Easter egg: Mess around with your remote controls, until you highlight the W with the 214 value underneath. You will be greeted with a old title test from Summer of 2004, in which was used to pitch the original plot and script for W.A.L.-E (WALL-E).
Easter egg: On the regular DVD (not the special 2 disc edition), go down to Special Features, press the left arrow then press the up arrow and it will highlight the B and L logo in the upper left hand corner of the screen. It will take you to "Geek-o-rama", a feature about the Pixar employees.
Easter egg: On disc 2 (bonus disc) of the Special Edition set, at the bottom center of the Behind the Scenes menu (you get to it from the Humans main menu) is a link to the Original Development Test clip. I could only get to it from my computer, not my DVD player.
Easter egg: On disc 1 of the Special Edition set (the feature movie), on the main menu, the circle with the W and the 214 value (which changes) is a link to a short animation test clip. (I could only get to it on my computer, not my DVD player).
Easter egg: On the regular version of the DVD, on the Main Menu screen, go down to Set Up. Push the right arrow then the up arrow and it will highlight a W above the menu. It will take you to a test title from 2004 that the director used to pitch the movie.
Answer: It certainly wasn't intentional, although the director, Andrew Stanton, has acknowledged that he did see Short Circuit many years ago and agrees that it could well have been a subconscious influence. WALL-E was principally designed with the job that he does in mind - the design brief was to consider WALL-E as an appliance first, what he would need to look like in order to do his job efficiently, then work out how to read emotion into the character after that. Stanton has stated that the chief inspiration for WALL-E's eyes came from a pair of binoculars, which he decided looked happy or sad depending on which way up they were.
Tailkinker ★