figures whenever they have narrowed down a small group where one of the members has committed a crime, but they don't know who exactly committed it. If the guilty party comes forward willingly, they'll receive a lesser punishment. If they're exposed by one of the others ratting on them, they receive a harsher punishment. If no one fesses up, they all get harshly punished.
The Time Passage
How long did it take for Mike and Sulley to become fully-acknowledged scarers?
Disney released "Disney Parks Scare Cards" (like the ones Mike mentioned in the film and we saw in the credits) and the cards for Sulley and Randall have them each in their 10th year as scarers with their scare totals matching what we saw in Monsters Inc.: Sulley at 99,479 and Randall at 99,351. So we can assume it took Mike and Sulley approx. 3½ years to reach the scare floor.
Continuity Errors betwixt M.U and Monsters Inc.
Shouldn't they know her already?
At the end we see Roz (as a member of the CDA) take Mike and Sully away saying "I'll be watching these two." This means that before they knew her, they got a glimpse of her. Here's the question: When Mike and Sully started working at MI, they didn't raise an eyebrow at the slug woman with a gravelly voice who started around the same time as them?
Roz was talking to Oozma Kappa, not them. They might never have met Roz before she started working at the factory. With the above estimate of them working there for 5 years before actually making it to the scare floor - nothing says Roz started working at the same time, and they wouldn't have had any contact with her for years even if she did. She was one of a dozen people that arrested them, and all they saw were faceless monsters in yellow suits.
Shouldn't they remember this dude?
This movie shows that the Yeti knew Mike and Sully when they were working in the mail room. However, when they meet in Monsters, Inc. there is no implication that they met before.
Mike, Sulley, and the Abominable Snowman likely simply forgot. After all, Yeti seemed like he was a supervisor when he talked to the duo at the end of the movie, so even though they worked together they might not interact often enough to remember each other.
For what it's worth, they probably did recognize him in the first movie, we just didn't see the said event happen on screen. After all, it was a clean jump cut from the Snowman's debut to them in the cave, so we can assume that one of them went "Hey, I remember you!" in the interval.
Avoiding the spiky balls
The first test in the Scare Games is to run across a dark hallway to the light at the other end, avoiding spiky balls that monsters got from the human world that are laced with toxins and that give them an allergic reaction - in this case, swelling. However, we know and are shown that coming into contact with a human isn't toxic, so how does that work?
The balls aren't from the human world. They didn't have human tainted stuff lying around, so they used something from their world - specifically, they said they couldn't actually use human items, so they had the boys in the lab cook up something for them.
How to work through the ranks
As shown at the start of MU, going to University and getting a degree is needed/heavily preferred to be a scarer. So how, exactly, did Mike and Sully climb the ranks? After all, a cafeteria worker at a nuclear power plant wouldn't be able to become a nuclear scientist no matter how hard they work.
First off, scaring is a partially creative industry where a degree is less important. Case in point: a great number of programmers in the video game industry are self-taught and many in general don't have a degree in a design field. Therefore, it's not quite the same as nuclear physics where a degree is essential. That said, Mike and Sulley did go through Uni, even if they flunked, and this means they would've had experience regardless. The ending credits showed that eventually there were scare try-outs inside the plant itself. By then Mike and Sully would have worked through the ranks, and more importantly, managed to network pretty much the entire plant, which would have allowed them a chance at the interviews. Also, remember that during MI there's an energy crisis. Maybe at the time of MU, the entry requirements for scarers were strict, but you could easily see them relaxing more and more as time went on and energy grew scarcer. Heck, the opening scene of MI has untrained monsters trying out for scaring positions.
Shouldn't they be using Adults
If an adult scream is also a great source of energy, why not situate some doors next to rollercoasters and theme parks? It's demonstrated the scream doesn't have to be out of fear, since Boo screaming with excitement during the climax of the previous movie manage to briefly power the door the gang was riding. Seems a lot more efficient than scaring kids.
There aren't usually doors near roller coasters, so they won't be able to connect to objects like those close enough. Admittedly perhaps setting up a door attached to a haunted house could be effective...
We never get much of an idea of how much the monsters know about human civilization, so it's possible they're not aware that roller coasters and theme parks exist.
Or if they do, they might think in MU that the screams won't count if they're not screams of fear.
Based on how the adult screams blew the capacity of a lab's entire stock of canisters through a closed door, it may be that the energy obtained from full-grown humans is too volatile to be bottled commercially, or even to use at all. Same as we don't use liquid nitroglycerine to fuel cars.
A scare job at an amusement park is a disaster waiting to happen. People would notice the big scary monsters running amok - especially if it's during operating hours.
The suggestion isn't that they scare people at an amusement park, the suggestion is that they collect the natural screams that come from them.
Varied Architecture
Why is everything in the monster world designed for average-sized monsters roughly as large as humans? Both movies showed that there are monsters building-sized.
Maybe they have separate facilities for both types of monsters. After all, it would be incredibly inconvenient for human-sized monsters to have gigantic locker rooms.
What would happen to the Scarers if they switched to humor?
What happens to the universities after the monster world starts to use laughs instead of screams for energy? Is the scaring school replaced with a comedy school?
Most likely, but remember that the conversion to laughter didn't happen overnight. Other schools exist, and each one would convert at a faster pace than others. While the Scaring curriculum was the most popular and prestigious of MU's programs, it was made painfully (at least for Sully and Mike) clear that it wasn't their only program. Others like Fear Tech might need to change their names, but, likely, all they needed to do was just come up with a new program and re-allocate rooms rather than completely uplift the school.
FWIW when the film was in theaters, the Monsters Inc. Laugh Floor attraction at Walt Disney World's preshow was updated to include an advertisement for Monsters University, which is indeed now a comedy school.
There ain't anything to say they wouldn't use both.
The Scare Challenges
In the first challenge of the Scare Games, Oozma Kappa came in last place and stayed in the game because another team was disqualified. This implies only one team can be eliminated per round. So in the second round, what would have happened if more than one team was caught? What if Oozma Kappa hadn't gotten their flag? Who would have been eliminated, them or the team the librarian threw out?
There are several possibilities. The team who was caught first is out, whilst the others get a handicap in the next test, or the teams that failed undergo a tiebreaker contest to determine the winner, whilst the other teams proceed straight to the next levels, or the ones who performed the best go through, whilst the worst is kicked out.
Since one team was caught and Oozma Kappa never was, presumably Oozma Kappa would have simply had to continue with the event and go back into the library after their flag. Judging by the elimination in the first game, only one team can be eliminated per event, which makes sense. After all, if more than one team was eliminated in one event, they'd have to skip one or more events, and where's the fun be in that?
Continuing the above headscratcher, in the fourth challenge of the Scare Games, Roar Omega Roar and Oozma Kappa won the challenge by avoiding the monsters who needed to find them in the hide-n-seek game, resulting in the elimination of the Eta Hiss Hiss team as they chose too easy hiding spots. However, Mike and Sulley also chose hiding spots where they could have been easily detected. If that was the case, assuming the other members of Oozma Kappa and the members of Eta Hiss Hiss we didn't see being detected made it out from the house, then which team would have stayed on the game?
Just like the answers above, it's possible that the team with more detected members was the one kicked out of the competition and the one with fewer detected members stayed.
Regarding the fourth challenge also, why was Randall allowed to compete in that challenge if his camouflaging abilities gave him an unfair advantage? He could camouflage himself all the time he wanted and no monster seekers would have ever detected him...
Remember the games aren't supposed to be fair; the scare games and ultimately Monsters University is to train your scaring skills. So yes, Randall has an unfair advantage, but it's good that he has that advantage and they are encouraging him to make good use of it.
It's a natural ability, not a cheat. Banning Randall would probably be equivalent to banning Michael Jordan from the NBA on the basis that he makes other players look bad with his exceptional gifts and talent. Plus, some monsters can probably smell Randall or sense his body heat. Add to that they let Scott compete, and yet he never makes a sound when he walks.
Conflict of interests?
Monsters U is most likely affiliated with or owned by the Waternoose family, considering they share the same logo and brand name. If this is the case, why are monsters that went to rival schools, such as Fear Tech, ending up working at Monsters Inc.?
You can get a job at a corporation that did not sponsor (or own) your school. It is probably easier to get a job at Monster's Inc. through MU, but it might not be the only way.
Toxic humans
If the toys and clothing of children not being toxic were unknown at this point, how did Mike bring himself to wind the doll (and touch other things) when he was scaring the adults at the summer camp? If they touched all of that stuff, wouldn't the CDA be more concerned with them and do more than just haul them away? Even if he did it because he had to, he still should have acted like he touched some kind of bio-hazard.
Not everything in the human world is presumed to be toxic, only things that children have handled extensively. Scarers who venture through Doors into human bedrooms don't have to worry about touching the floor, bed frames, etc. Possibly Mike wrapped his hand in a garbage bag from the cabin wastebasket, or some leaves snatched from a bush outside the window, before touching the doll.
We could have avoid all of this
Acting as assistant/coach to a scarer is a viable career (as seen during the school trip at the start of the movie). So why does no one suggest this as a good path for Mike after he's repeatedly shown his knowledge? Even when he gets kicked out of scaring he goes straight to can development.
Mike would have viewed it as becoming second fiddle to a scarer. He wanted to prove that he was scary- it was his dream. It's like telling someone who dreams of being a concert pianist that they should become a piano tuner instead.
Does the coach position even exist officially? During the opening montage and when Mike breaks into Monsters Inc. to show OK the Scare Floor there are assistants but no individual coaches; the scaring major at MU seems to indicate at that point scarers were expected to be good at both technique and analysis; even during the first movie all of those other technician monsters seemed to lean a lot more towards "assistant" than "trainer". Mike's "coaching" was probably a personal thing between them.
Beware the crying child
Why is a crying child alerting their parents such a bad thing? It wouldn't produce any energy, of course. But would screaming not still cause a parent to check up on their child?
Maybe since the scream is collected, the sound is dampened/absorbed also and doesn't travel out of the room.
If your child is crying, you try to find out what is upsetting them so you can get rid of it, therefore you are more likely to search the room. If a child is screaming, it is more likely to be written off as a nightmare or imagining things. And on the other end, if a scarer made a child cry, they'd have to get out so they wouldn't be seen by the parents and they wouldn't gather any energy, effectively wasting time and the use of a door.
More on the Scare Challenges
In the final Scare Games challenge when Mike finds out that the test dummy was rigged, we see that it was only set to the lowest difficulty during Mike’s turn. The rest were set at the highest. So, just how was the robot still able to rack up perfect scores when Mike went on to test the robot to see if it was fixed? Logically, the robot would have reset the order at the end if it was to be in perfect condition, so just why was it able to produce two or three perfect scream scares in a row when the other settings were set to the highest?
Given the toggles seemed to be old eighties-style physical sliders, it seemed likely they have to be manually reset after the last round, otherwise, it stays on the last setting.
Speaking of the last event in the scare games, how did no one notice Sully sabotaging the scare dummy in the final event of the competition? They show us that there is a live feed inside the set, and no one picked up on it? It even looks like the case was bashed open.
At one point, he lay against the side of the bed with his front facing the camera and his back to the bed. He adjusted the machine behind his back, and nobody noticed because his hands were behind his back.
But wouldn't someone cleaning up the arena afterward realize that one of the panels has been busted open?
They may very well would have, but since we never saw that What If? as Mike discovered it before anyone else did we'll never know.
Again during the final round of Scare Games, no one, not even Dean Hardscrabble, seems to find it suspicious that Mike's not-particularly-scary scare gets him the highest possible points, even though none of the other competitors (most of whom were scarier than Mike) managed to do that?
Maybe they were too into the Games to notice? That's why the host of the U.K. version Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? didn't notice one of the contestants cheating.
The Slug Dude
How come that one slug student took so long to get to class, but other slug monsters like Roz can move around pretty quickly? Why doesn't he just get a scooter?
Roz and a few other slug monsters are bigger than that one, if not lighter, thus they could clear more ground without much need for speed.
The real question is: how did that slug student manage to finish the previous levels of education everyone has to before going to college?
Home-schooled?
Shouldn't he not have braces
Why does Mike wear his braces for so long? Heck, why does he have them at all? The worse his teeth were, the scarier he would look, right? So what's the point?
Not necessarily. Shiny sharp teeth are just as scary, if not scarier, than terrible-looking teeth, because it's a signifier that you're going to get bitten. So it's actually in a scarers' best interest to keep their teeth in good shape.
What's "interference"?
Shouldn't knocking your opponent off a wall count as some kind of interference? For that matter, if the roar was so loud, then shouldn't Randall's fake kid have been affected by it?
Could count as part of Loophole Abuse, but also could count towards real experience in the field. If you are going to climb walls as part of your scare technique, you are going to have to deal with loud noises knocking you off. And it was stated that the dummies are set to the highest setting, which means a very heavy sleeper. There have been plenty of people who sleep through earthquakes...
Deputies are useless
Towards the end of the movie, where all the sheriff's deputies are looking for what turns out to be Sulley and Mike inside the cabin, why is it that none of them are armed with anything more than a flashlight? Even if they thought it was a bear or some other woodland creature, you would think that they would at least have a taser or something to stun the creature with. Even if one assumes they had one, holstered, shouldn't they pull them out when they see claw marks?
It depends on what one thinks. If they're under the impression that they're simply investigating the aftermath of a terrifying event and the threat is gone then no - they might not see a point in drawing a weapon. In addition, the cabin was so dark that they couldn't see anything. It would've been really dangerous to start shooting without anything resembling a good shot at what they were aiming for, especially as their anxiety at the situation was slowly evolving into terror.
The Disney+ subtitles mark them as forest rangers. Obviously cops are present since the lights were seen, but rangers might have been sent to search the woods for any sign of what the kids had seen too, and they don't carry weapons.
How would that work?
We know that monsters can be born with both female and male heads, as seen in a newspaper Roz holds in the first movie. So would such a monster be allowed to join a fraternity, a sorority, or neither?
The newspaper doesn't say the monsters have female and male heads, just five heads. But assuming there are monsters with multi-gender heads, it would likely ultimately depend on what the monster heads agree upon and which fraternity would accept them, to say the least. Or, if not, it could be like the transgender issue in human society.
Why can't the male head join a frat and the female head join a sorority? The Terri/ys clearly expected to be allowed to compete in the Scare Games as two people, so some situations must not follow the "one body = one player" rule.
Because you usually live in a frat/sorority house with the other members.
IIRR, Terri didn't really say that they ID'd as male or female (or anything strictly as either), just that their version of the name "Terry" is spelled with a feminine variant ("Terri" usually being short for somethin' like "Teresa").
How did he get that far?
How did Mike even get that far if he's not scary? That's like someone getting a basketball scholarship when they're only four feet tall.
He did well with his homework and got all the answers right. It was only when the exam came that he'd have to do scaring, and that's when he would have failed. But even regarding that, the issue with Mike is that he still believes himself to be scary in appearance when he isn't. That is ultimately why he failed while the rest of Oozma Kappa managed to continue their degree.
The Toys on the floor
The only event's conditions that you could logically guess at in the Scare Games is the scare simulator at the end. ROR is implied to all be past their freshman years (otherwise they would have had to take the final exam with Mike and Sully). So why is Reggie Jacobs caught so off-guard by the toys on the floor?
Might have been just pure overconfidence considering what he thought he was up against.
If he's been in the games before, maybe they used a different setup last time and he was expecting a repeat. His training was made useless in an instant.
Different scares and different programs
If the Scare School puts so much emphasis on delivering the most appropriate scare, then wouldn't it make sense for scaring companies to assign specific children to the monsters most likely to scare them?
They do assign specific monsters with certain kids. Hence why Boo had her drawing of Randall and why Sulley said in the last installment "Randall is your monster, huh?". But it helps to train scarers to be able to scare many different kids. They'd prefer as versatile a scarer as possible. This also makes sense as they can realistically only scare a specific child once a night, whereas being able to scare many children is much more efficient.
For that matter, how could the companies collect information on no less than thousands of children without being detected?
There's a deleted scene where they have the smallest bug-sized monsters fly through the keyhole, take pictures of everything, and fly back through to their class. They then have to answer questions to deduce the child's personality, and thus, their fears.
Why they didn't they school somewhere else?
Why, after being expelled from MU, could Mike and Sully simply not enroll at Feartech? Okay, it's not the university of their dreams, but it's still obviously a good enough school to produce scarers. Why did they HAVE to start at the bottom as Janitors?
Their reputation that they cheated in exams, caused a scandal, and potentially almost revealed the monster world to humans would likely cause FT to decline to accept them. Either that or financial issues.
True, but couldn't Dean Hardscrabble write a letter of recommendation? After all, she admitted she was impressed by the duo at the end.
She could also not. Being impressed doesn't mean you have positive thoughts about someone.
Considering Sully and Mike heisted Fear Tech's mascot, they both knew that there was no way they would get accepted anyway. And even if they did, they'd be dead men (monsters?) walking.
Shouldn't Frat houses be on the campus
How/why is Oozma Kappa permitted to have their fraternity in a normal neighborhood off-campus instead of on Frat Row? It's also curious that Hardscrabble later tells Sully to leave campus (and later Mike), even though it seems Oozma Kappa lives in an off-campus neighborhood.
Frat houses don't necessarily have to be on campus, just near campus. Frat Row is probably reserved for higher status frats, ones that have sponsorships, etc. As long as the house itself meets whatever standards the school has for frat houses, it can be one. And once a house is considered a frat house, it's officially part of the school, meaning if you get kicked out of school, you're kicked out of the frat.
That number ain't right
At the very start of the movie when Mike was a little boy, the field trip teacher counts 19 children plus Mike, making twenty. However, when they split into pairs for the expedition, Mike ended up on his own and had to go with the teacher, which would logically only happen if they had an even number.
The kids would rather go around in threes than be seen with Mike.
Maybe one of the students has two heads? The teacher counts them as two separate entities, but because they share one body, it's not possible (or at least not ideal) for Mike to 'pair up' with just one head while the other already has a partner.
Evacuating the cabin
Why was the cabin evacuated and surrounded by deputies by the time Sulley got there? It was being treated as an emergency even though the entire point of the preceding scene was to show that the girls weren't scared of Mike.
Even if the kids go "There was this weird one-eyed frog thing and a bear inside, LOL!", the counselors are going to order an alarm and security check to make sure there's no chance of harm.
Mike's Scariness or lacktherof
So, Mike is completely, 100% not Scary? To anyone? At all? How?! Given the diverse number of children worldwide with many different fears, as well as the fact that some are just scared of everything, it seems an overgeneralization to say Mike is not scary.
Maybe it's an overgeneralization, but even though there are kids with panphobia they're few and far between. It's no good for Mike if he can only work with one kid out of a million. Word of God elaborates that monsters like Mike and Oozma Kappa lack a traditional build. But while Oozma Kappa was able to adjust their "faults" into effective Scaring techniques (with Mike's help), Mike, however, lacked a certain "spark," implying there wasn't much about his physical appearance or traits to be resourceful about and convert into the effective Scaring technique. The animators even designed Squishy to be shorter and "cuter" than Mike to emphasize it wasn't physical appearance that doomed Mike, it just was his lack of spark. Whether this worked out, YMMV.
Honestly, if you woke up and saw a walking ball with one eye and a giant mouth next to your bed, would you not be terrified? Especially as a little kid. And remember, it's not a cartoon, it's fully realistic.
If the scene with the kids suggested anything, Mike is more "psychologically humorous" than he would be scary. The other monsters were scary but in different ways beyond appearance. The other monsters had something else that made them scary: Squishy had his stealth, Don could wall-crawl, Terri and Terry using the combo of dance and magic tricks, Sulley has his size and roar, and Art, well, he's shifty. Hell, besides Randall, the other monsters looked aesthetically cute, funny, or in-betwixt, while Mike just didn't have it. As mentioned before, other monsters had a spark of being scary but Mike's spark was being humorous.
Randall's glasses
Randall ditches his glasses, squints, and looks confused, showing that he needed them (plus, they're huge), then proceeds to help Mike which involves reading a textbook, and has no trouble. How?
If he's nearsighted, he wouldn't need glasses for reading, only for seeing things that are further away.
Depending on the size of the font/text
How Scary is Sully
Just why is Sulley the only one who's considered scary out of everyone in Oozma Kappa, anyway? He's a big furry thing. He looks like a cuddly toy.
Or a kitty...
Have you seen his roar face? Or heard his roar? Sulley looks friendly because we've seen him in daily life. At night, as a kid, with no idea what he is, one would be terrified of this screaming beast from nowhere.
He resembles a huge, hairy yeti with a mouth full of sharp teeth. When he isn't being polite, professional, kind-hearted or a goofball, it's shown (in the first movie especially) that he can look very frightening and vicious - a creature that could maul you to death in a matter of moments.
The Door to the Human World
So if it's possible to power up a door from the human world, and a powered-up door can work even when in storage and lying on the ground, then shouldn't there be at least a few instances of a situation where, as a result of a bunch of people screaming for some monster-unrelated reason near a door, people would accidentally bridge into the monster world? And also, if a kid's laugh is so ridiculously powerful, then wouldn't that result in the same situation as well?
It's only possible for a portal to open if the door is in a station on the monster world-side. Also, remember how powerful the scream (from multiple adult humans) had to be to open a door in a station from our world's side. The chances of all those conditions being satisfied by chance are low.
Locking up the fear cannister
Why would Dean Hardscrabble keep a full scream canister in an area where it could be easily stolen/knocked over? Screams are a powerful and potentially dangerous energy source. It's like keeping a fuel rod on display.
Hardscrabble merely assumed that none of her students would be clumsy enough to knock it over. It's not exactly the center of attention - Sulley stumbled back a good few feet before he bumped into it and knocked it over. The canisters were also shown to be pretty heavy, so it's not like anyone but the bigger monsters could've knocked it over, and they would've had to be clumsy, careless, or malicious to allow it to happen.
You're made the wrong person, Sulley
Why was Sulley mad at Mike for failing his exam? He started the fight that led to Hardscrabble kicking him out of the major, and he was going to fail regardless since he didn't study.
Because Sulley at that point was still a moody, overconfident jock, unable to recognize his faults. One aspect of his character development is him realizing that he's a one-trick pony that should have tried harder to make his scaring abilities more diverse and take the course seriously.
Quite the transformation
How did hard-working bookworm Michael Wazowski turn into too-lazy-for-paperwork Wazowski?
The reason Mike worked so hard during his time at MU was that he was striving for a career he wanted. Paperwork OTOH is repetitive and boring, so it's something he doesn't like and does not concentrate too hard on. Also, his problem with the paperwork wasn't that he didn't get his paperwork in, it was that he didn't file it correctly, giving the various departments the wrong colored papers. There's probably a spot in each department marked "Wazowski (and others)" for misfiled paperwork thanks to that. And finally, the simple reason: it's been 10 years between the events of this movie and the last one. People change; they get lazy.
He is hard working in the sequel, he simply chooses to direct his efforts and energy elsewhere.
Randall's glasses 2
Why doesn't Randall get contact lenses? We see Mike wearing a giant one in the first film, so clearly they exist.
Maybe he'd rather have to squint than potentially poke himself in the eye.
Maybe he found that squinting makes him look more sinister.
Randall ditches the glasses because they didn't camouflage with the rest of him and remained visible. Perhaps the same would happen with contacts, having visible lenses floating around and making light reflections unless he kept his eyes closed. Mike doesn't have any issue with being invisible, and for him wearing a contact lens is more comfortable than a framed lens that would essentially surround his whole body due to his shape.
This ain't a video game
Why does the scare machine at the end have difficulty settings? Presumably, all the students are supposed to be judged equally.
The simulators used in the event were just generic scare simulators, designed to be used by both the most experienced scarers and new scare students fresh into school. It makes perfect sense for them to have different settings.
Working their way up
So, Sulley and Mike get off the ground at MI as mailmen first, and then move up to other blue-collar positions, including at one point being janitors. Given this, why is Mike shown to be dismissive towards the janitor duo that appears in Monsters, Inc.? Doesn't working in those shoes yourself usually endow you with a more empathetic attitude towards those working in the position now?
Keyword 'usually'. Not everyone would necessarily be inclined to care about the little guys just because they once held a menial job themselves. Since working his way to the top was only Mike's second choice, one can imagine him trying his best to forget about all that hard labor he had to put in before he became a scare assistant. Also, he was only dismissive of them once, when he thought they were distracting Sulley from his work — it's possible that under less "strenuous" circumstances, he tends to be a bit friendlier. The two janitors hardly seem put off by his telling them to get lost, hinting that it's not that big of a deal to them or that he hasn't made a habit of saying it. Alternately, maybe he remembers perfectly well that he and Sulley used to work alongside those two, but he just never got along with them.
The Deal with the Dean
How did Johnny become aware of Mike's deal with Dean Hardscrabble? When they were about to face off at the final round in the Scare Games, Johnny's last words to him: "Don't take the loss too hard. You never belonged here anyway." suggests this.
Mike made the deal with Hardscrabble right in front of him. Johnny was there because that's when Mike asks Randall to join Oozma Kappa and we learn he joined ROR.
Scaring Teenagers
What made the monsters think that teenagers couldn't be scared? Pretty sure that even they would be easily frightened by them.
It's not that they wouldn't be scared, it's that they wouldn't be consistently scared, similar to adults. You'd be able to scare them maybe 3, 5 times at the most before they started reacting with violence rather than screams. Thus, the monsters don't bother.
Draggin' the whole team down
Why shoot Mike and the rest of the Oozma Kappa team down? Sulley doesn't have to tamper with the simulator settings and Mike would have won the Scare Games and readmitted to the Scare program - I mean, Mike put in his best at the final round, everyone can hear that. It's just that he is not at his peak performance at the camp cabin after his argument with Sulley. Eventually, Mike would lose interest in becoming a scarer later on and apply for a scare assistant position at Monsters Inc. upon graduation. There are multiple career opportunities available. You don't have to be a psychologist after you major in psychology. Similarly, monsters don't have to be scarers after they major in scaring.
Just how?!
How exactly do Mike and Sulley pull off those effects at the end? How do they get things to move around without touching them, like they have some sort of telepathy?
This is subtly explained visually at the end of the scene: Mike was using a fishing line to yank down the beds and move around the doll. He uses that same line to trip the adults.
in the first movie. So would such a monster be allowed to join a fraternity, a sorority, or neither?