We bought WALL*E, of course, and watched it together immediately, and it's just as good on repeated viewing. Then last night, as we were talking over the bonus content, Jack noticed something. The featurette, about one of the robots on the Axiom, is called BURN*E. "Shouldn't that be BURN*A?" asked Jack.

Of course, my nine-year-old is right. The "E" stands for "Earth-class" and we clearly see the trash robots on the ship are labelled WALL*A for "Axiom."

This morning, I found that even the director has admitted the name was a hand-wave.

There is no prouder moment for a hard-sf parent than this.

FYI: "Hard" science fiction tries to get everything important right and track with science as we understand it. What I think of as the paradigmatic example comes from the 1993 Clarion workshop, where one of my colleagues began a critique of a story with, "I did the math, and your planet has no atmosphere."