Lego’s New Lightning McQueen Set Reinforces My Homunculus Theory

When it comes to the Pixar Cars universe, I think it’s safe to say I have opinions, because I am a very Serious Man with all manner of very important thoughts, and a good number of those thoughts involve attempting to make sense of the surprisingly complex and troubling implications of the Cars universe. I’ve asked the actual people behind the franchise itself many complicated and difficult questions, and I’ve even come up with an overarching theory of my own in an attempt to explain things, The Homunculus Theory. Pixar has never officially acknowledged my theory, but I am encouraged to find that at least one unexpected but highly influential organization seems to have given at least a subtle nod to it: Lego.

Yes, Lego! THAT Lego, the company that may prefer their name to be rendered as LEGO, but whatever, you know who I mean. The makers of those fantastic interlocking plastic bricks that we all know and love. Lego has announced a new Cars-themed set, one that is the main protagonist of the Cars movies, Lightning McQueen. And this set contains a small but extremely significant detail.

It’s not even a detail you can see from the outside of the car, once completed; one would only know of its existence if you were actually building the car or taking it apart. It could have been left out, and hardly anyone would have noticed. But it wasn’t, and the inclusion of these few yet significant pieces suggest, I believe, at least a tacit acceptance of the fundamentals of Homunculus Theory. You know what? Let’s do a quick refresher on the theory:

Homunculus Theory attempts to explain the Cars universe and answer the question of what happened to the humans? All of Cars-universe culture is really human culture: there are human languages, art, culture, traditions, written linguistic systems, everything. There is physical evidence of humans everywhere, too: why would these sentient cars have door handles or windows otherwise? Why would a school bus exist? Why would an RV exist?

An RV is an automobile specifically designed for humans to live in. They make no sense in a world without human beings, and yet there are no human beings in the Cars universe. Look, here’s a clip from the movie showing a car with a mattress strapped to its roof:

Who is that mattress for? Why does a mattress exist in this universe? The cars never use them!

So, Homunculus Theory posits that the cars seen in the Cars movies are really automobile-human hybrids, existing on earth at some time in the future when it became advantageous for humans to be permanently fixed into their cars, which become more like exoskeletons. As I summarized before:

“In this theory, the near-vestigial human body is placed within a specially-designed automobile that becomes the human’s permanent carapace, a new physical body through which the human can perceive and interact with the world. There must be some sort of combined breeding/gestating/manufacturing facilities in the Cars universe that produce these combined human-automotive beings.”

… and that disturbing graphic above there shows how this may look. Now, as time goes on, it’s safe to extrapolate that the human-car hybrid would become ever more integrated, with the barriers between the human inside and the exterior car breaking down, perhaps until the human’s organs just become integrated into the now-inaccessible interior of the car. It seems that the Lego designers believe this path to be accurate, because the Lightning McQueen set includes this:

In #LEGO's upcoming 77255 SpeedChampions #LightningMcQueen set, a few pink pieces are used inside the cabin to construct a mini car brain for McQueen.

????: @Racing_Brick pic.twitter.com/wgwZZYwSSv

— Montgomery "Lightning" McQueen⚡ (@Kerchoo95) November 20, 2025

See that? Those two pink pieces? They’re the car’s brain. The human brain that was part of the homunculus that has evolved to be fully integrated with the car. The Lightning McQueen set isn’t officially released yet, so the building instructions aren’t available on line right now (they should be in January 2026), but I still wanted to confirm this Lego brain with another source. Happily, Lego has sent some pre-release sets to reviewers, so I can get some independent confirmation:

Look at that. While I can’t confirm there’s anything in the official instructions that specifically state this is Lightning McQueen’s actual humanoid brain, I wouldn’t expect Lego to come out and label it that way, anyway. The only other example I can think of where Lego incorporated a very specific yet unexpected organ, in this case a tiger anus, did not have any special labeling called out in the instructions:

So, let’s recap what this means: by including what seems to be a wet, pink, biological-type of brain inside their Lightning McQueen set, Lego is acknowledging that this car – a machine – is capable of human-level cognition because it has a human brain inside. And the only rational way to accept that this car has a human brain and is surrounded by evidence of human culture, language, political boundaries, and so on – is to acknowledge that, at some point, human beings had to be incorporated into these cars, imbuing them with life. Essentially, the Homunculus Theory.

Thank you, Lego, for being brave enough to acknowledge this unsettling truth about the Cars universe, even in this very subtle way. Now I just need to figure out what’s up with those teeth and that tongue.