The Scream/Laugh Canister is an object in the Disney/PixarMonsters, Inc. franchise. Its purpose is to store up the scream energy of human kids that the Scarers collect upon entering a door and successfully scaring the child in question. Each scream canister would be taken to a different room in the factory, where the screams would be extracted and refined into energy.
Later, when the company additionally began collecting children's laughs, scream canisters could easily collect them, but their maximum capacity wasn't enough to accommodate because laughter was ten times more powerful than scream. Thus, larger Laugh Canisters were created courtesy of MIFT, which featured larger meters indicating the greater energy storage capacity.
A notable scream canister belonged to Dean Abigail Hardscrabble, the Dean of the School of Scaring at Monsters University. This canister contained the scream Hardscrabble collected during her old career as a Scarer, which broke the All-Time Scare Record. However, it was accidentally knocked over from its pedestal by Sulley when he and Mike were trying to scare each other. The canister clattered on the ground, loosening its containment-lock, and unleashing the scream inside, causing it to fly about the Scaring School's lecture hall until the scream ran out and it broke. At first, Hardscrabble "appeared" to take the loss of her "one souvenir from a life-time of Scaring" rather well, citing, "Accidents happen," and amending the situation since "the important thing [was] no one got hurt." However, Hardscrabble then retaliated against Mike and Sulley by testing them on the spot personally, finding fault in each of them and judging them unfit to continue with the Scaring Program: Mike because she deemed him, in her professional opinion, not scary; and Sulley for disregarding the study of Scaring.
It is unknown what became of Hardscrabble's canister afterwards.
The amount of scream energy a child can output is enough to fill one canister, while the amount of scream energy a group of adults outputted in the climax of Monsters University was enough to fill the canisters (even ones not attached to the door) and overload them.
Larger Canister created by MIFT with double energy capacity
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