John Ratzenberger’s five best Pixar roles
If you’re a fan of Pixar, then you’ve heard John Ratzenberger’s voice a lot, as the former Cheers star is something of a good luck charm for the animation studio, having appeared in 24 of their feature films (including projects due to be released in 2026); that’s 77% of their total output.
Ratzenberger’s association with Pixar goes back to its very early days, when he became good friends with John Lasseter, a driving force in the studio’s initial success. Unfortunately, if you know anything about Lasseter, then you know that this is quite worrying.
The actor’s own political views (he’s a big Donald Trump guy, I’m afraid) and his criticism of Pixar’s “political correctness” in recent years are one giant kick to the childhood. Instead of feeling sad about yet another hero falling to the dark side, let’s instead celebrate the many wonderful characters he has given us.
This is absolutely not an endorsement of the man himself, and that’s the great thing about animation: you can just pretend that his voice belongs to somebody else.
Five of John Ratzenberger’s best Pixar roles:
Hamm: The ‘Toy Story’ Series (Various, 1995–2026)
Where better to start than the first time Pixar fans heard Razenberger’s voice?
In the studio’s groundbreaking debut feature, Toy Story, we meet a number of characters that would go on to become icons, and one of them is Hamm, a piggy bank routinely used by Andy as the villain of his childhood fantasies. His real coming-out party is Toy Story 2, however, when he joins the rescue mission to save Woody, delivering the best line in the whole film, when he questions Buzz’s driving in the Pizza Planet truck.
Over the course of four films and three decades, Hamm went from a funny side character to one of the symbols of the entire franchise. His dry, sarcastic mannerisms are always a lot of fun, especially when he plays off Mr Potato Head. Ratzenberger is one of a few actors to have appeared in every Toy Story movie, following the sad deaths of Jim Varney and Don Rickles. He is set to reprise his role in the upcoming Toy Story 5, which could be the making or the breaking of the entire series. Given the box office success of the four previous movies, this one could add some serious digits to the star’s already impressive numbers.
Yeti: ‘Monsters, Inc’ (Pete Docter, 2001)
When Mike Wazowski mentions a list of monsters who were banished to the human world early in Monsters, Inc, it comes across as little more than a funny joke that nobody expected to pay off so brilliantly in the movie’s third act, when Mike and Sully find themselves cast adrift, they run into none other than the Abominable Snowman. Although he’s called ‘Yeti’ in the credits, Ratzenberger’s booming voice welcomes our downtrodden heroes to the Himalayas before going on to completely steal the scene.
Everything Yeti (I still hate that name) says is hilarious. His eternal optimism, his obliviousness to Mike and Sully’s sadness, and his insistence that all of their problems can be solved by lemon snow cones is comedy gold. He’s only in the film very briefly, but it’s such a memorable part of one of Pixar’s most beloved endeavours that he even crops up in Monsters University, where we find out that he was banished for tampering with people’s mail.
At least he didn’t murder a baby or something like that.
The Underminer: ‘The Incredibles’ series (Brad Bird, 2004–2018)
Onscreen for about a minute, the Underminer has absolutely no right to be on this list, his first appearance coming right at the end of the first The Incredibles movie as the diminutive supervillain who threatens to use a giant drill to enact revenge on those who live above ground, prompting the titular family to suit up, and yet, he is one of the most memorable parts of the movie, which sounds like I’m damning with faint praise.
However, the character feels like it’s ripped straight from the pages of a classic superhero comic book, from his appearance and name to his motivation and choice of weaponry, and he could have easily battled the Spectacular Spider-Man or Adam West’s Batman, and that’s why he stuck with so many people who loved The Incredibles as kids. Pixar knew he was money too, and made him the primary antagonist of the 2005 video game The Incredibles: Rise of the Underminer.
The start of Incredibles 2 picks up exactly where the first film ended, as the family do battle with their subterranean aggressor; now let’s hope he will complete the set in the upcoming Incredibles 3.
John: ‘Wall-E’ (Andrew Stanton, 2008)
Given we’ve talked about supervillains, monsters, and talking toys so far on this list, it might seem a bit strange that we’ve given a spot to a very normal human character. You probably don’t even remember John from Wall-E, a passenger on the Axiom who, like everyone else, has become morbidly obese and scarily reliant on machines. That is, until he meets Wall-E, initially coming across our favourite cube when he knocks him out of his hoverchair. This leads him to Mary, voiced by Kathy Najimy, another human, to having her eyes opened to a life not dictated by a huge corporation.
John and Mary’s storyline is subtly genius; their meeting and subsequent love story is proof of the film’s mission statement that humanity should always triumph over technology. They also prove the innate goodness of the main character, who brings them together in such an endearingly accidental way. There isn’t much to Ratzenberger’s performance here, but that’s the point, because this is a quietly brilliant part of one of Pixar’s best ever movies.
Also, their joke about “having some kids” at the end is spot on.
The credits callbacks: ‘Cars’ (John Lasseter, 2006)
This list isn’t in any particular order, apart from this entry. John Ratzenberger’s greatest ever Pixar performance comes from the end credits of a silly film about talking cars, where, in the main bulk of Cars, he plays Mack, the truck tasked with ferrying around hotshot racing prodigy Lightning McQueen. This is all well and good, and he gets a few nice moments in, but his real highlight comes after the film has ended.
During one of Pixar’s famous post-credits scenes (where have those gone, by the way?), Mack is at a drive-in movie theatre. Onscreen, we see a selection of famous Pixar characters rendered in carform, like Hamm from Toy Story, PT Flea from A Bug’s Life, the Yeti from Monsters, Inc; yes, these are all characters voiced by Ratzenberger, being watched by a character voiced by Ratzenberger. To top things off, Mack then realises that the studio has been using the same actor to voice multiple characters, labelling Pixar a “cut-rate production”.
A little self-indulgent? Possibly. Very funny? Absolutely. And this was back in the early days, remember, so just imagine how long this scene would be if they decided to do it today.
