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pardon my nonexistent map-reading, I live on the other side of the globe,

Piston Peak National Park seems to be somewhere in Oregon... or is it upper California/Nevada?? Wait hold on,

(wow, you really did just want to read my ramblings, huh?)

Part One: About Skipper

In the two Planes films, there's always a mentor character, though not the same mentor for both movies. Skipper is a mentor of the first film, a classic hard-edged, gruff old man with trauma and trust issues, who comes around to adoring the rookie racer enough to become that mentoring figure. By the second, however, he takes a very noticeable back step from the main cast, little more than the "helpful grandpa" to Dusty's team of helpful friends pushing him on to his next adventure.

Writers faced the need for a new character to fulfill Skipper's prior role for the sequel, taking place in a new environment where a character like Skipper no longer fits the bill of a useful mentor. More than just the aspect of firefighting being out of his loop of knowledge, he doesn't fit the bill as a mentor for a completely different reason: he's a "completed" character, without more to delve into.

Ideally, you want characters to grow, and develop themselves naturally throughout the length of a story. Skipper, while not what I would not call a fully fleshed-out and "developed" character, is at least one with a character arc – a process in which a struggle exists and is overcome over a period of time. Skipper's arc is begun and completed throughout the period of the first movie: he is cold and reserved, and after shit goes down it's revealed that he is traumatized and hurt, and then overcomes that hurt in order to save this kid he's found a new reason to live for again. There's a clear beginning, middle, and end to his arc, as much as there is with Dusty's overcoming a fear of heights.

But arcs are not full character growth; they are simply obstacles, facets to larger developments within a character's story. For this reason, coupled with his position as a side character and mentor figure, Skipper completes his arc without any further arcs or struggles existing to be built upon. He starts off a grumpy old man, and ends up a significantly less grumpy old man that no longer dislikes Dusty. What more is there to tell here, really? Dusty inspires him, and from here on out, his background development comes from the main character himself. There's no longer a need to make that a focus.

Part Two: Passing the Baton

Right off the bat, for the second film it was clear they were going to need something else to fulfill the role Skipper did. It's a lot easier, continuation-wise, to add a new obstacle, rather than redoing an old and previously completed one. You can't exactly just roll back the clock on Skipper and make him hate Dusty again without reason. (Technically, I guess you could, but that would be weird and boring and taking a back step to rehash the same verse)

The added distance and new environment adds to that need to push Skip back into a silent role, just there for support while someone else holds the baton of being "the mentor". That figure is then taken up by Blade, who's got all the qualifications for this environment to be the right fit of a mentor for Dusty.

On the surface, both Blade and Skipper are extremely similar, because they are both there to fulfill the same type of role: a character to start off not trusting Dusty, who then becomes a sort of teacher to him and helps him further his own journey. Typical mentor figure stuff. But interestingly, there are differences in the two of them that make for a lot more variability across their arcs. This is less so between the two of them directly, and more so in the ways they compare to Dusty.

There's something specific to Blade as a character that works in a way Skipper couldn't have: something we call being a foil.

Part Three: Where Skipper Fell Short

A "foil" refers to a character that mimics or mirrors the main protagonist, someone like them, but different, in a directly opposing way. This is often done in writing to show the main character their own flaws, or the things they do differently that are important to distinguish. You see foils in everything, though mostly it's with rivals of a main character. Here, that foil is in Dusty's mentor.

So what makes Blade a foil? Well I'll start by saying why Skipper isn't one.

The writers of the first film originally had a section to their storyboards, which sheds light on why Skipper knows and does what he does. In it, one night before the races begin, Leadbottom is confronting Skipper, which I believe Dusty ends up overhearing. Leadbottom demeans Skipper's attempts to train Dusty, remarking that "you're trying to make him fly after your dreams."

This was the closest we got to knowing why Skipper knows all this racing stuff, and why he's agreeing to teach it to Dusty. This was his dream, somewhere and at some point – likely, before he was enlisted in the navy and before his major crash. But this was a cut section of the film, one we never saw to completion. The concept is never touched upon anywhere else, never alluded to in what we get of the first movie. The whole portion is essentially scrapped.

Had they gone and pushed this, I might've been compelled to say Skipper could have been something of a foil, or at the very least, a pathway, a version of what Dusty wanted to be that didn't go as planned. Had they hammered that concept home, he'd have been a stronger contender for it. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case for the first movie.

If nothing else, the concept of a foil for Skipper and Dusty is reversed: Skipper doesn't show Dusty where he's fallen short, but rather the other way around. Dusty is surpassing Skipper in doing things even he couldn't. Perhaps this is where the metaphor for mirroring doesn't hit the same way. We don't get development on Dusty's end, we only get it from Skipper's.

So then, let's talk about the part where Dusty receives the same kind of foil he gave Skipper.

Part Four: The Perfect Mirror

From the get-go, we don't know a lot about Blade: we know that he's a battalion chief for Piston Peak, and he's been tasked with getting Dusty trained to be a serviceable firefighter for Propwash Junction. He's stern because he needs to be. He's strict because it's required. However, as we get through the film, something becomes increasingly apparent: he and Dusty are butting heads, far more than to be expected.

And this is where the foil already starts to comes in.

What we know from Dusty during the first film is that he is, plainly, a fucking bonehead. He's faced all his problems head-on with sheer force of will, continuing to push until he can break the ceiling (ironically via breaking through the clouds, in one instance) and simply powering through his problems directly and physically. Exchanging pain for profit I like to joke.

What he's faced with right now, across his firefighter training, is a problem he cannot solve with force. This is what drives him to a final, real self-development, where he is finally beginning to crack under the pressure. His efforts do not work here. On the contrary, they directly make everything worse. This is a pressure that Blade pushes back against very directly, building a tension between them that all falls out in the beginning of the mine scene. This is their most important confrontation.

Blade lays it out to Dusty – that he gets it. He gets the frustration, and knows it firsthand. Not to get cheesy, but that quote "Life doesn't always go the way you expect it," goes HARD when you make that connection between Dusty fighting his inability to cope with failure, and Blade's past inability to cope with his grief. They have both lost something. They have both struggled to come to terms with it. Blade works here where Skipper didn't by looking Dusty in the face and going 'you have to get through it.'

Skipper's story falls just a little bit short of this kind of impact. His past is an explanation for his failings as a teacher, but it doesn't correlate as directly with what Dusty goes through. You can tell they wanted it to – they wanted to try to compare Dusty trying to race regardless of his aircraft model with Skipper having given up flying altogether because of his losses. But the comparison doesn't have enough give. There isn't enough of a spark to light it. Skipper doesn't inspire Dusty here, Dusty inspires him. The crop duster doesn't get much room to develop his own viewpoint here, as he becomes the light everyone else strives for, without the struggle.

So they give him something to struggle with for the next film.

And Blade? He holds the comparison between them point-blank on Dusty and goes "it's get through this, or you'll die. I went through it. I made my own choice. what's yours?"

There's an obvious, if somewhat dark, notion here between them both: you have to keep trying and keep coping, no matter what. You can't kill yourself, and you can't just give up on everything. You've got to keep pressing forward and gritting your teeth and sucking it up and just doing the hard parts. What Skipper shows us is a warning, "don't do this [giving up on it all]. Don't become what I did." On the flip side, Dusty ends up on that end himself, ready to give up himself, and gets Blade's tough love of "If you do give up, you'll let yourself down. You'll let everyone else down. You can't fail, because no one else is coming to save you. So get up."

There's a good reason the entire mineshaft interaction is my favorite part in the entire World of Cars series. It is a very, VERY well done conflict and resolution. We have the breaking point, and Dusty desperately needed that in order to grow as a character. We have the comparison, the foil, the character directly opposing his every move going "quit giving up on yourself". There's a clear connection to dealing with that loss of a sense of self, dealing with grief, loss, failure. And there's overcoming it. There is getting up again and gritting your teeth and hanging the fuck on, even when it gets worse, even when the guy telling you to keep going crashes in front of your eyes. The message still gets across: "Keep going. Keep fighting."

Conclusions

GOD I wish we had more Planes content in general, man. FUCK

This has been a really long talk with Pen. I will now disappear into the ether to concoct more content, and piss off some more website content guidelines while doing it.