Set a few years after the first movie, the appliances have been busy assisting their Master while he's busy working at a veterinary clinic. While working on his thesis, his computer crashes due to a computer virus and he ends up losing all his hard work. Toaster leads the rest of the appliances to try and recover the Master's thesis with the help of Ratso the rat, and they soon come across a sick and outdated computer named Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein is responsible for the computer virus as he's been trying to alert the other appliances of a plan to sell all the animals at the clinic to Tartarus Labs for experiments, orchestrated by the Master's jealous assistant Mack. With the wellbeing of both the animals and their Master at stake, it's up to Toaster and the rest of the appliances to save the day.
The Brave Little Toaster To The Rescue contains examples of
- Abhorrent Admirer: Mack is this towards Chris. She is not in the least bit flattered.
- And That's Terrible: Mack, who even states he's "so bad".
- Animal Talk: Suddenly possible between the appliances and Rob's pets.
- Art Evolution: While the original film isn't exactly known for stunning animation, it still looked like a feature film (the director and several key animators traveled to the overseas studio to supervise the Taiwanese staff). The animation here is a more economical TV level of quality, being handled entirely by the overseas studio.
- Babies Ever After: Inverted. At the beginning of the movie, Rob's cat Maisie has become a new mother to three kittens.
- Bad People Abuse Animals: Exaggerated for Mack who takes pride in abusing the animals at the clinic. He's all too happy to sell them to Tartarus Labs.
- Big Damn Heroes: When Murgatroyd and the other animals kidnapped by Mack and his assistant Jim are taken in their truck, Murgatroyd's glass tank falls and breaks on the way, freeing him. He then climbs under Jim's leg, scaring him and causing him to stop the truck. Mack and Jim are arrested by the police soon after and Murgatroyd and the other animals are returned to Rob's veterinary clinic.
- Book Ends: "I'm Into Something Good" plays at the beginning and the end of the movie.
- Bottle Episode: Most of the entire film takes place inside the veterinary clinic, which is unusual for the main characters to stay in the same place since they did go on many adventures in the other two films.
- Brick Joke: At the beginning of the movie, Chris quips that "I'm Into Something Good" sounds like a song that would play on Rob's old radio. At the end, after Radio is fixed, they turn Radio on and he plays the exact same song.Chris: Hopefully that station will be out of range where we're going.
- Call-Back: Just like the other two movies, this one opens with an oldies song (in this case, "I'm Into Something Good" by Herman's Hermits). Unlike the others, however, this song is actually significant to the plot, as it reflects on Rob and Chris's relationship.
- Carnivore Confusion: Murgatroyd (a snake), who due to his good heart, never dares to eat his animal friends especially Ratso. Ratso makes a rude comment towards Murgatroyd on his snake hiss and causes him to be repressed by the rat.
- Character Development: Rob (aka The Master) was merely a goal to meet in the first movie. Here, his career as a vet, as well as his relationship with Chris, are given their own beefier subplots.
- Characterization Marches On: Kirby. While still not exactly an upbeat character, he is considerably nicer, and any traces of his grumpiness are virtually non-existent.
- Covers Always Lie: The VHS cover depicts the climactic scene of the appliances chasing after the truck full of the stolen animals, including Radio who was not present in that scene because he sacrificed his only tube to save Wittgenstein.
- Cyber Green: Wittgenstein's computer virus is portrayed as bright green gremlin-like beings made of pure electricity, running about his circuits and destroying his vacuum tubes in a green explosion.
- Dark Reprise: During "Chomp and Munch", Wittgenstein sings the chorus of "Super Highway" as the visuals portray him being shut down and put into storage.
- Disney Death:
- Wittgenstein and Radio, the former by burning out his WFC-11-12-55 tube, the latter by physically removing his, and both of them recovered by being provided with a new tube.
- After the appliances and Ratso stop the truck, they check on the kidnapped pets. At first, it looks like Maisie got crushed to death by a wooden crate. It turns out she was just knocked out cold for a moment.
- Escaped from the Lab: Though the trauma from his torture leaves his memory fuzzy, Sebastian was either rescued from Tartarus Labs by Rob or at least escaped and was later found by him.
- Fat Bastard: Mack.
- Forgotten Anniversary: What kicks off Rob and Chris's subplot is that Rob is too wrapped up in his thesis and graduation to remember their anniversary. It comes to a head when he yells at her for using Kirby to clean kitty litter and she tells him that she hopes they'll be very happy together. They eventually patch things up when he passive mentions their first time meeting, showing that he does remember.
- Good Counterpart: The computers that sing about the Super Highway are basically friendly versions of the newer appliances that sing Cutting Edge from the first movie.
- Gory Discretion Shot: Happens when Sebastian shows what the animal testers did to his arm.
- Heroic Sacrifice: Radio gets one of these.
- Irony: In the first movie, Radio almost gets his tube taken out at Elmo's and barely gets saved before that can happen. In To The Rescue, he removes it voluntarily.
- Insistent Terminology: Rob doesn't like to refer to the animal's cages as such, getting angry at Mack for not calling them "units".
- Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Ratso the rat.
- Lighter and Softer: While the stakes are almost as high (saving animals from an inhumane testing lab) as the first film, the film is otherwise far less unabashedly somber and macabre than its predecessor.
- Lovable Lizard: Murgatroyd is a kind-hearted snake whom Rob rescued from a mongoose. He is friends with Toaster and the other animals and never eats any of them, despite being a predator species.
- MacGuffin: The WFC-11-12-55 vacuum tube, which powers Radio, is the core of Wittgenstein's systems, and is rare and discontinued.
- Mad Scientist Laboratory: Tartarus Labs is apparently infamous for performing cruel animal testing such that Rob is horrified when he discovers his animals are being shipped there. They are additionally the ones responsible for skinning Sebastian's arm.
- Master Computer: Wittgenstein is a downplayed but benevolent example. Once provided with Radio's tube, he shows off why he was once one of the most powerful computers on Earth, forming the titular rescue in seconds, calculating everything so it's "boo-boo-proof", and orchestrating the whole thing, taking control of multiple computer systems throughout the campus to do so, all while recovering Rob's thesis.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Rivals!: Radio and Ratso end up breaking the WFC-11-12-55 tube after a struggle to see who should get the honor of putting it into Wittgenstein.
- Obviously Evil: With a name like "Tartarus Labs", you know there's nothing good about them.
- Race Lift: Downplayed. Chris is Ambiguously Brown in the first movie and
Word of God says she and Rob are a biracial couple. Here she just looks like a swarthy Caucasian. - Reptiles Are Abhorrent: Averted. Murgatroyd is a good friend of Toaster and the other animals. Notably, he never attempts to eat Ratso (a rat), despite the latter's rude comments about him.
- Snakes Are Sinister: Averts this with Murgatroyd, who is a good-natured and polite friend of Toaster and the others.
- Snake Versus Mongoose: Murgatroid the snake describes how Rob once saved him from a mongoose. In the United States.
- Sssssnake Talk: Murgatroyd.
- Totem Pole Trench: During the "Remember that Day" segment, Kirby and Murgatroyd the Snake do something like this to make themselves look like Rob. This was another instance where the participants were not trying to fool anyone, but merely just playing around.
- Troll: Radio plays Spike Jones's cover of "Cocktails For Two," which famously begins as the original, gentle ballad before suddenly becoming a loud, wacky novelty song, to help the animals sleep. He's promptly shut up when everyone throws trash at him in anger.
- Vomit Discretion Shot: Kirby, after Chris uses him to clean kitty litter. When she and Rob leave following an argument, he darts out of the room and can be heard retching in the hallway.
- Writers Cannot Do Math: Wittgenstein said he was down there for 4,999,450,852,312 nanoseconds, or "since that awful day when transistors were invented." The thing is, the number he gives is only about 83 minutes, and considering that the internet's already invented, this really makes the gap between the two dates really doesn't feel like only an hour. Once can presume it's a result of his steady degradation from spending so much time without maintenance.
