Talking Simpsons - Bonus Holiday Podcast - What A Cartoon Movie - Toy Story

Episode Date: January 12, 2026

Happy New Year! In case you didn't know, every month we release the premium podcast, What A Cartoon Movie. And, as we take a week off to rest and recharge, we're giving all of our listeners a chance to hear a free sample of this Patreon-exclusive series. So please, enjoy our ultra-long look at Toy Story! And if you'd like to hear 85 more episodes of What A Cartoon Movie—with a new one to come every month—simply head on over to the Talking Simpsons Network and sign up at the $10 level. If you enjoy hearing us talk about cartoons, you'll be glad you did! This episode was originally posted on November 30, 2019.

Turn's from present in the past. Every week will be an animated bash. What a Cartoos and Shops. Hello, everybody, and welcome to What a Cartoon movie, the podcast with hyperactive, hyperdrive, and AstroTurf. I'm your host, Sad Strange Little Man, Bob Mackie, and this is an audio exploration of every animated movie ever. Who is here with me today? It's Henry Gilbert and somebody poison the waterhole. That's unfortunate.

In today's movie, or this month's movie, rather, is Toy Story. You! Loudest line in the entire movie. So yes, you voted for it. This is the first Pixar movie we're talking about for what a cartoon movie. And it is still a very, very great movie, even though it's a Pixar's only first movie that they ever did. We had a poll for a bunch of different Pixar films. I think it was right to go with Toy Story.

You know, the history segment of, say, Monsters Inc. would be kind of like this same one plus five more years to it. Right. And just how this movie came into being is very, very interesting. and how it almost didn't come into being is even more interesting. So before we start, I want to ask you, Henry, what is your experience with Toy Story, this first Toy Story movie at which there are now for? Oh, man.

I mean, I love the whole Toy Story series. I was there, like, at least the first week in theaters watching this, you know, with my mom and little brother. Like, I don't think people who didn't grow up with it can really understand how insane it was to see Toy Story like the movements of it. We've never seen anything really like it before. So I was entranced just by the commercials. And then when I saw the movie,

it told such a funny, memorable, exciting story that it just stuck with me forever. It was like one of my favorite movies when I first saw it. And I think each Toy Story deepens the world more and more that I just love the stories even more each time. I think, you know, some real world things hurt it in its legacy, but I... We'll cover them, don't worry. But I do still love watching this original one even now.

And like, I remember as a kid when I was at like a TV store and an electronic store with my parents. And the TVs were showing like demo reels of CGI shorts, like early 90s ones. And just those were so mesmerizing to me. Lots of orbs, lots of checkerboard patterns, lots of reflections happening. A lot of fishes swimming around. Basically, the Homer Cube segment. Exactly, yeah. And those were crazy to see.

To then see a whole film about realistic-seeming toys, it just was mind-blowing. Totally mind-blowing. I had the exact same experience because we were the same person in many ways, Henry. So we've hosted these podcasts together. But, yeah, I remember I didn't see a lot of movies after I was like eight in the theaters with my parents. but I remember I went to see Babe, the movie Babe, came out the previous summer, and before Babe, there was a trailer for Toy Story with the Thin Lizzie song, Boys Are Back in Town or whatever. Oh, right.

It might have even been a teaser, but I remember seeing that and saying, I have to see that movie. And even my mom lead over and said, that looks really cool. So I was committed to seeing it. And I was still, like, there was no real internet for me at this point in time, but I was still buying animation magazines and hearing about this new movie, Toy Story they've been working on for years, how it will be the first CGI movie. And like you, I was fascinated with CGI, just seeing it and wondering how they made it and seeing what they could do with it.

We were very fortunate that we grew up alongside of this medium so we could just see a change over the years. I guess three years before this we saw Terminator 2 with the T-1000 and just this like amorphous blob or even seeing like basically a single polygon in Tron. Yes. So like, oh my God, this is the future. We do remember the movie Tron. And also Homer Cube, which aired just a few months before. or maybe just like a month before Tori Story came out. Like that was just, wow, I can't believe this is happening

and they're airing it on TV for free for me to watch. So yeah, just fascinated with the media. Even though I kind of poo-poo 3D animation now compared to 2D animation, I was so interested in this movie when it came out. And I remember just being there in the theater with a friend of mine and it feeling important. Like, we are here in history as being made. And I remember I didn't see a lot of movies twice in the theater,

but this was one of them. Oh, yeah. And going back, it just was like, I want to look around every room and look at every object, because it was just a detailed, fully realized, fully created world with sets and, you know, fully crafted characters. It wasn't just drawings. It was something very new to watch. I, you know, I think I might have talked my mom into taking us a second time. I think they had some really good Christmas adverts that used the Christmas scene from the end of the movie.

It was like, it's still, you know, you still can see Toy Story again. It's Christmas time fun. Streaming won't be invented for like 12 years, people. You have nothing better to do. We'll be waiting another 10 months before the VHS walks out of the Disney vault ever briefly. I did have that too. But yeah, I mean, I feel like this was a, in the kinder terms, a Shrek style movie and that adults and kids could enjoy it of this era. Yeah, yeah. But I felt like I was maybe like a little too old to enjoy the toy aspect, but I did enjoy all the storytelling and the craft of it. And I might have talked about this before on podcast, but I was never a toy boy.

I was never into toys. Once I discovered video games, that's all I can. cared about throw all the toys in the trash put them in the fire i do not want any toys but i still connected with this story and like every five to ten years i remember oh my god i really love toy story and i still have to see four but i remember uh being completely like uh destroyed by three i only saw it once yeah and i don't know if i can return to it i might want to now that i'm going through the movies again but man like um four still made me cry but it didn't hurt like three three three was a dagger through your heart and then like i went to uh california

adventure last year and I was like, wow, this is like all, like I love Toy Story. I just, I tend to forget how much I love this movie. So doing all this research over the past few days was a real tree for me revisiting the movie, digging into the, uh, the very good Blu-ray. I mean, all of these movies are on streaming. Uh, but there is a very good Blu-ray that retains all of the amazing DVD extras as well. So there's new Blu-ray extras new meaning like 10 years ago they were new. And all, and also the DVD extras that are 20 years old at this point. So like it's, it's just a snapshot in time. Like, like, I just a snapshot in time. Like, I bought this DVD when it came out in the year 2000.

It was called The Ultimate Toy Box. Toy Story 1 and 2, and then like a third disc with bonuses on it. And I spent an entire weekend, like every day, like Saturday and Sunday just watching everything on those discs. But like it was just them exploring like, what can we put on DVDs? Will people watch all of this? There's some deleted scenes on Disney Plus, but basically all those extras are not there on Disney Plus.

And I think you could guess the reason why some person would be cut out of it. One person's all over every extra you see. I do want to say on the toy boy aspect, you know, you're a gamer like Rex. But I mean, I did play a ton of video games, but as I've said before, I was a spoiled upper middle class boy. And I had, I, it really hit me how spoiled I was with the toys. My mom got me when I watched that Netflix documentary series, The Toys It Made Us. It's like, this is a trip through Henry's closet. Yeah, every time, like, we did the pro wrestling one, I was like,

I had that one, had that one, not that one. And then, like, it's the Ninja Turtles one. I'm like, had that, yep, had that, wow, had that too. Like, it's quite, when I think of each of those being $5, I'm like, well, that was a lot of money my mom spent on me. And now they're all of only gone up in value, right? Well, I chewed on my toys. I didn't treat them as, I was closer on the Sid spectrum to Sid and Andy. That's funny.

I mean, I don't think you were like a rich kid, Henry, or anything like that. But in my experience as someone who was on the lower end of the income scale, the rich kids were the ones who treated their toys like shit. They didn't care. Well, they weren't special. Well, they were special. And I didn't say you didn't, but I'm just comparing Andy who is very, like, upper middle class. I mean, they're

very nice house to Sid's like lower middle class lifestyle. I think Sid would treat his toys much nicer than Andy. No, Sid breaks a lot of the rules of, well, Sid is such an evil child. But anyway, yes. The toy stuff in it, this movie,

it did really touch me because I, I did do all these actouts. I had these storylines with my toys. I'd have Spider-Man fight Superman. Or also, if I, say, found a pro-wrestling toy lacking. Like, I was like, this pro-wrestling toy can't do all the moves that I know this person in real life can do. This He-Man toy now becomes Hulk Hogan.

Like, he's just Hulk Hogan in my mind. You're violating so many IP laws by doing that. I think, you know, we were the last, even I still played with my toys a bit like how the commercials told me to. but now kids are so instructed by what they're supposed to do with toys and all the toy play channels, I wonder. It's all about unboxing the toy. Everything else is not profitable for children. And you know, I think this movie really did touch my mom in a way too because it is such a boomer vision of toys. Like the toys that Andy has are more the battle of boomer things, especially cowboy versus space man.

Yeah, Buzz is just the 90s toy intruding in this boomer space. So I think my mom really loved seeing. this movie too in theaters and it touched her memories like I don't think it's a coincidence that a couple years after we saw this movie my mom set up an eBay account to buy some of her old toys

back on eBay. Like I think this film in general probably reignited a love of old toys among the boomer generation right when eBay was getting started up. I think my Woody was a Final Fantasy 3 cartridge. Oh gee. And I carried him everywhere. Not really.

I think my Woody was a series of Spider-Man toys just because I would trade up every Spider-Man toy to like, well, this one has even more articulation or this is even cooler pose. See you old Spider-Man toy. Time for new Spider-Man. I guess before I discovered a video games, my toy of choice was this stuffed tiger

named Tig from the TV show Shirtails. I didn't like Shirtails. I didn't watch it, but somehow I was given a character from that show. and that is a tiger. I think I still have it my mom's. It's pretty disgusting now. Oh, yeah. I mean, it's a germ bomb.

A tender heart, I think of Care Bears was my favorite stuffed animal until I got a non-unnamed fox from a, it wasn't from any TV series. He was like from a, but he was like a Garfield-style fox animal. But I liked him a lot. He was fun.

Yeah. So I want to move on to the history segment here. So I'm going to do a history of Pixar but only up until Toy Story because even only going to Toy Story, it's still a very long history. So like with Kiki's Delivery Service, we only went up to the history of Jibli,

up to that point. There's a lot more to talk about. There's a lot more I wish we had time to talk about like Disney battling Pixar over, you know, rights to movies and will Toy Story 2 be direct to, you know, VHS or will it hit the movie theaters? Will that count as part of their contract?

Like, that is so fascinating, but it's not part of this story. You know, there's always going to be, I'm certain there will be a weather coach movie for Toy Story 2 in the future. Yes, that is a very fascinating history, and I can't wait to dig into the other Blu-ray I have for that.

That turned 20 this year. That is, yeah, I think just this week. By the way, we're recording this on Thanksgiving. Yes. And all of the early Pixar movies are Thanksgiving Week movies. Like, this was a Thanksgiving week movie. So...

Yeah, until they did the double Pixar year, I think they pretty much owned Thanksgiving. Yeah. So let's talk about the slightly dry history of Pixar, at least the beginning of it. So Pixar started in 1974. as the New York Institute of Technology's computer graphics lab. This was founded by the institute's founder Alexander Schur,

and basically he recruited fellow computer scientists who shared the same dream of wanting to create the first computer-generated film. So this, as early as 1974, was their goal. Wow, 74? Yes, and Schurr, born in 1920, died in 2009. He lived to see that happen. That's amazing.

But in all of the histories I've read, after what happens next, he kind of disappears from the story. so I don't know what his comments were on this or how he felt about CGI movies, but sure is the guy he founded the New York Institute of Technology and the Computer Graphics Lab, and this was his dream, and he recruited fellow men, only men, to share in his dream.

So unfortunately, funding this lab gave NYIT serious financial issues. So members of this program, the Computer Graphics Lab program, realize they needed to break out of academia and join the legitimate film industry in order to make this happen. Like they weren't going to get their funding from bookworms and eggheads. I mean, those eggheads don't know anything about telling stories.

No, they don't care about that. They just care about numbers. So how they enter the movie industry is interesting. So basically, at his mansion in the Bay Area, Francis Ford Coppola held a three-day conference about the future of digital filmmaking. And George Lucas was there. And that's where, yes, exactly. Sorry. He was much less froggy then.

Oh, that's true. But he was pre-divorce, so he had a lot more energy. But they met up with Coppola and Lucas there, and that is where essentially George Lucas had hunted people from the computer graphics lab to join the graphics group, one of Lucasfilm's computer divisions of three. So they joined the graphics group, and that was one of three divisions of Lucasfilm's computer division. It is a little complicated. Wow, okay.

I mean, the Coppola's part of it, I didn't know. I knew Lucas was involved in there somewhere, but both of them, they, the dream of American Zoetrope and Lucas as well was like, they were so sick of dealing with Hollywood. They wanted to make, you know, the Bay Area the next Hollywood and use the power of their popularity to draw people away from Hollywood to them. I'm sad it didn't happen. We could be living in a new, and what killed that, Heaven's Gate? Was it heaven gate? Is that the name of the movie? Heaven's Gate? Well, and it was also just that, yes, Heaven's Gate was part of it, but that wasn't, it was really just that Coppola couldn't be very productive. Like, I mean, Apocalypse Now really hurt it. It was also that, like, Apocalypse Now wasn't in a going to be a crazy amount of work. He wanted Lucas to do it. And Lucas is like, yeah, of course he wants me to direct it. It's too hard. But also, the relationship between George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola,

that's the inspiration of, at least in the first Star Wars film, the relationship between Han Solo and Luke. And so it's a kind of contentious Big Brother thing, but he also wanted to show that, like, Han over promises, and he's got a lot of charm and charisma, but can't always come through. That's how he felt about Coppola. So it just really was the two of them,

their inability to really work together, kind of stopped it from being. what they wanted it to. And also the 80s, the 70s film boom, turning into the 80s, like, hyper-commercialism really wanted to. It's interesting to, after going through this history for research, how much of all of this happened here, not just in the Bay Area, but on our side of the Bay Area. We could go walk to Pixar now and get escorted out. Like, we could just go there in Emeryville. It's, uh, it's, it was really special the first time I saw Pixar film here. Uh, I think it was Wally. I saw it in the Bay Area. And when at the, at the,

end of it has an Emoryville thing. I was watching the film at the Bay Street AMC in Emoryville, like literally within a mile of Pixar. That felt really special. Yeah. So in 1982, the graphics group of Lucasfilm, they began working with industrial light and magic on some of the first ground-breaking computer effects in film. So that includes stuff like the Genesis Effect and Star Trek 2, the Search for, sorry, the Wrath of Khan. Three is the search for Spock. And also a very famous effect. in the movie no one remembers, the stained glass night in Young Sherlock Holmes. That is just

a clip in the history of Pixar Real. Like, no one remembers that movie, but it is a really cool effect. I only know that clip. I only know that moment from the Young Sherlock Holmes. I never saw that movie. So one very important figure joins this organization in 1983.

After being fired by Disney, a lot more about him later, but in 1983, John Lasseter joins the Computer Graphics Group in Lucasfilm. And basically, he was enchanted by what he saw in the movie Tron and was like, this is the future of animation. So within this group, he would direct a very monumental short called The Adventures of Andre and Wally B. This is on YouTube. It's about a minute long. It is super primitive. But if you think this was made in 1984,

you will be very, very impressed. Oh, yeah, yeah, I remember that one. Yeah, I mean, they needed somebody, if they were going to do an animated thing, it seemed like they were definitely lacking in somebody traditionally trained in classical animation. like from the Cal Arts Cabal, as they say. The filthy Cal Arts number is all over this movie. Yes, yeah. We're kidding, of course. We love Cal Arts.

We're making fun of the people who hate them and think there's a conspiracy to make all heads bean-shaped. And I have all the pickle-mouthed, bean-shaped and pickle-mouthed. I'm a big fan of pickle-mouse. So, yeah, John Lassar's on board in 1983, makes the Adventures of Andre and Wally-B.

So there's a lot of really boring business stuff here. I won't make you suffer through. But basically, in 1983, two things happened. George Lucas got divorced. And also, that's the year of Return of the Jedi. So immediately after that, he's in financial problem because no were Star Wars movies. And of course, divorce is going to take a big chunk out of your wallet in a lot of cases. Yeah, I recall in the book Easy Riders Raging Bulls when they talk about the divorce in 83, they don't mention Pixar in there. But they do mention how his wife described the empire he built as this reverse period. pyramid of he has the pyramid is all of the things he made to make Star Wars and all the people he has to pay and balancing that pyramid is one P and the P is Star Wars and without that what supports

this army of people you employed to make movies it wasn't Howard the Duck I mean that's like it's crazy to think that Lucas just for 16 years was like I don't want to make movies anymore just not any movie he paid people to make video games film. He could make any film. It's very weird. I don't know where his head was or what he was planning. I mean, divorced dad. He's in divorced dad land. He certainly wasn't writing those movies that eventually came out. That never

happened. He had been thinking about those for 20 years, Bob. What are you talking about? I don't buy it. Actually, the prequels are good now, Bob. That's where the conversation's going. I'm not young enough to think that. I don't have that dangerous opinion. But, so 83, Lucas got divorced. No more Star Wars movies for the time being.

And people in the graphics group thought, oh, he's going to sell us. because he is not really making any movies anymore and he needs money. So in 1986, the computer graphics group spun themselves off as the independent company Pixar and basically they would focus on developing computer hardware until technology was at the level

where they could make this full-length computer movie. Wow. So for a very long time until the 90s, Pixar was a computer hardware business. And the shorts that they made were basically, here's what you can do with our computer hardware. Like how the original Unreal was like, buy the Unreal Engine. You can do this.

Like, wow. I didn't know that. That was like a secondary business of theirs of just to sell you their hardware. And they were a miserable failure until Toy Story came out. And we'll talk a lot about that very soon. They were very self-possessed, though, to just like leap out into the unknown. Silicon Valley isn't that big yet in the 80s. No. Microsoft hasn't taken over the world just yet. And Bill Gates is just a somewhat rich child. And Steve Jobs is about to get fired. He'll appear in the story very soon too.

So also while they were still at Lucasfilm in 1986, this computer graphics group were approached by a Japanese publisher to make a movie based on the Monkey King legend, which you know which Dragon Ball is based on, of course. But they had to basically turn them down because they tried doing tests and stuff, but the technology wasn't there. So as early as the 86, they thought maybe we could do this, but the technology was not there until the early 90s in the production of Toy Story. Wow, that's, boy, in a different history, that would be so interesting because I know one of the first feature-length Japanese animated films is an adaptation of Journey to the West. So it'd be funny the continuation of that history that the first CGI film would have been Journey to the West.

The first CGI film would have been an anime. That'd be an amazing fact if that ever happened. A better future because Japanese things are always the better thing on this podcast. I sincerely believe that. So this newly formed Pixar had a very very very. hard time finding new investors. There are stories like they went to like 50 different Silicon, like angel investors and people in Silicon Valley and nobody wanted to invest in them. But they found a new friend in Steve Jobs who had just been fired from Apple. So Steve Jobs invested $10 million, I believe $5 million of his own money into the company and basically joined the board of directors as the chairman. So Steve Jobs basically save Pixar. It tells you what a prolific dude, Steve Jobs, was that founding Pixar is still just kind of like.

No, that's like two chapters in his life story kind of book. Like that, that would be most people's biggest accomplishment would be that. Yeah, I mean, I'm not a big Steve Jobs fan, and he had a lot of issues and problems, and I hate how people have turned him into the saint of technology, but this is one good thing he did. Yeah, no, I mean, look, I think most rich people aren't geniuses. They're more lucky than anything, and in the right place at the right time. And especially you hear the stories about jobs being like, he yelled at me.

me until I made an iPhone better. And what a great leader? It's like, but is that? Is that? I mean, and plus, like, he's, you know, as we all find out the second someone dies, you find out the worst thing they did. Oh, yeah, yeah. He, you know, he was a pretty bad absence T parent.

But, I mean, seeing the value of Pixar, that is, I mean, that's a, that's a check in the pro column for old Steve Jobs. I've got to give him that. So the entire company of Pixar at this point in time was based on selling the Pixar image computer. And while they were doing this. John Lassiter and a few others in this animation group were creating shorts. They can screen at

conventions like, I believe it's called Seagraph, to show off the hardware's power. So you see a lot of shorts that came out of Cgraph from this time, and it was a convention about just the power of computers and what you can do with computers. So they were basically making these shorts for free as a promotional item to sell these computers.

Those promotional items, again, like just a VHS tape of a dozen of these CGI test reels, like they were entrancing to me as a kid. I imagine being my parents trying to pull me away from the TV of like,

no, don't you see? This is... That unicycles moving on its own. This is like discovering fire kind of thing. You can't pull me away from it. So they made four shorts between 1986 and 1989. So Luxo Jr., that is basically what you see in the Pixar

logo, the ball and the desk lamp. Those are the characters in that little film. There's Reds Dream, which is a story about a unicycle. And that is basically made... That ensued Nintendo over. Yes, that's why you can't buy Uneracers or Play it anymore because they had, they copyrighted the idea of a unicycle that came to life.

Sure. Also, Tintoy, which won the Oscar in 88 for Best Animated Shorts. The first of many Oscars for them. And the first Oscar for a CGI short, too. Wow. Yeah. And that's sort of the prototype of Toy Story. So if you go watch Tintoy online, you can see, like, the entire idea is there, like, what is a toy experience?

And what is it like to be afraid of a child if you're a toy story? I'm glad they moved away from the tin soldier thing, though, because, like, those always depress me in the story. Like, well, also, like, the Nutcracker story, just like those are just bummer stories as a kid. I never, anytime they tried to sell me on a Nutcracker adaptation at Christmas time, it would be low on my list of Christmas specials, yeah. What's his story? He's a nutcracker, but the rats are real rats?

What's going on here? He's a king, too, apparently. Oh, yeah, and the last short was Nick Nack, which is, about a snow glow, but like a snowman living in a snow glow. That snow, yeah, that snowman is cute. You know, you can see in watching those, you see the seams so much and you like, the textures are just not there. You, you, with the savvy eye of an adult in 2019, it's certainly not impressive, but like the

character in, say, the tin toy or the snowman in that clip, it's still there. Like, you're engrossed in the people that are the stars of. it any way. And it's kind of fun to approach these movies, these early movies and shorts, as someone who's played 20 years worth of polygonal video games, where you know things about, you know, clipping and textures and mapping and things like that. You have all this

knowledge in your head that people watching these at the time did not have. So that's why it also like a magic trick. So while all this is happening in the 80s, Disney took an interest in Pixar and purchased these Pixar image computers for the purpose of streamlining the cell painting process.

Ah, right. Via the CAP system, Caps, all in caps. This is custom software that Pixar made for Disney. So in The Little Mermaid, I believe the final scene is painted with caps. And after that, every movie, every 2D movie is from the rescuers down under to like Home on the Range. They're all painted with caps. It's why you can't buy a cell from Aladdin is a gift for somebody. That's true.

They don't exist. Like, yeah, it's, yeah, and that waking sleeping beauty documentary I watched fairly recently, there's about five minutes just on caps. and showing the Pixar folks working day and night to get caps ready for rescuers down under. They don't really pull punches on rescues down under not being a hit, but they also are not like, oh, it sucks or whatever. But when they show it in there,

the clip in the movie of the giant golden eagle flying, I'm like, that still is impressive, and the digital coloring really is showing off there. I still have to watch that. I didn't ever see it. Oh, really? Yeah. It's a weird, like, it's an odd movie

between The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the, the beast. No one really thinks about it. I mean, it really should have just been a VHS sequel, but it was before Returned Jafar when they really decided to do that. So, yeah. So the Pixar Image Computer, the entire focus of this business was not selling well. Sure, you know, Disney was buying them, but you need more than just Disney buying computers from you to stay in business.

So basically, Steve Jobs invested even more money in the company, $50 million to the point where he basically just bought out all the shareholders and became the king of Pixar. John Laster's animation division turned into a division that would make commercials for outside companies. Instead of just making these free demos and free shorts to show off, they were now a commercial company making things for commercial. You know, I talk about how misperized I was by CGI shorts. It seems extra sinister because that also was true for the commercials. Any commercial that had a CGI thing on it, I was just glued to as well, like the Cool Spot. Like, Cool Spot wouldn't have been popular enough to have his own video game

if it wasn't for how cool the computer graphics looked in the commercials. So gorgeous. I mean, and their computer graphics weren't limited to characters. They were even doing like a really cool 3D text and fonts. Like one of their software packages they made along with renderman, which is a very pivotal part of the story, was a 3D text tool to render 3D text.

You could, making cool logos that zoom across the screen and stuff like that. So things you don't really think about as CG that are still necessary. That anybody's computer can do now in like seconds, but 20, 30 years ago, not so easy. So in April of 1990, now we're in the 90s. So April of 1990, Pixar sells off as hardware division. They are no longer a hardware selling company. In that same year, they moved from San Rafael to Richmond, California.

I only know Richmond, California, as the last stop on the Bart line in our direction that goes nowhere. Yes. Yeah, it's not the nicest area, I think. Well, not, like, there was. There was a big fire that I think there's still a bit of like a toxic smoke situation in Richmond. I've rid my bike there a few times and it's just the kind of industrial area, like just very flat and uninteresting. But apparently Point Richmond is the place where they all hung out. It's a very like kitsy Bay Area town and a lot of the landscapes of Toy Story and other movies were inspired by how often they would go to Point Richmond for lunch and to hang out and party and stuff like that.

That sounds nice. So when Nina comes back to town, I want to go to Point Richmond to see what it's all about. having a now I'm in love with Pixar all over again. You found it a new man. No, I've never been to Point Richmond either. Yeah, I think the furthest stuff I've gone is like Elserito del Norte to go to the Trader Joe's before the Trader Joe's opened in Berkeley. There was a time before that? I know.

These are some local references, but man. You're so lucky there's the Trader Joe's just here now. I used to have to ride the bar two stops to go to Trader Joe's. So they would be in Richmond, California from April of 1990 to November of 2000 when they opened up their new campus in Emoryville, and that's where they've been ever since for the past, like, 20 years. Before they built up that mall down in Emoryville, I wonder what was even around them. Like, it seems, that is real small town field. Yeah, I mean, basically, I just go to Emoryville to go to the outlet mall or whatever, the big outdoor mall for,

like, there's a Uniclo there, and there's a movie theater that always plays with the Rift Tracks there. Ah, yes, yeah, it's primarily where we see Rift Tracks. Now, at least the anime movies are at the theater across the street for me. but the Rift tracks, you still got to go down to the Bay Area one. Yeah, you can't. You'll drive by Pixar. You can just look, I mean, it's not like a big exciting building or anything. It's more like a bunch of airplane hangers, I guess, really.

There were a few big companies in Emoryville, too. I mean, Maxis, the makers of Sim City, they were there until they, you know, went away. They did the thing that all EA companies do, which is closed down by EA. They're forced to make bad decisions, and then they're punished by making those decisions. Why did you do those things we made you do? You guys got to tighten your belts. That same philosophy applies later in the story, too, by the way. I mean, that is, I don't want to defend Hollywood, but Silicon Valley also sucks for a lot of reasons.

So they go to Richmond, California, and the East Bay, and at this point, they stopped selling hardware, but they do start selling things like Render Man and their 3D font tools on the open market. Like, now anyone can buy them. And if you were a kid interested in these things like I was as a kid, you would read PC magazines and see these programs at the back of magazines for like $900. This is back when like Photoshop was a thousand. I mean, I'm sure it's still a lot of money. I have a subscription. I forget how much the actual price of this software is.

But like you'd buy your Word suite for $300 and you'd buy your Photoshop suite for $600 and things like that. So this is a very expensive suite to buy. Yeah. It's crazy to think back to that now because I think like, why would I pay for Microsoft word. I have 800 ways I can write things now. I can't believe I ever paid. The only time I ever paid for it was when I was a student and I got a massive discount. But now with Google Docs, like, I've been on Google Docs for the past eight years. Yeah, which, you know, I feel like one day Google

will just say, oh, no, didn't you see, we own everything you write in here. This is ours. All of these are ours. All the podcast notes, no, they're going to publish them without our, consent. They'll embarrass me without all my typos and my podcast notes. And all the secret notes I never say on the air. So Pixar's relationship continue with Disney to the point where they signed a $26 million three-picture deal in July of 1991.

Wow. Pixar was really Disney was really into them. That's pretty impressive. Mega, big time. So this would start with a film adaptation of a tin toy TV special, Laster Pitch, which would become Toy Story. And this is where the history

of Toy Story development starts. So that's the end of the history of Pixar. And right now we're going to get into the history of Toy Story. Okay, the history of Toy Story. So we have to go back to before the three-picture deal signed in July of 1991. Before this, Disney wanted to headhunt John Lasseter after he won the Oscar for Tintoy. It was getting a lot of hype. He was a hot name in the animation world.

But he did not want to leave Pixar because, in his words, he wanted to stay at Pixar to make history and not go to Disney to be just another director. Yeah, no, I mean, if he had just taken the job after the Oscar, they would have just said, like, okay, cool, we need a director for Lion King there. You're just the Lion King. Yeah, you're assigned a project. Yeah, I think he made the right move there. Like, I mean, and he was part of the dark times of Disney. Like, when they fired him, that was in the dark era before the Little Mermaid and Katzenberg kind of changed up the animation division. So I could see him not wanting to come back. Oh yeah, so let's talk about that. So Disney fired him in 1984. Not the first time they would do that by any means. But so why he got fired was he stepped on the toes of some of his superiors by making a short CGI test film for an adaptation of where the wild things are. So he wanted to make a CGI brave little toaster movie.

But one of the animators he was working with, I believe it was Don Hahn or someone like that, they were like, well, Disney was already going to make a Wild Things movie, but it didn't work out. Let's use that as our test because they already had an interest in that, so we could impress them. I remember that Wild Things test footage. Yeah, that's right. So basically, he made this and was fired afterwards. So, like, you made your thing, you fucked up, you're fired. But this is online, too. This test footage is online. It looks really cool.

Yeah, now Disney's acts like, what a cool thing we made instead of like 30 years ago. They said, you wasted company, money, and time making this thing we didn't give you permission to make, boo. You know, you hear the stories of like, take the initiative, grab the brass ring. And then when he does it, they're like, hey, whoa, stop that. And if you're a woman and you grab the brass ring, they're like, that person's crazy. Yeah, what a great. Who does she think she is? She's really too bossy and just very shrill.

We got to get her out of here. And I guess at that point, Disney was like, do we even want to still do animated movies? So it was the great mouse detective that won a modest profit for them. And they were like, okay, let's still do this. But before that, I bet he was seen as like wasting time and money and company resources, probably buying equipment to make this thing. It's online now. It looks really cool.

It is 3D backgrounds and 2D characters. And it's about a minute long. So check it out. It's on YouTube. It could have really been something, I think. It's shocking. It took so long for where the wild things are to ever get adapted. Like that was one of my favorite books as a kid.

I loved it. I mean, the main character's name was Max also, which was my name as a child. Your witness protection program name. And now I can't not hear James Gandalfini's voice in my head. There's a famous gangster monster. I still need to see that movie. I heard it's very good. It's 10 years old now.

You like Arcade Fire. They're all over it, too. I'll just watch the trailer. Okay. Are they all over the entire movie? You know what? Actually, no. Okay.

They were a big part of the trailer. The trailer was the best part of that movie, in my opinion, having not seen the movie. But John Lassner does not want to leave for Disney, and they're like, well, we can't let someone make a movie outside of Disney or can we? So this goes back to our last What a Cartoon movie about The Nightmare Before Christmas. Tim Burton wanted to buy back the rights to that story he wrote while at Disney. They said, no, we own it, but we'll let you make it under our supervision. So Tim Burton set the precedent of someone making a Disney movie outside of Disney. That's amazing.

I didn't realize it goes, what? what interesting timing. It goes straight from nightmare to this one. In Burton's case, he was just so big that you don't say no to Tim Burton you want to work with him. But Pixar hadn't, I mean, I guess yes, they'd won an Oscar for their shorts, but they had

really proven themselves as filmmakers. No, none of them have written any movies or anything like that. Lasseter never directed a film before. None of their shorts had dialogue even. So they were taking a huge risk on Pixar. But even so, Pixar animators were not thrilled about going to Disney. Disney had a back.

reputation about, you know, how they treated their animators. And of course, who else had a bad reputation, but Jeffrey Katzenberg, who we hate. Boo! Boo on you, Katzenberg. Boo. More on him later, but he was known as a micromanaging tyrant, which he would admit to at the time. He's like, yes, I am a tire, but I get results, baby. And he chop a cigar. I mean, I guess he did get results, but I think you could also get results by not being a tyrant. Yeah, I think that would also work. Being a nicer boss always helps. So Disney wanted to play hardball with Pixar. They were a nearly bankrupt company.

It didn't have a lot of bargaining power. So these terms of Pixar's three-picture deal were not very good. And they would become a point of contention around the time of Toy Story, too. But it did give this company the massive opportunity that made them. I mean, we talk about how getting paid an opportunity is bullshit. Sometimes it does help. You also need money. Opportunity's good. You also need money to live off of with the opportunity you get.

So they did get money too. Disney, when they're going to get that kind of opportunity for Pixar, it is going to uplift them quite a lot. It will make them famous. They'll have the entire Disney marketing machine behind them. So it's hard not to succeed with that. I think maybe Disney maybe shouldn't have been so mean because if they, I don't think they considered, well, if this is a success, we'll still want to work with them, right? but now it doesn't sound like they were being penny wise and pound foolish, which is exactly Jeffrey Katzenberg. Oh, yeah. That's who he is.

So I do want to read you this brief quote about the terms of the contract, just in general. I'm sure it's like a thousand-page contract, but here is the contract that Pixar signed with Disney. So this is a big quote. So Disney would own the picture, the movie, and the characters outright. So Disney owns the movie and all the characters. They would have creative control and pay Pixar about 12. 12.5% of ticket revenues. Disney had the option, but not the obligation

to do Pixar's next two films, and also the right to make with or without Pixar sequels using the characters in the film. Disney could also kill the film at any time with only a small penalty. So this contract sucks. Wow. That's terrible. So they get everything,

and they could kill it if they want to, and they can make whatever film they want after and Pixar can't. And they don't even have to make two more movies. They have the option to. Yeah, wow. So it's a three-picture deal, but not guaranteed. It's not like a pay-or-play contract.

Hello, it actually comes up here. But, yes. Wow, that's terrible. I can totally see why when the shoe was on the other foot, Pixar made him pay. Yeah. That was the, I appreciate that vindictiveness on their part. You know, as much as I love all these movies being on Disney Plus,

I kind of hate that Pixar eventually just became Disney. Yeah, it's something that bugs me in general on the Disney Plus app. is when in their collections they list like Christmas films and there's Home Alone there. I'm like, you don't get to claim that. Home Alone exists in a way that Disney would never have approved of in 92. And so I hate to get to write the history of that. I saw that.

How was that a Disney movie? Like, who distributed that? Well, I mean, it was Fox. Oh, yeah. It's just all the Fox. It's like Sound of Music is on there, which is like Sound of Music is not like a very daring film, but Disney would have never made a musical about,

Nazi Germany and escaping it. It would have just been seen as controversial. This is not me making a Walt Disney was a Nazi joke, though he did like Lenny Reefenstahl. But anyway, he wouldn't have made that film. And so I hate that, as always, history gets written by the victors. And so they just get to have all these things like, yeah, all these Disney properties. Isn't Disney great?

Like, Disney would have never made Star Wars, but they'll buy it after it's successful. And same with Pixar. Let other people make the risks for you. Yeah. Yeah. So all of this would come to a head. with Toy Story 2 four years later. But again, that's a different podcast,

but it's really, really interesting. I didn't want to get too deep into it in my research because you can just read article after article. This is when the internet was publishing things. You can read so many accounts of what was happening at the time. But that is for our What a Cartoon movie about Toy Story 2, which will happen as God is My Witness.

So let's talk about the development of Toy Story. The story or the premise of the movie would change a lot over time. So the first treatment of this movie starred Tinney, the Tintoy from Tintoy, and a ventriloquist dummy going on a sprawling adventure with the dummy who was named Woody because he's a dummy.

So Woody retaining the name of the dummy is like the, you know, just like what was passed on from this version. So Woody makes a lot more sense as the name of the dummy. Oh, yeah, that totally does. Yeah, hey, nod head. Clunk, clunk, clunk.

I have a PhD in film. But yeah, so Woody would be the dummy and all the other toys would rally against him because he was the villain of this movie. Not a lot has been said about what he was doing to be the villain or what his scheme was. But Woody was the villain and Tini was the hero. They would meet other toys in this grand adventure across America, presumably. I mean, ventriloquist dummies look creepy.

They're not heroes of movies. They're villains. Ventriloquist dummies are villainous things in Toy Story 4. I don't want to spoil too much, but there are scary ventriloquist dummies in it. Yeah, I saw about 10 minutes of it at Thanksgiving dinner and early Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving dinner. I was like, these, I don't like these guys. But we know all they want to do is drink wine, but they can't because the sawdust in their belly would explode. I'm referencing to... This is all these critic references. No, no, I'm referencing a devil doll for Mr. That's in there. You stupid, dummy. It's the ventriloquist act where you watch a guy eat ham and make a dummy not be able to eat ham. We love your cruelty. Oh, God. It's so funny. If you like him eating ham, wait till you see me eat ham. Oh, yes. These are for nobody, by the way. It's Turkey Day, so it's time to celebrate

Mystery Sense. I'm going to make a mini Thanksgiving dinner when I get home and watch an episode. It's funny, though, they thought, you know, to think of how all the famous characters in Pixar now, that they thought then, like, well, our most famous character is Tinney, so he's going to be the star. Tinney was on fire. I mean, within the animation community, people knew Tinney, but he was not a marketable character because... You can't make a toy out of that. He was a toy for the greatest generation, not the boomers taking their, you know, millennial children to the movie. He was a toy from a different era, so not a lot of appeal there.

And he didn't really move around that much. He was just sort of a very stiff tin toy. Very, if you think some of the characters in this are static, he's really static. So this treatment didn't really work. So what Katzenberg did well for this movie is he suggested the movie be a buddy film. And if you look at what Katzenberg wanted to do the toy story, you can understand why Shrek is the way it was. Shrek is very much a buddy comedy where the two buddies are at odds and eventually through the movie, they see eye to eye about things

and that is like his ideal form of a movie. So what happened was a lot of changes happened in this buddy movie rewrite. Tini would eventually become a spaceman that went through a few additional changes before becoming Buzz Light Year and Woody would remain Woody but would lose his ventriloca's dummy status

to become a cowboy to contrast with the spaceman angle. So just like two different eras classing with each other to represent the two different personalities clashing. He has more of a howdy duty vibe in some of those, that early test footage I looked up, yeah. He really does. And in this version of the movie, Woody was a villain, a more sympathetic villain, but he was a huge jerk because Katzenberg was pushing,

make this more cynical, make this more edgy. He wanted to make a Shrek-style movie while at Disney. Like, we could see what his game was. No, there's, uh, in the final film, every edgy moment, I didn't fully know that, but every edgy moment in that feels like, a little taste of Shrek in this movie. Yeah, the penis envy, Joe. that was all over those commercials. Exactly. The kissing of the butt, too. Like, all these dirty moments that Shrek just became like almost a PG-13 film.

Like, they say ass in the movie even. It thinks like just like this membering your character. Yeah. Buzz doesn't have an arm for like 20 minutes in the movie or 15 minutes. Yeah. So I can also see, I mean, you know, that Katzenberg, I think, was always straining against, like, the perceived Disney wholesomeness too. I think this was as an.

outsider creative thing. It could even push more against it and be further away from it. Though, that's crazy to think, though, because the heart of Pixar now is what people love the most about it. Like, it's emotionality. They took back emotionality

from Disney. Like, no, we're the most emotional show. We're going to make you cry. Every time you're crying. You're going to weep in that theater, embarrass yourself. So I have a little clip from this first version of the movie. It's test footage, but it shows, well, you're going to hear it, but it shows Woody is a much bigger character than a smaller buzz.

So the ventrarchus dummy tintoy aesthetic is still in effect in terms of their size. But also, Woody is much more sinister. So this is a version of the scene where Woody traps Buzz behind the dresser. So I'll have two versions of this to play on this episode. So this is the first version of it with a non-Tom Hanks playing Woody. Hi, pal, what you doing? I'm Tempice from Moore. Yeah, what's his button?

You weren't thinking of flying, were you? Well. You know, Andy loves toys that can fly. Really? Well, then. No, Infinity and beyond. You know, Andy loves toys that he can find. So, yeah, he's just very creepy and evil.

And I believe this, I think this was test footage. They sent to Disney, they were like, show us what the movie will look like. So they animated this scene from what they thought the movie would be. So, yeah, Woody is a huge prick. Does not have the charismatic voice of Tom Hanks, make him, you know, more lovable. And this is basically where Woody started. Yeah, also, you know, it's funny in that the getting lost behind the dresser scene,

it also involves a globe, just like in the final film, too. You could see a lot of these elements still remained in the final movie. So, again, Katzenberg was like, no, make the movie edgier, make it more cynical. This is the Go-Go-Go-90s. We're going to make a movie very different than the Disney fairy tale storybook, you know, touchy-feely movie. Like make this your, you know, edgy-nigh-nigh-old. 90s movie. So basically what Pixar did, being very terrified to lose this movie, lose this opportunity,

they took every executive note. They're like, we will just listen to whatever you tell us. And what happened was when they delivered the story reel, which was like not even animation, it was just basically storyboards made into a video to show them what the movie would be. You would not start animating 3D without that, like full approval, like number one. Yeah, yeah. I mean, in general, when you see storyboards from Pixar, I think it was surprising for folks. For me too, that think like, oh, they still plan it like a traditional 2D animated

film. So you see just drawings of Buzz and Woody. And I really like, you know, in the more final versions of the storyboards, it's fun to see what a drawing of Buzz or Woody would look like instead of a three-dimensional creation of them. When I was a kid in just reading these animation

magazines, it was like astounding to see like, oh, they draw these things first. These things are all drawn still. Well, I mean, the legacy of this film is people thinking a computer did it, right? Yeah. You told Woody to be mean and he did it, right? So basically, going back to them taking notes, they took every note that Katzenberg and his executives gave them. And the result was, you did exactly what we said and we hate it. Yep. Oh, God. I mean, that's exactly Katzenberg right there. Like giving you a million notes and then once you give it to them, then he

rejects it. Because that's why I said that character that bonkers we did, the little guy was totally him where somebody says like, well, no, that was your idea. Of course it was my idea. And I did it for the right reason. So there. It's hard to avoid Katzenberg and everything we talk about lately. Like any 90s animation thing, Katzenberg comes up in some way. Yeah. Well, if ever Quibi gets into animation, we'll talk about it. Quibi's not happening. Let's have them fun. Let's have Quibi fund us. Just quick bites of animation shaft. Yeah, we can do it. Five million per episode. They've got the money. So what happened was, this all led to an incident known as Black Friday, which is very similar to what happened with Aladdin.

Yeah, especially from Katzenberg, too. I think the Aladdin thing was even called Black Friday or Black Tuesday or something. Yeah, it was called Black the day of the week they showed in Katzenberg. I think also in our Goofy Movie podcast, there was a similar Katzenbergian. But Katzenberg had exited before they got into final production, so they actually could walk back the things he told them to do, such as having Bill Farmer not do the goofy voice as goofy. What a horrible mistake that would have been. So what happened was they showed them this story reel for their new treatment of the movie and they hated it. So we're lucky enough that Pixar did

expose us to the public via those DVD releases. So I'm going to play a short clip of what happens in their version of the movie that didn't make it where instead of in the movie that we're going to talk about later, Woody wants to trap Buzz behind the dresser. So he gets to go with Andy to Pizza Planet. What happens is through this Rube Goldbergian, event, Buzz gets knocked at the window. That's not what Woody wanted. In this version of the movie, Woody throws Buzz out the window, and his confrontation

with the rest of the toys is very ugly, and I have some of it here. And these are like most of the voices you'll hear in the final movie. Move it, move it. Hey, Spuds for brains. What do you think you're doing? Off the bed. Hey. You're going to make us, Woody?

No. He is. Slinky. Slanky. Slanky. Slanky. Get up here and do your job! Are you deaf? I said take care of them! Uh, I'm sorry, Woody, but I have to agree with them. I don't think what you did was right.

What? Am I hearing correctly? You don't think I was right? Who said your job was to think, Spring Weiner? Just use this vast reserve of brain power to consider this for a moment. If it wasn't for me, Andy wouldn't pay any attention to you at all. In fact, my sketchy you... friend, you would have been hauled away to Goodwill

a long time ago, so shut your mouth and get them off the bed. See, yes, this is the version of Woody we didn't see. So yeah, Woody is still a sort of villain in this version of the movie that has to, you know, learn a lesson, but you're never on his side because he's too much of an asshole.

I mean, Woody messes up and does some cruel things in the final version of the movie, but you like him the entire time because he feels bad, he's never too mean, but in this version, he is just the worst. They give you a reason to think that he's at least like, well, He's defensive. He's losing his confidence.

But he's not being like intentionally shitty to people. But in this, yeah, like that scene starts with him pretending to shake, buzz his hand and throwing him out of window. And when everybody tells him like, you just, you just killed him. He's like, yeah, so what? It's a toy eat toy world. That's right. Yeah, that's a line that was before that clip. But it's like, yes, I rule all of you.

And this is my bed get off. And I'll have my like, my subordinate take care of all of you. And it's also a harder thing to come back from at the end of it because he's like, he's being mean to a dog and you just see this slink being so sad. How can you ever like a person like that? When they throw him out the window at the end of this sequence, you absolutely deserve this way. You deserve death. Like you killed another toy and are telling everybody else you'll kill them too. And it's funny.

So this version of Woody would not make it into the final movie. But knowing that this existed and these voice readings exist, in the movie, I feel like some. some of these original Woody readings are still in because at times Woody sounds too mean in lines where he's not supposed to be mean, but he's talking about you're going to need a movie buddy, if you don't have one, get one. He's like really mean in some lines.

I'm like, I think they just retain some of the earlier Woody lines for this final version. Yeah, I think you're right. A couple times the negativity comes out of him or he acts like a real creep. And I feel like they add, maybe they add some other line to be like, oh, oh, I didn't mean that or whatever. Yeah, there's, you'll see some of mean Woody still in here.

The worst he does in the final movie is Tells Linky to, like, shut up. Yeah, that's basically it. So, yes, Katzenberg hated this movie, the movie that he asked for. He absolutely hated it. So much so that he thought it was, Disney thought it was unsalvageable, and they shut down production. And basically, Steve Jobs personally financed Pixar at that point as the writers worked on a new script, while the animator shifted their priorities to making more commercials. So I read a lot of sources.

The story went that they were given two weeks to come up with a new script. so Andrew Stanton, and they hired some, you know, Hollywood folks to come in and help him. So he went off to write his new script. The rest of Pixar was working on commercials. But the two weeks thing is a mystery because they didn't start production again. Sorry, production was in Greenland again until February. Oh, wow. So between November of 93 and February of 94, there was nothing happening at Pixar toy story-wise outside of writing that new script.

Damn. And those three months of just that I got, you know, again, another thumbs up to jobs, like paying for, the company to keep going. I think a lot of other bosses would just been like, oh, we lost, we lost the Disney deal. Cut bait. I don't trust you guys to make a new thing. I mean, also like thinking that in Silicon Valley today, somebody would trust creatives to do anything. Oh, yeah, yeah. No way. So another, another thumbs up for Steve Jobs. He actually was like, oh, these artists know what they're doing, but also there's a lot of money in it for me if this pays off. And there certainly was. So basically, uh, Disney wanted to move pixel.

star down to Southern California, and they were fighting it the entire time. They're like, we need to watch over you animation dorks. We know how to make movies, you don't. Thankfully, they're able to stay up north up here. But Disney brought in some screenwriters like they did with Aladdin. So they brought in the screenwriting duo Alex Sokolow and Joel Cohen. They don't have a lot of screenwriting credits that are that interesting. But I think they were just script doctors at the time.

And so was Joss Whedon. His real name is Joshua. Shut up, Joss. It's a fake name. you made it up. So he was working as a script doctor, and as much as Josh Whedon annoys me today, he added characters that were very interesting,

like Rex. He added the character of Rex, and he added the concept that Buzz didn't know he was a toy, which is such a pivotal and interesting hook for this movie. So that is a huge addition to Toy Story, that concept alone. Yeah, I can't imagine it without that. Like, it's also, it's what makes Buzz a difficult character

every Toy Story sequel, Yes, because they have to give him amnesia or replace him. So tell me, without any spoilers, does Buzz Lightyear exist as himself in four? Yes, he's just a little more marginalized, I'd say. He's less. He's not so much a co-star in four. Yeah, because, like, in one, he has his arc,

and it's a killer arc. Like, he goes through an existential dilemma and comes out the other end, okay, but there's really nowhere else for him to go after that. That's why in two, he's replaced by a double, who is classic buzz, and in three he has his mind erased and rebooted, so he acts like classic buzz too.

They don't do that in four. A number of storytelling choices in four feel like that they were trying to not repeat things. I think because they noticed people had noticed Pixar was repeating things. But yeah, Josh, Josh. Weiden, he, you don't hear the overly cloying Whedon dialogue in here.

I think the closest to it might be also like potato head and ham kind of make some postmodernist comments. Yeah, yeah. But why would that happen kind of things? So also Joss wanted to add Barbie in a pivotal role. Mattel said no because they assumed, you know, Barbie is not a character you can put a personality onto. Barbie is a character that girls project their personality onto.

So they turned it down. Of course, when Toy Story 1 was a hit, they're like, put Barbie in two, go for it. A whole aisle of Barbies. Go, go, go, go. I mean, the number, they probably looked at the sales of Mr. Potatohead. And they're like, shit, we should have really had a commercial in this, too. Like, yeah, I mean, well, also, too, like, Pixar's not a proven commodity. Why would you trust them with your gigantic brand Barbie for your movie?

And apparently Woody and Buzz were going to be rescued by Barbie as part of the escape sequence in Act 3. Like, it was going to be a Terminator to, you know, come with me if you want to live parody. That's fine. Yeah. That's fun. And there's also a joke to talk about in the commentary where Woody wishes he was anatomically correct when he meets Barbie. So I can go without Woody talking about his lack of penis

in the movie. Thank you very much. I think they already, they've walked up towards that joke with Ken in the three and four. I don't know if that, I didn't think that Ken stuff was that great in 2010. I just don't know how well age in 2019. Michael Keaton's a great actor though. Yeah. It was really good

cast. It's just kind of a like a really corny bunch of gay jokes to me. I mean, he's a metrosexual. Yeah, it's true. Yeah. No, and there's even more of that in the the short where they helps them have a Hawaiian vacation because they're going to have their first kiss and everybody's like, you guys have never kissed before,

which again fits more with like Ken is actually gay. It's a Tobias style character. Exactly. So yes, production didn't restart until February of 94 and this new script was not recorded until March of 94, but they were recording voices for Tom Hanks and everyone else. It's early as 1991. Wow.

Yes. That was before Tom Hanks like was Oscar winner Tom Hanks too in 91. Well, I think his 92 was when Philadelphia came out. Philadelphia 93, League of their own 92. We'll talk all about how lucky they were to get these two when we talk about the voice actors. They say approved the script and what made it work was Woody was a much more charismatic and sympathetic leader of the toys. And they made the Andy's room like an all-wickal workplace. Like Woody's the boss.

They have meetings. It's very like, you know, professional. And that made it less of a juvenile comedy and more of just like a character. character-based comedy. Woody is much more of a manager instead of like, yeah, it feel, you know, in that, in that Black Friday clip, it also makes it feel more like Lord of the Flies, just as like the brutality of it. It makes it of just a darker place to be a toy instead of like, look, we all have jobs as toys. It's a more civilized existence, too, which doesn't take you to as dark of a place, you know. And yeah, that scene at the beginning of the movie, which we'll get to eventually,

the scene where what he's having the meeting, it fully establishes the world and the characters. Like, just like two minutes you understand like, okay, this is how a toy operates in this world, and these are the characters and this is their relationship with each other. Like, it's such a perfectly written scene. And that reflects the script as a whole, like, my personal thoughts on this script is like, despite the amount of troubles it had, the final version is like a perfect movie script. Like, everything pays off. Everything is very tight.

there's absolutely no fat in this movie. Everything works. There's nothing in this movie that could be taken out at all. It reminds me of things like Back to the Future One. Just the perfect, mechanically perfect, thematically perfect movie script. I noted so many times in my notes like, oh, this just seems like a one-off joke, but it establishes a thing that will be important later. Like all of these discoveries, they all pay off as a functionality, like, I guess what you've

call it like a perfectly made watch. It just moves in all the ways. it's supposed to. Even things that don't matter, like at a certain point in the movie, Ham and Mr. Potato Head are playing strip battleship. And only upon this viewing, I was like, oh yeah, Andy got Battleship for his birthday. And they talk about it in that scene. Like, it doesn't matter, but it's laid in there. Like, this part of the movie exists earlier. Now here it is later, even though it doesn't really matter that much. They're playing Battleship because it's new and they just got it. Yeah, like,

yeah, there's a real attention to detail that I think a lot of the more cynical films of say the DreamWorks O'View do you don't contend with? So one thing I want to talk about plot-wise and we'll explore this throughout our podcast is just as you grow older and watch these movies

you tend to think a little too much about the reality of being a toy and after I was like a teen I thought boy you know being a toy seems just like a living hell like these are condemned souls. They're probably like murderers in another life just condemn

to be in toy bodies. Reminds you of that Twilight Zone episode where they're all toys in a box and they don't know what they are until the very end. It's like a horrifying reveal. Like you're all toys. You're all toys. But yes, like there are so many things. If you ask too many questions and the movie is very good about not asking them that don't make a lot of sense and they make the world seem terrible like, what is death for a toy? What he says? We're going to die a lot in this movie. What is life for a toy? When does a toy gain sentience? A big question that I stumbled upon because I watched this with Nina for the first time is like, Buzz Lightyer doesn't think he's a toy.

Why does he play by all the toy rules? Like freezing when, you know, he's picked up with the claw and not like running over to Andy and saying, hi, Andy, I'm Buzz Lightyer. How are you? Why does he stop moving instead of, yeah, you take too much into it. It drives you crazy.

Well, the big one for me is when Liddy says, now we're going to have to break some rules. I was like, okay, wait, so there are rules. Like, you all have agreed upon rules here. What's going on? There's no punishment for breaking the rules, apparently. And I imagine like my head cannon is Woody like basically briefed buzz like, okay, when these big people around you can't move because the space command would punish you. Like he made up some lie to fool the very gullible buzz.

Just to get him to stop moving. But that scene is not in the movie. Yeah, though, I guess, you know, if you pull out it too much, then the film is just explaining rules constantly. It becomes a wicket-a entry. Or it was like, I didn't see the Beauty and the Beast live action version. But Lindsey Ellis, the YouTube essayist, she made a really good video about how, like, the film tries to explain things, questions people had from the original Disney version. And instead, the explanation just makes for an even more grim and sad world. Yeah.

It takes, it doesn't add anything. It only takes things away to give more context to a fairy tale. And I guess, like, maybe three is the only one that really explores, like, some of these questions, like, okay, three is like, well, here is what death is. Like, this is what death is for a toy. So we figured that out, at least, like, just being decimated beyond existence. Yeah, because you can lose your head and still be a toy. Yeah. But if you're melted, yeah.

But then four deals with, like, okay, we put eyes on a fork and that's, you know, sentient life. But what about, like, is the battleship game sentient? Is the Magic 8 ball would use as sentient? I mean, there are too many questions. If you start asking, like, as Hermes said, it just raises further questions. Yeah. I don't want to spoil four for you, but they're not super interested in answering those questions either. Which I think ultimately is to the benefit of it because we all want these answers, but the mystery is more fun than just having, like what if there was a scene where Forky says,

when a child put eyes on me, a soul was breathed into me and I now am this thing. I feel like if Toy Story was created today, it would have that element to it. there would be like way too deep lore to explore. Well, because nerds like us demanded it. And so they're giving it to us. We're at fault. It's our fault that's happening. I'm just so glad that they didn't export too much.

But one thing I did want to bring up was the, the 1986 Christmas special, The Christmas Toy, which I had seen before this, and it was like kind of digging in the back of my brain, even 95, like, this is kind of similar to something I watched. And then later, when it was easy to access, I was like, you know, there are a lot of similarities. And I feel like they are, it's just lateral thinking. It's just the conclusions everyone would come to by saying, like, what is life for a toy? But in the Christmas toy, which is, you know, get it on YouTube for like 99 cents.

It's fun to watch. It's an hour long. There is a punishment. So the toys, they can come to life when you're not looking. The punishment for not being in the spot, the human being left you is death. Yeah. You die. You become still forever.

Yeah. And you're just, yeah. I mean, there should be that kind of punishment. Otherwise, why aren't toys always out of place? they're like moving when you're not looking at them otherwise, like if there's no punishment. I, yeah, and also it's about a space toy replacing the favorite toy of a kid, too. That's true, and the toy doesn't know it's a toy either. And it's kind of a buddy picture, but between a tiger and a mouse toy instead of,

uh, the space toy is really just weird. Like, yeah. Yeah, I'm glad the threat of, uh, you know, constant death is not hanging over these characters. I like that that element that there is a punishment for not acting like a toy, but I don't think it would fit in in this movie in the tone they're going for. Well, Christmas toy is supposed to be like maudlin and about death and also rebirth. Like that, that's the themes Jim Henson is really interested in a lot. Like he really likes that.

And especially bringing that into a Christmas story, it makes sense for them. But for a toy story, it's already you have enough to think about of like toys hating each other and how the toy's interpersonal relationships are. If you're also thinking, like, they will die at any second. Like, it's a lot of extra stress. Too much anxiety. Yeah. It already gives enough anxiety to people who are afraid to throw away any toy ever.

Oh, yeah. I'm glad I saw this when I was older. I assumed this made everyone into hoarders, that whole generation. Like, the true millennials, like, born in 1990, when they saw this movie as a kid, like, I must keep everything. What if Toy Story is real? Well, Jesse, you see the way Jesse is heartbroken to be thrown away? I can't do that to my Jesse.

That's messing kids up. Please let's know if this movie messed you up. Let's talk about music, though. So Toy Story was an atypical animated movie for 95. It wasn't a fairy tale adaptation, and it took place in the modern day. So very strange for an animated movie that was released by Disney to do these things. And Lasseter did not want it to be a musical. And at the time, Joss Whedon made a good point.

Maybe it was later that he said, like, movies like Toy Story are about characters masking their emotions, not singing about how they feel. Like Woody and Buzz and other characters, they're just masking how they really feel, masking their concerns and their worries and their actual feelings for each other. You don't do that in a musical. That's why it's a big deal near the end of the movie

when he's under the crate, telling Buzz like, I'm just jealous. When it finally comes out, if the first song in the movie or second song was like, who's this new toy, he's more cool than me, I'm insecure. That's why it's good.

someone else sings the music and not the characters. We'll get to that in a second. So Lassner didn't want to be a musical. And Disney was like, this is a Disney movie. We're in the height of everyone loving Disney songs and people going to the movies for the music. And selling soundtracks. Selling soundtracks.

We have to make this a musical. So there was a compromise that there would be non-diagetic songs sung throughout the movie, which wouldn't be sung by characters. And who would they be sung by? Randy Newman. Yep. Just sits there all night and day,

singing about what he sees. Fat man with his kids and dog Drove in through the morning fog Hey there, rover Come on over Wow, it's nice to have music while we eat So yeah, I love that family guy joke so much As bad as family guy can get

Whenever I hear Randy Newman I think of singing about what he sees And a lot of the songs In Toy Story are Randy Newman's singing about what he sees. Yeah, it feels like he wrote it after like, strange things that happen into me.

Yeah. Strange things are happening right now. It comes sky and a rocket. Yeah, like literally singing about what he sees. I wonder with the sailing song if it was originally flying. And then they're like, no, you got to separate it a little more there. I have a clip of that.

Oh, really? So this is the ultimate. So there are a bunch of cut songs. They're all in the Blu-ray. And they're also all on YouTube at this point. Buzz Lightyer's theme was called Plastic Space Man and you can still hear the music

of this melody when you see Buzz Lighter like da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da That's Buzz Light year's theme But here is Randy Newman singing about what he sees Flying close the sky But there's in just as you find him

Wherever a wrong to write Buzz Light yeah we'll join the fight Buzz Light yeah Buzz Light yeah Buzz Light yeah There you go. What? That's the Buzz Lightyer theme.

It really is describing four chews on an apple right there in a song. But that song eventually turns into the sailing song. So they retain that part of it. But you just can't say Buzz Let's do this thing. And then he does this other thing. At least the I will go sailing no more. At least that is like, it's a metaphor. It's a metaphor for Flores.

Yeah. Not being able to fly. But yeah, so I think this series and Pixar in general would back away from sung songs. Like I think every Toy Story movie from this point on has one main theme that's sung. Like the second movie has when she loved me. The third movie apparently has a song that I forgot about. And I assume the fourth movie has another song. But Pixar does not release like musicals.

Like Coco was the outlier there. Yeah, yeah, which was important. Like when they needed music to tell the story, then they used it very well. But like, yeah, Incredibles doesn't have... Incredibles has an amazing score that's just like a classic James Bond score. Like, it's great. But there isn't a need for music for it. Yeah, I think Bugs Life still was cursed with Randy Newman music.

That's right. There's a bug. There's a bug. It's what life is with Joe Rubug. Oh, boy. Yeah, not a great song. The, you know, the music in this movie is very good. I think the scoring is very good.

Yeah, friend and me is a classic. Like, it really is. Even if it makes you want to tear your hair out by the 17th time you've heard in Kingdom Hearts 3. Oh, God, yeah. You know, maybe they didn't want to pay for another song, but they really should have. Yeah, yeah. This instrumental is driving me crazy. But, yeah, Randy Newman, I was like, I didn't know a lot about him outside of, you know, I love L.A.

and those things. And I was like, was this his first movie he scored? No, he was scoring movies back in, like, as early as 1971. and writing music for television even earlier than that, he, I think the first thing that he wrote for, music for was the many loves of Dobie Gillis. Good Lord. Yeah, like in 1963 when he was like 17 or 18.

He's so old. Man, wow. So, yeah. I will compliment Randy Newman's music in Princess and the Frog. He wrote some really good songs there. I think they're helped even better by him not singing it. Like, in other people singing. Yeah, let's get that voice out of here.

But, yeah, it's very, it's very like, that his voice is just part of this movie and I do like it and I think they eventually know when to back off of songs and there's not a whole lot of songs in the movie. Now the later toy story films, their reuse of friend and me is always fun

each film like how are they going to re-contextualize it? How are they going to replay you got a friend in me in a new way to make this its own version? So we can talk about the visuals of this movie. We'll be talking about that throughout the entire

podcast of the movie discussion, but I took a lot of notes and I could bore you with math details. One of them I thought was interesting was like, the original movie, the final render of this movie that they delivered to theaters was not even 1080P. It didn't matter because it was on film and everything was softened, but the original print of Toy Story was a low resolution than a PlayStation 4 game.

Holy crap. Wow. So yes. So the 1080p versions of it must just be like fully re-rendered or whatever. Yeah, I have to assume the 4K Blu-ray and the old Blu-ray where it's like, we're re-rendering all this footage with our data. Yeah. Because I don't see hard, like, pixely edges on things or anything like that. So they obviously re-rendered it at some point. No, you didn't, you didn't know what HD was anyway back then, or at least we didn't as kids.

No, I was watching the Ultimate Toy Box DVDs on my 480P, like, flat screen. Oh, man, yeah. Yeah. I think how stupid I was even in 2006. I had an SDTV and played gears on it. I'm like, what am I even missing? Who cares? Now you can't even read a font on an HDTV.

It's impossible. But yeah, I remember like when I bought the DVDs, the big deal about them was this is a digital transfer. We're not transferring the film to a DVD transfer. We're just taking the data, just putting it on a disc. You're going to watch it right from the computer. So that was like the big draw of watching these movies on disk. Yeah.

So we'll talk a lot about visuals throughout this podcast, but I feel like even in 95 you get a sense that Pixar knew what would age poorly and what wouldn't age poorly. I will say this is a daring, dangerous opinion. I will say the humans in this movie don't look that bad. They don't look that bad.

And they knew the humans were the lesser characters in terms of their visual impressiveness, which is why Sid is the human you see the most of, but he is an ugly villain. So they knew like, okay, our humans are ugly based on the technology. They can't be that good-looking, we rarely see Andy up close.

In adults, you almost don't see at all. You have to look really hard to see Andy's mom. Yeah, Andy's mom does not get close-ups. Like, I feel like they really wanted Sid to be the only human you saw. But for certain things to work, they're like, well, we have to see Andy's face and head. Now, I think the, like, Molly and Hannah, sometimes they move. There's a scene where Hannah, like, is scared and goes, ah, like, and it does feel like a, poser drawing of just a thing being shaken.

There are a couple of times where humans look like Renegade Angel, Xavier Renegade Angel characters to me. That is very true. But they did know that too. Yeah. I think that's a difference between them and some of the stuff that hasn't aged well in their competitors' films because I think they were just like, well, yeah, an animator would tell them, well, this won't look good.

And then they were told, I don't care. We need to show this. Like, I think it's important to show this character, this human, or have this motion happen. So just do it. I don't care if it'll look bad in your dumb animator opinion. While this feels much more based on what the animators thought, let's limit this because we know how it's going to look. Yeah, and Pixar's philosophy was like, let's do things when we're ready to do them. So their first movie to be driven by human characters was 10 years later, nine years later, the Incredibles.

So they didn't think they were ready to have a convincing human cast until 2004 of the Incredible. 2004 is the Incredible. So, like, this movie is 95. And it's always impressive every Pixar film where they get to show off at the front. Their new technology, like, they always want to have, like, the start of Toy Story 2 with all the buzz light year. What we find out is a video game. They're showing off just how far they've come from the first Toy Story. Like, every film they want to just wow you with the things they can.

couldn't do before, which that's the kind of, you know, it's something 2D film can't offer 2D animation in the 90s and 2000s couldn't offer as much because it felt like everything's been conquered. The West was one. We know the limits of... We made home on the range

just hang it up. But yeah, going back to this movie, having, you know, lived... I saw it last 10 years ago and I've seen a lot of great graphics and played a lot of great video games since then, and I just saw like clips of four at a Thanksgiving meal. I was like, this might not look that good.

I went back to it. I'm like, man, this is a great-looking movie. Almost 25 years later, you can still see the rough edges on things. You can still see textures that aren't really up to snuff. But, man, the acting is on point, and the staging is on point, the lighting.

Like, I think they did such a good job 25 years ago that movies, even like... So I also saw parts of Shrek, like, at a bar on an HDTV, like right before I did this. Shrek looks like shit. It looks so bad. And the Shrek came six years later, and in CGI terms it's like a geological age.

It's in, yeah, whenever I watch Trek, I'm like, this is so bad and hated and ugly. And I see, I see where like the box is around them when they're like, oh, we're in the forest. Well, no, I see the edges of this box here. They breathed so much life into the small area they were in that they didn't make it seem small. Like, it worked. They were also better at tricking you, at being like, being like, you. like magicians of just like, no, look over here. Yeah. And there's no mocap garbage. Like all of the faces are hand. That would have been too

easy. Yeah. And all the faces are hand animated. Like the lip sync is really good. The emotions are really good. The way all the characters act really good. I love Woody's floppy, exasperated acting. Like just so many touches. I watched this movie three times for this podcast. So once I watched it with Nina, once I watched it for notes and I watched it the third time with the commentary. Just like watching all the faces, just how much work they pulled into all of these characters, making them convincing. when previously CGI was like, well, you can make like a unicycle

or a lamp or whatever, but you can't make a convincing person. Like, this is convincing acting. They have so much fun with Woody especially. Like, he is like one of the greatest actors of CGI movies, just the way he like, when he says,

he doesn't have laser guns or when he goes, like, slinky. And the U.R. a toy scene. And he's like, you are a child's play thing. He holds up his fingers to buzz. And like, he makes a little box, motions with his hands. I'm getting exasperated talking about it,

but the characters look so good in this movie. And that's the animators breathing so much life into it. And it's one of the saddest things about Toy Story, making people think computers just made it when animators work so hard to make this pile of polycons look convincing and move correctly. Especially if you see the computers they were using at the time. So on the Blu-ray, there's an archive DVD-Xra,

that's like the making of Toy Story, and I feel like it was made of the time, like in 95, because everyone is super skinny and young, and they're showing off all of their computers that they're using, like, super primitive computers made this movie. It's primitive.

It's pretty much, yeah. They're all dressed like college students, but, well, Lasseter always has this Hawaiian shirt on. But one of them, I think Pete Doctor is showing off the computer he's using, and it's just like a big boxy computer, and he's like, well, this is how you move Woody, and there's, like, 80 sliders.

He's like, I'll move one of his hands. It's like, somebody had to do that. It's like, stop, motion but with the CGI character. I assume there's a little more streamlining now, but just like every little part had a slider on it. It's just like crazy. Well, I mean, when you see what people can pull off now with just Team Fortress 2 assets and making them act things out. Oh yeah, Gary's mod is like a Pixar tool from like 10 years ago. Things have changed quite a lot, but then I mean, you also expect a lot more fidelity and realism as well. Like the difference is

are more noticeable. But yeah, just to think of all the different like strings they have to pull on these marionettes. And it's just so, it just frustrates me that the promotion of this movie removes so much appreciation for the artistry. Yeah, I totally agree with you. So yes, we'll talk a lot more about the visuals

when we talk about the movie. But man, they really hold up. Like we don't watch CGI movies from the 90s anymore, I don't think. I think this is the only one that people are like, let's watch Toy Story. We love Toy Story. let's watch it.

Like, it holds up, and it's crazy to think this was 25 years ago. Yeah. They were working on this. Other than, yeah, I wouldn't watch Bug's Life. Maybe. It's better than people say it is. Sure. Well, yeah.

But there's also Kevin's Bayfishing. Oh, yeah. Well, let's talk about noble people if you want to talk about problematic, me too, folks. We got to talk about John Laster. Unfortunately, until like two years ago, John Laster is like on everything. He was the front-facing public view of John Laster is like,

boy, this big fat man baby in his Hawaiian shirt, he loves toys and he loves joy and he loves making movies for all the kids and he loves celebrating art. Really, he was just a giant pervo who cultivated a culture of sexism at Pixar and did a lot of things, most of them that aren't on the public record. Yeah, it's, it was very depressing to find out because as, as a fan of animation, I definitely, you know, I believe the hype about him as the guy. who like he fixed Disney after they bought Pixar he fixed him and that he brought anime to the west

he brought anime yeah he was personally friends with Hayamiyazaki he was all these great things and like I mean now you look back on it it just feels like egomania how he like I remember the ads for cars were about they all started with Alasseter taking a family road

trip and it was not how he went on a road trip with the family it's like oh the family you abandoned like that family yeah we're making this now I don't even want to try to make too many jokes about it. It's just gross. Yeah, it is really gross. And we won't get into the details.

You can read them on your own. I reread all the stories. I'm like, wow, I feel like there are bigger secrets that are buried. I feel like what Lasseter was okay with getting out, got out. But basically, I want to say, this is me speculating. The agreement was Lassiter will step down, but everyone is getting NDA'd. Like, no one can talk about this. He's going to say, like, I made some mistakes.

Goodbye. Oh, hello, Skydance. I'll be your new boss. And that happens. But, yeah, like, my. My initial stupid thought about Laster is like, oh, that's a real bummer we can't talk about last year in good terms anymore. But the real good thought that I should be having is it's a shame like so many women were

held down at Pixar and not allowed to achieve. And so many women's careers were either cut short or just, you know, made a lot worse because of John Lasseter and, you know, the culture he cultivated at Pixar. Yeah, just like the boys club that he engendered to and just that he, yeah, it didn't seem like a very open space for women at all. I think they're, and they're trying to fix that now at least, at the very least because it made Disney look bad that that happened under their watch when they want to market themselves, as you know, a woke corporate brand doesn't work if under your watch for 20 years somebody got away with like all this very, at the very least,

improper behavior. Very, very improper. Yeah. And I just think it's a bummer. too that when people want to talk about his skill. And like if you just want to speak objectively of skill as a storyteller and animator, he probably is a very skill band. But there are a lot of skilled people who didn't commit crimes or didn't hold people back. I don't think skill or talent is necessarily a get out of jail free card. And I mean that literally like to get out of jail. I think we've treated it that way for too long, you know. Yeah. And then you hear stories about like the malign brave, which I like the movie Brave. I don't think it's terrible.

People didn't like it, but you hear about like, oh, the woman director was removed from the project. Now you think with this new lens, you're like, I wonder why. Like, was it, like, she wasn't working at Pixar as a woman. What were the challenges of that? And you wonder, like, what could have happened if that movie could have been better and questions like that? And why it's been such a male-driven company for so long. Maybe that will change on the Laster's gone. Yeah, you know, his shadow is, with just how long the production is on these films,

His shadow is a long one. So even if he's been gone for two years, they're still making movies. He okayed the production of us. Yeah, and I think he still gets like a story credit on Toy Story 4, but I think Frozen 2 removed

his executive producer credit. I remember seeing Coco and just seeing his name at the end of the end. Yeah. Yeah. He was there. He was there. He worked on it, you know?

Yeah. He, I mean, he's very talented man, but he fucked up as a human being and that's more important than the cartoons you make, I think.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, again, you just, you could treat, people nicer. That's all. Even if you're talented, that doesn't make you able to treat people poorly. So, yeah, Lasseter directed this movie, of course, and also he directed the first three Pixar movie. So this, a Bugs Life and Toy Story 2, and he directed Cars and Cars 2. And, man, when Disney, you know, bought Pixar, he was given even more power, which I think might have made his behavior

worse, because he was not only chief creative officer of Walt Disney animation, he was. was also that of Pixar, and he was put in charge of, like, imaginering, like, theme park stuff. Yeah. And he, like, answered directly to Roy Disney. He, like, he could bypass, like, every executive. He was incredibly powerful, which, you know, with that kind of power, if you're already a bad actor, you're going to be made worse. And even especially if you're telling yourself, like, everything I did is perfect. I'm the greatest storyteller of all time. We made every film has been the best film ever. It wins every award. It makes all the money. We never make a bad. We never make a

one and till cars but yeah I mean that you you have to be incredibly full of yourself yeah but but Pixar had so many great other people around him that it's like it's not the john laster's show as much as they made him central to so many behind the he made himself central to pretty much behind the scenes feature it's unfortunate that he was the mascot uh for like a better term for the company for so long because of his very you know very iconic look the vacation dad look he had. He was like before Miyazaki movies, he'd be the friendly white man who would tell you, now, don't be

scared, this is from another country, but it's all going to be okay. My best friend, Hayao Miyazaki, made this, and we love each other. So yeah, it's unfortunate that he is all over every Pixar thing, both in terms of his name, but also his appearance. It's really unfortunate that that will haunt these movies forever now. Yeah, pretty much, I think

a very bad downside of it is that, like, Disney is famous for hiding, of not really promoting the people who make their films. Like, directors don't get as big a piece of it. Like, nobody gets to be like a Don Bluth type. Like, oh, this is a Don Bluth film. Lasseter got to be that.

And now it feels like punishment for like, oh, see, we uplifted this guy and made John Lassiter so famous. What did he do with that power? Yeah, I'm sure, like, 10 years ago or maybe even recently, like, you could, you can show somebody with John Lasseter and they would know who he was. more so than like, who directed Little Mermaid, who directed Lion King? Like, even I can't answer some of these questions because they're not, you know, here are, um, Musker and Clements are here.

I know what they look like. I know who they are, right? Yeah. So like, uh, they, uh, I mean, I'm sure he was a big part of it, but they made him like the public face of this company. Yeah. Yeah. Like Hideo Kajima kind of thing. Basically, yeah.

So enough about that creep. Let's talk about other people who didn't fuck up. Uh, Pete Doctor is another person. So just a brief. We're going to go over these careers. very briefly because there's a lot to go over here. So the main people behind this movie creatively were John Lasseter, Pete

Dr. Andrew Stanton, and Joe Ramped. Pete Doctor joined Pixar at 21 and has been there for 30 years. So what a working career this man has had? Wow. Joined in 1990 at age 21. So Pete Doctor went on to be the main director on Monsters Inc and had many directors.

He was the director of Up Inside Out and the upcoming soul. Oh, you know, that's soul. It starts with a lead character dying. Is that like the sequel to Ghost Dad? Hmm, it could be. Well, man, you're bringing up all these bad people now. Why don't they go to it under the pound and get a new jazz man? But, yeah, Soul is the new movie that Pete Doctor is behind. I hear Inside Out is very good.

I like the better one is called Herman's Head. Inside Out is very good. I don't want to cry. It's what I want to see the movie. Imagine seeing it with your mom. Oh, geez. Bad times or good times. I thought with your mom. Filling times. Andrew Stanton. So he is the accredited screenwriter along with the writing duo and Joss Whedon on this movie. So Andrew Stanton, he directed Finding Nemo, Wally, and Finding Dory. And he also branched on to live action with the mega bomb John Carter.

Oh, he's a John Carter man. Yeah, that's sad. Yeah, don't hold that against him, though. He never really left Pixar. No, I mean, John Carter, that was a hubristic moment for Stanton, I think, yeah. And John Carter just sounds like a Denzel Washington, movie or something. It does nothing about Mars. I feel like right after

that one, that's when they're like, we're, okay, forget it, just buy Star Wars. We can't make films for boys. Let's just buy Star Wars and Marvel. And now Andrew apparently dabbles in TV direction. Like, he enjoyed live acting direction. So he's directed a few episodes of Stranger Things and Better

Call Saul. Oh, that's cool. I didn't know that. Man, I've probably watched one of his Stranger Things episodes. And the last member of the cast, the main creative cast, is Joe Rantf. So unfortunately, the bad news is you probably know this if you're listening. He passed away during the production of cars in 2005 in a tragic car accident where the other person in the car survived,

but he did not. Yeah, it's sad. It happened in Berkeley, as I recall. Yeah, it's unfortunate. I, yeah, we talked a little about Ramp because he was a big creative force on the nightmare before Christmas as well. Yeah, he was the storyboard supervisor. So he was working on other Disney stuff

while working on Toy Story. And he was the person there who had the most traditional animation experience. So he was a story guy on things like Little Mermaid and who framed Roger Rabbit, and I believe Oliver and company perhaps. But he was known in the industry as like one of the best story guys. He really knew how

to, you know, make a storyboard and pitch it. Like pitching a storyboard is one of the most important parts of the process. You have to be very charismatic and like sell an audience of fellow creatives on your ideas. So like you can see clips of the making of toy story of him like pitching

the story and it's just sort of like the Rocko's Modern Life episode of Wacky Deli we did for a cartoon, except the people in the room are laughing at him and not asking questions. No, he sounded like a very indispensable part of Pixar, and so his, you know, accidental death is quite tragic for, I mean, I think people were afraid Pixar couldn't even recover without him. Yeah, very important man. I don't think he ever wanted to be a director. I think he was really interested in the storytelling aspect, so he never directed a movie, but he was a major part of like almost every Disney movie and then Pickens. star movie until he died. And he'd be like a voice actor and things, I think, because he just, people liked him doing voices at storyboard things so much. So like, well, he's the voice of this guy. Yeah, he plays Lenny in this movie. He's He's Heimlich in a Bug's Life. He's the shrimp in finding Nemo. Like, he would find a role in like almost every movie. Yeah, yeah. I, uh, this story of the

early days of Pixar, you remember that Wally commercial that was the lunch? Like, we had a lunch one day and we planned out all of our films and first would be Toy Story. Oh yeah, yeah. It's, it's talking about these guys just at a lunch in, I guess, Richmond Pointe talking about these films. I want to go to that mythical restaurant. But yeah, I guess was Wally the last one of that mythical lunch where they playing all their movies? According to that trailer, yes, Wally was the final idea they had. Interesting. So, I want to talk about the voice cast. So they're so notable, I didn't take a lot of notes. But what's important is that Pixar got Tom Hanks and Tim Allen in 1991. Tim Allen, home improvement had just started.

1994 was the biggest year for Tim Allen ever, which is why the critic made fun of him so much, and The Simpsons in 94. So Tim Allen had the number one TV show, the number one movie, and the number one book, all in 94. That was the year of Arf, Arf, Arf, Arf, Back to Jail for me, Tim Allen. Oh, boy. It's, I mean, yeah, he's a sake guy, but, quite a success. I got to give it to. Yeah, so, yeah, Tim Allen, they were lucky to get him when he was on the rise. By the time Toy Story came out, we were in the era of the Santa Claus and home improvement was taken off and everything was all hunky-dory for Tim Allen.

And his performance as Buzz shaped the character because when he came in, he did a very down-to-earth, Tim Allen, working class guy voice for Buzz. They're like, oh, this really isn't going to work because they imagine Buzz is like, I'll save you, like that kind of a character. But they're like, no, this is better like Buzz Lightyear. is more like a cop than a space hero. Yeah, yeah, you know that he still can say a lot of stilted things, but I guess, yeah, you see the more kind of like blue-collar believability of him

is like, I'm just a guy doing a job, I got to. Yeah, and he's like radioing into his superiors and things like that. It's very cop-like. He's not Dudley. I think he's like Dudley-Duride in some of the older things, or it's not Tim Allen. I'm glad they went a different way. Yeah, Tim Allen brings so much to the role. I, and you remember those, those classic trailers that were like fake versions of the voiceover sessions of like, here they are doing the voices.

Oh, yeah. They didn't really do that. But, yeah, so Tim Allen, as Buzz Lightyear, enough said, he kind of sucks now. You got to forget Tim Allen sucks if you want to enjoy Buzz Light Year, but it's fine. Celebrities have done worse things than Tim Allen. He's just a jerk in public. Yeah, just a jerk. And I don't agree with his politics.

Yeah, a rich idiot. So Tom Hanks, we all love him, America's Sweetheart. when they cast Tom Hanks, his career was shit. He couldn't even get the role of Mario in the Mario Brothers movie. They're like, Tom Hanks is a nobody. Like, Tom Hanks had a big moment with Splash, kind of puttered out through the rest of the 80s with bombs like Joe versus the volcano and Turner and Houch. Now on Disney Plus.

Oh, Turner and Huch? Okay, cool. I saw that movie in theaters with my mom. But basically, Laster really wanted Tom Hanks to be Woody. And based on one clip in Turner and Hsu, Hooch is basically how they figured out, like, he'd be perfect. It's the, it's the, um, you can see clips of this. It's, uh, basically them animating Woody to Tom Hanks freaking out about the dog.

Oh, that's cool. Like, don't eat the car. Oh, you're eating the car. Like, um, and that is the kind of energy they wanted for Woody. So they got him at the perfect time because Tom Hanks was making fucking dog police buddy movies in, in 1989. They hire him in 91, 92, League of Their Own, 93, uh, Philadelphia, 94, Forrest Gump. And the hits keep it coming.

Yeah. And then 95 is Toy Story. It's incredibly lucky in that regard. I do think without Tim Allen and Tom Hanks as the leads, I wonder if they'd as easily gotten people in the theaters. I mean, just the wonders, the wonders of the animation, I'm actually doing the buzz meme now. Yeah.

Wonders of the animation. But that would have gotten people in, but I do think knowing Tim Allen and Tom Hanks, two of the biggest stars around or doing voices in it, that does pull you in too. If they didn't take off, I imagine you'd be in theaters 95 and be like, I think that guy had a TV show, and that's the guy from Big,

I'm pretty sure. Whatever happened to them. Yeah. So, it's good they took off like that. So other people in the cast, Don Rickles playing Mr. Potato Head. I didn't understand the hockey puck joke until like two years ago. I didn't know he said that. Yeah, my mom had to

explain that one to me as a kid. Also, Wallace Sean as Rex. You might know him as the non-Andre and my dinner with Andre, but obviously the Princess Bride. He was doing voice acting at this time. He was Principal Mazur in a goofy movie. This was the most excited I was in the theater because I didn't get these hockey puck references.

I didn't recognize a lot of these voices, but when I heard, as I would just call him, the inconceivable man, I was like, I'm so excited. His voice is perfect for cartoons. Like he's a born cartoon voice actor. Yeah, especially for a nebichy, worrisome dinosaur. And of course, John Ratsenberger as Ham, the Piggy Bank, basically playing a Cliff Clavin type,

like a know-it-all who actually knows nothing, who basically sees the world because he's up on the, up on the dresser. That's like his status in life. Like, all these characters are sort of defined by, like, how they're played with and, like, you know, how that defines their character. It's really about class struggle, if you think about it. You got these four toys versus the upstairs toys. The bed toys, the toys, the toys, the toys,

that hold all the money. But yeah, Ham is great. And I mean, John Ransenberger became an indispensable part of Pixar films after that. Yeah, like basically being in everyone. And we also have, you know,

lesser characters like Annie Potts playing Bo Peep, who I saw has a much bigger role in Toy Story 4 in a very fun way. It was pretty much them apologizing for how little they did with women in the previous movies. And who am I forgetting? Is there anyone else like weird appearances? Yeah, I was going to mention that,

like Aunt Jackie for me. Roseanne is Andy's sort of like goofy, realistic mother who we don't really see the face-up. She's great as a single mom in this. Like she has some very good mom lines, which is, was really funny because, you know, on Roseanne, she's the single one. She's not a mom. This is a totally different mom energy. This is much more like her in her, uh, recent Oscar award winning performance. Uh, whatever. Lady Bird? In Lady Bird. Yes. Thank you. Yeah. In Lady Bird. boy oh, Jim Varney, Ernest.

RIP, Ernest, yeah. And basically, Jim voicing Slinky Dog changed the design of the character, too. It's more of like a hound dog type. It's really cute. Slinky Dog is just so, he's a bit of a suck-up and eager to please, but that's what a dog is.

Yeah, and I love Ernest or Jim Varney in this role, and I have to feel that, like, Jim Varney was just like a Disney property when he was hired, because Disney bought the rights to Ernest. they made like, Ernest, you know, saves Christmas, Ernest goes to jail and maybe one other thing. And, like, he was just in the Disney fold for a little bit.

Oh, Africa? Or was that close? No, no, no. That's like the last one. Okay, yeah. But I think there was a messy divorce after Scared Stupid. But they really liked Ernest at the time. Yeah, I mean, there's definitely feels like a lot of like Disney favors being done

to get some people in this movie because, you know, now obviously huge honor to be cast as a voice in a Pixar film. They get tons and tons. of people to do it. But back then, it's like, well, you want to be in an animated movie? I mean, this is again, the bad part of Toy Story's legacy. It made starcasting for animated, specifically CGI films, a gigantic part of CGI films. Like, it's all about saying, oh, we've got this person to say five lines. Like, Shakira talks for two seconds. Yeah, Zendaya. Zendaya is Michi. She will always be Michi. But yeah, I mean,

give credit to Tom Hanks and Tim Allen. They took these roles on when being in an anime movie was not cool. This is before the release of Aladdin where it's like, can you believe Robin Williams is in this movie and Gilbert Godfried? Yeah, totally. Yeah, I think. And to give it to them for sticking with it too, like there are many things in the Toy Story production

that they don't do the voices in, but for the mainline movies, they still do the voices. Like, they still stick with it. Tom Hanks has got a friend and his brother. Oh, yeah. Hey, man, it's gotta be nice to be his brother. You just get to, you're almost as good of a voice actor. Sounds pretty convincing, but I would rather have Tom Hanks delivering that very awkward monologue about Hearts in Kingdom Hearts 3. Oh, if only. Yeah. No way with Square going to pay for the Tom Hanks money. No way. He wouldn't do it anyways. He was he collecting vintage typewriters or whatever he does. And of course, like, you know, Pixar animators doing certain voices like Joe Ramp is Lenny and a few other things. And the people playing Andy and Sid, Andy's voice actor, I think just did one role before Toy Story

and since then he was just been Andy. I'm sure he moved on with his life in terms of what he was doing. I didn't know that. But the kid who played Sid was an actor before and after that in many kid roles. So he is a really good actor. I have to say Sid's performance really sells it.

Yeah, they need a good villain for this movie and Sid as the sadistic child, he does a great, great job. So yes, that is perhaps our longest history for a what a cartoon movie. Maybe I shouldn't have done the history of Pixar, but I hope you all learned a lot and when we come back from the break we'll talk about the entire movie.

You've got a friend in me. Yeah, you got a friend when you've got a road look. Establish a recon post downstairs. Code Red, repeat. We are at Code Red. Recon plan, Charlie! Execute! Move! Move!

It's a... It's up, Big! Walt Disney Pictures presents. Come in, come in. Do you read me? The story of two toys. There seems to be no sign of intelligent life anywhere. Hello!

Pooya! Headed for a showdown. My name is Woody. This is my spot. No! I am Buzz Lightyer. I come in peace. You are a child's play thing!

You are a sad, strange little man. And playing by their... own rules. Draw. Me again. I don't like confrontations. Buzz-looking alien! You're mocking me, aren't you?

Impressive wingspan. Very good. Oh, what? What? You can't fly? Yes, I can. Can't. Can't.

Can't. Adventure takes off. When toys come to life. To infinity. And beyond. Toy Story. Look out. Can.

And don't forget to clean your room. It's not that bad. Looking for something cool to do, you can pop into Burger King. All right. Hey, right now, Burger King has these cool toy story puppets. They're from the new Disney movie. You can collect all four, a $1.99 each. With any kids club meal, only at Burger King, and bring the folks.

You might have your hands full. Burger King Kids! Good Food, Cool Stuff, Kids Only. So welcome back to the second half of our What a Cartoon podcast for Toy Story. we're going to talk about the movie, which is an interesting beginning. How did you feel about this when you saw it in theaters for the first time? The fact that when you first see the toys, they are just toys being played with. Well, you know, I think I know they wanted that these static things make you go like, wait, what is this?

But I was knowledgeable enough of movies by that point that I'd seen the trailers and knew these toys are going to be talking soon. I'm going to get to see them. So it was just more like waiting. for the toys to come alive. So yes, this movie begins with Andy playing with all the toys. So heartwarming. I don't have a whole song in here, by the way. But, yeah, I feel like it did.

I mean, kids did not play cowboy and robbers or whatever. Thankfully, not Cowboys and Indians. But it is a very fun, like, look into kid logic. Also, no guns, I would have had. The kid would, I remember seeing in some of those early storyported scenes, Woody has toy guns and I'm like, whoa, Woody. That's right. His holster is always empty, which actually pays off later in the movie. Everything pays off.

I do think it's good kid acting of just like, oh yeah, well, I have a this and you can do that. Like that's what it's what drove me crazy in imagination games as a kid. It's just like, well, I can actually have every power and I'm Batman too. Force Fields did play into a lot of kid play. When you learn about the concept of Force Fields, it's like, I've got a force field. It's really easy. It works just invisibly.

Like, well, this force field blocks everything. You can't get, well, I have the everything gun that actually breaks force fields. No, you don't. No, like, if you see Toy Story 3, word for word, the force field scene reenacts at the beginning there. That's right. Yeah. He says, I have a dog that makes force fields. That's what potato head says.

And Woody says, well, I have a dinosaur that eats force fields. So you get to see what the imagined version, what Andy was seeing in his head when we're seeing just these toys flop around. I don't know what four does, but I think like every movie opens with a sort of different reality. Like two is a video game opening with the graphics far advanced in the Super Nintendo they're playing on. And three is that. I don't know what I've never seen four. Again, four is still lost to me right now. Well, I do know that Bo Peep's three-headed sheep play a big role in Toy Story.

Yeah, I did see that. And so it's funny to see them here for just this like one off line. I also always loved Rex because he, I really think they intentionally took this T. rex toy that was made for Dino Riders. Like it had the same legs and arm structure that I had, this 80s toy. Rex fits pretty much all those dimensions. So it reminded me of one of my favorite T. Rex toys. He even had like the, the jaw was in the same place.

He did not look silly. He looked like a scary. He don't look anxious. Yes, yeah. I guess the genius of this movie is you could see the movie and go out and buy all the toys. It's really smart. If I had been five years younger, I would want Woody or Buzz. And I have the urge to buy one of them whenever I go to the California Adventure and see the great, like, toy story shops they have there.

Yeah. So you can buy any character you want. I wonder if that's really why Disney liked the pitch of Toy Story that they first turned in. Oh, Toys-A. If this works, we don't have to make toys. of Aladdin or Jeannie or whatever to sell it. We just make the character and you play with them. It's also funny to think of this movie.

And then how Wally was all about like plastic junk. We're buried in it. The world is too. But then you can still buy your Wally action figures there. At Target at the special Wally stand-up at Target. Just throw right in the trash when you're going with it. But yeah, the opening is very cute. The friend in me sequence is very fun too.

It's a lot of showing off with camera angles because, you know, the opening is fun, but it's not to show offy. But here they're showing, like, look, we modeled a whole house, and you're going to see different perspectives of the characters and things like that. And just, you know, just very much also selling the idea of Andy and Woody being these, like, best friends, even though one is not a real thing. You get a real sense of scale, too, because that is key to the film. So you get to see, how big is Woody next to a chair, or how big is he in the hands of a boy,

like all these things that you get, you get to really know who, Woody, at least is scale-wise in the world of toys. I don't think I knew who Randy Newman was before I saw this movie. I certainly did not in any way. Maybe I'd heard the song, Short People Somewhere. Maybe. Maybe I heard about him his famous love of Los Angeles. Maybe he, you know what? Maybe he appeared in an It's the Gary Shambling show episode, and I didn't remember it. I'm sure he did.

Yeah. But yeah, so after the friend in me sequence, a lot happens, it's more just like, you know, building the tone for the movie. again, this very economical movie and it gets to things really quickly so immediately we smash into the idea of like Andy's birthday party is about to happen. It's a very pivotal thing

and we learn like very soon after this it's happening because it's not his birthday but they're moving. So like these very important moments are happening in this child's life and all the toys have to be aware of it. A couple times there was something that felt dated in this opening too to me

was Molly the baby a couple times I was like Yeah, that's just a model shape. The baby sucks. I don't like the baby. It's the only human I think that's truly, I don't want to see it on the screen. I guess that's left over of the baby from Tintoy.

Oh, the baby from Tintoy. Molly looks like a fully formed, you know, photorealistic human compared to the Tintoy mutants. But also there's the moment where Woody gets thrown in the air on the recliner, there is a little bit of like lack of physics to his flight through the air. Yeah. I guess it's more of a tribute to Pixar's ability

to recreate physics so well for most of the movie that when I don't feel it, when there's a tinge of the uncanny valley there, it's noticeable. Okay, so where does Andy's mom get money? Like, she has a lot of money for a single mom at field. Yeah, you figure like, well, something happened to dad or who knows what happened to dad,

but they don't need that big of a house. But I guess it was the 90s where it's just like, well, I'm a white upper class, middle-class woman, and I have to live in a nice big house with my son. Yeah, well, that was something too I caught for the first time. that Andy is sharing a room with Molly, and that's why they're moving to get a house where the kids can have separate bedrooms. I guess it's only a two-bedroom house then, right? Yeah, yeah.

That's what it seems like. They're moving to a bigger house, which also, though, if she has a, like, relatively newborn baby, that implies some man was in her life. Yeah. Well, I don't know. Artificial insemination, I guess. We don't need, like, that's never been answered. There's been things like, well, is Woody the toy of Andy's dead or something like that? That's key to so many fan theories for sure.

Woody is Andy's dad. Reborn. Kind of. He's a father figure. Oh, yeah, I think he, but, but yeah. So my assumption, though, is that the father died and that this life insurance money, that's how she's buying them all these toys and they're affording to buy a new house and move. That's, that's what I think.

And she also, it's like, oh, I've got all these memories. I need a fresh start. I mean, there are so many bad fan theories that I know exist out there, like, what if Woody killed? Andy's dad? What if Andy's dad was too close to Andy and Woody thought he was horning in on his territory? We've seen that Woody will come to life for revenge. And of course there's all the

every Pixar movies in the same universe theories as well. Too many of that crap going around. I didn't see any that's all a dream ones yet. No, no, but they got to be out there but yeah again there's more showing off so like we smash into Andy's birthday party planning.

We learned about that and then we'd get an FPS shot of through basically Woody's being carried up the stairs, like, them showing you like, look, this is a set that we made. Like, we had to build a house to show you every room and every corner of it. That's really cool. Yeah. They pulled that off. Yeah, I didn't even think of that as like, Pixar movies always are really good at showing

off in ways that aren't too flashy. It's more when you think about it, like, oh, they went to all that trouble. Like, I remember when Coco came out, one of their promotional materials, that was also part of their like, you should feel guilty. if you steal this kind of speeches. Oh, yeah. But they're like, look at this screen, this one shot from the movie. You see every light here that was all animated by someone,

each light of these thousands of lights in this town. Like, you should appreciate the work they put into it. But it's stuff like that that Pixar does that's like not showing off so much of just like realism and adding texture to a world. So yes, Woody is tossed into his regular spot, the bed. We learn how important the bed is later in this movie. but Andy takes Molly out of the room and that is when Woody springs to life

a very important moment in this movie where it's just like, okay, the toys have to make sure the coast is clear before they can come to life and do all of their business. Yeah, yeah, just the little blink says so much about his character

like, are we safe? Okay, all right, let's do this. Yeah. And we get a lot of little jokes that introduce characters. Potato Head is very pissed off because his character was designed as an angry character

voiced by Don Rickles because the idea was like If you were Potato Head, you'd be mad that your pieces were always falling off or that you were losing your face. And, well, the stuff of him being mishandled by a toddler, that's like the plot of Toy Story 3. Oh, you're right. Yeah. Again, ages three and up. So right on the box. So in this film, I forgot that Potato Head is almost a villain figure. Like, he's kind of evil. Yeah. Like, upon rewatching this, I'm like, boy, I think Potato Head sees a power vacuum he could fill. he immediately turns on Woody

or at the very least he's been grinding this axe of like when Woody falls I'm going to be there to push him off He knows when to He sees power Like he knows like I should get closer to buzz Like this is the new guy to be

You know following And he has to be the most famous toy In the first movie too Oh for sure yeah Yeah I think it was a big gift for them To get potato head He kind of uplifts the rest of the toys in it With the legitimacy

Yeah so we meet Ham whose first introduction is him not getting something or not understanding something, which is the anti-ham, I think. He's the one who at least pretends to no thing. So Ham doesn't get Mr. Potato Head's Picasso joke, where he rearranges the parts of his face. To be like, look, I'm Picasso. I like that gag because every kid who played with Mr. Potatohead put the things in the wrong pieces.

So that's the first joke you do with him, too, of like, yeah, you can rearrange his pieces. And also it kind of sets up the eerie or. reality that Mr. Potato Head's pieces are independent of himself, too. Yeah, and you can take them off at will. Yeah, I think that was stretched to the limit with tortilla head pizza. Oh, you're right. I forgot about that. Man, I need to watch three again.

Creepy. But yes, so Sarge has not seen Slinky. We meet Sarge, of course. He's a classic Cream Army man. No copyright on that. You can use them as many times as you want to. Arly Army. I mean, it's shocking to see guns on these characters, though, too,

I was like, yeah, and also when Etchus gets straws a gun, in both those cases, I was like Disney would not okay that now. Very, very 95 movie. We meet Slinky again, voiced by Jim Varney. What are dead guys in this one minute scene here. Too many. Don Rickles, Walsh, Sean, thankfully, still with us. But, yeah, Don Rickles, Arlie Ermi, Jim Varney. It's a real graveyard in Toy Story.

But, yeah, he wants to play Checkers, which is a tiny little motif in this movie where he's easily distracted and is just like, a real golly gosh howdy friend of Woody's. I love that. He goes like, well, you can be rid of this time. Like, he's just so agreeable.

And then also, I love when he tells him to like, when he's troubled, he's like, be happy. He's like, ah, yeah,

so good. Really playing it up. Uh, we meet Rex, who tries to scare Woody. And we see immediately like, this is the cowardly, uh,

lying kind of figure. Yeah. With little arms. Uh, it's like, well, did it didn't scare you? Just to come off as annoying.

It's so funny. Yeah, again, we have to introduce like eight characters in the first two minutes and like who they are and what their relationship with Woody is. We meet Bo Peep, who basically is horny for Woody. That's her character in this movie. Yeah, she's, uh, that's all a woman can be is horny, I suppose. But I guess it, uh, I mean, it's surprising at all that, uh, Andy has a girl toy. Like I, I had toys of female figures only because,

because it was like, well, it wouldn't be the X-Men if I didn't have Roe, or it wouldn't be the He-Man set if I didn't have Evelyn. So I had those, the girl figures, but it still was in our youths, a very heavily gendered thing of like, you don't want a girl toy. Oh, are you like girls? What's the... That you're true. That's true, but I think they said this in the commentary that they felt that that was mishandled and that, Bo Peep was sort of the baby's toy, and not even a toy, sort of like a nursery decoration almost. So people did wonder like, why is this Andy's toy, but actually they spent a lot of time establishing the fact that Molly is in Andy's room, but maybe not enough time saying that like

Bo Peep is Molly's toy. It's Molly, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, because like Bo Peep has no character, there's nothing for her to say, but oh, Woody. No, that's right. She's actually, I remember now because it's part of a plot pointed four. She's attached to a lamp, so she's not even, she's kind of like an accessory to a lamp. So, and as I can see a precocious kid like Andy saying, well, I have a damsel in distress that a cowboy needs to save, oh, this lamp has a girl toy on it. Help, help, help. It might have been Barbie if, you know, Barbie was available.

Totally, totally. But yeah, she just has a real smoochoo kind of feel to her of a more like a character from a 40s cartoon, it feels like. And so we have the very important meeting scene which does establish the world in a very, very good way in the characters. So here's a bit of the meeting scene. Has everyone picked a moving buddy?

Moving buddy? You can't be serious. Well, I didn't know we were supposed to have one already. We have to hold hands. You guys think this is a big joke. We've only got one week left before the move. I don't want any toys left behind. A moving buddy.

You don't have one? Get one. Tuesday night's plastic. corrosion awareness meeting was, I think, a big success, and we want to thank Mr. Spell for putting that on for us. Thank you, Mr. Spell. You're welcome. Okay. Oh, yes, one minor note here.

Andy's birthday party has been moved to today. Next, we have... What do you mean the parties today? His birthday's out till next week? What's going on, John, there? Is his mom losing her mom? Well, obviously, she wanted to have the party before the move. I'm not worried.

You shouldn't be worried. Of course Woody ain't worried. He's been Andy's favorite since Skin the Garden. Hey, hey, come on, potato head. If Woody says it's all right, then, well, darn it, it's good enough for me. Woody has never steered up wrong before. So, yeah, this is very important scene because it's like Woody is very confident. He knows the most about this world more than the other toys.

While there are freaking out, he's got a cool head about things. But all of this will soon be undone. Yeah, this one at least, I think the... the toys get a little more level-headed as the films go on, but in this one they've really presented as like, almost like Springfield of just a bunch of crazy people that are ready to become a mob at any time, and Woody is doing his best to contain them.

He's just like, please, every... It's almost like Andy Griffith kind of thing, too. Yeah, he is the sheriff, the sleepy sheriff. But yeah, I mean, it's funny that, I'm watching this so many times, like, all of the toys, their concern is like, we will be replaced. And Woody's like, nobody's getting,

replace. Don't worry about that. And he is the one who gets replaced. It's pretty funny. Yeah. And everyone gets replaced. That's also the reality of it. They, as time goes on in the timeline of the films, yeah, they all just get sold off or given away or probably thrown in the garbage. And I think like Rex is sort of the red herring character where it's like he is the most concerned and anxious about being replaced, but ends up being Woody. Like you think maybe it was Rex, will there be a new thing for Rex to take over if you've never seen the movie? I've seen it's not a concern for me, but they could be laying that in, like, well, this is the character that's worried about being replaced the most. I like, too, that you find out that they

do, you know, seminars there. They have a very active life in this room. And I do like that extremely worthless, quote-unquote, toy that Woody's using with the notes on it. It's got, like, the piece of plastic that you draw on when you pull it up, the things disappear. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's such a worthless thing. Those were terrible. They were like, at least Mr. Spell could talk out loud. But all these toys it's funny you think of a lot of these toys around there just replaced by tablets you just say if you kid a tablet they can do all this here's the slinky tablet have fun uh you know it's slinky in the andy griffith thing that makes him fife i think uh oh yeah also talking about great acting and animation right before the meeting starts when woody is all like bashful with peep and then they're like no hey witty you got to do something and when his face turns from like bashful to biz all business. Yeah. Really great.

Or that's sort of like awshucks look he's doing when he's holding the, uh, the big tablet or whatever. Yeah. Like,

and then yeah, snapping back into action. But yeah. So like a lot of what he says here will eventually, uh, be thrown back in his face. Like all the confidence he has here is undone so quickly when buzz appears when Rex is worried about,

you know, getting replaced. And what he's like, um, it doesn't matter that we're played with. What matters is we're here for Andy when he needs us, which he does not believe in any way when it actually happens to him. He's like, no, I'm the king of this bed. And he needs to play with me. It's not like,

well, he'll play with me eventually. It's like, no, now. Potato Head is correct that it's easy for Woody to say those things because he's in such a favored position. Yeah. And he points out like, no, we've been through this before. We've been through birthdays and Christmases. Like, this is like, you guys need to calm down. It'll all be okay. That butt kissing gag, too, that's another like seasoning of Shrek in here. Like, oh, that's a Shrek joke right there. It's very nice. It's like, it's more like a softer Shrek. Yeah. Though then again, they've They did a grosser joke with butt stuff with him later of like the monkeys were going to be shoved up his butt. Yeah.

I forgot about that. But yeah, they go a little further as the 90s come to close. But yeah, so the birthday guests show up. And they're basically all like peering at the blinds and being terrified about being replaced. And they're just like, oh, that's a small box. Oh, God, no, it's a big box. Yeah, the freak out. What did that kid bring him in that like eight foot long box?

It must have been like a poster or something. Maybe it's like the Buzz Lightier poster that he hangs up later in his room. Oh, yeah, I could see that. Yeah, I think, yeah, you know, they do say a kid gave him bed sheets and he has new bed sheets a little later. So I think that actually could be a set-up line, not just a coincidence. Yeah, who invited that kid? But, yeah. I mean, if some kid did give me bed sheets at my birthday party, it would be like, hey, come on.

They'd have to be pretty good bed sheets, like Aladdin bed sheets or something like that, which I had. That's too close to like getting socks or underwear. It's too practical. Yeah, you're right. Bedsheets can be a little fun. I had Simpsons bed sheets and Garfield bedsheets. Those were the big ones for me. Only had Aladdin ones and then just regular bedsheets.

But they're good Aladdin bed sheets. So what comes next is a set piece that does take a bit of its time, but it's very clever. And it's what they did first. That's what they animated first is the basically the recon with the Armymen. That's cool. The idea was just waiting to happen if you have a toy story movie, like the Army men are doing Army things. And the most clever part of it is, which is just like we take for granted now, it's just like, they don't walk. They clomp around on their little Army bases.

They're kind of like waddling. Yeah. It captures what kids who played with Armymen knew that you couldn't like, you had to go, like, it's going from one side to the other or scooting them along, I guess. Army men were low priority toys for me. They're more like debris in the background of other toy playing for me. Or you're like at some friend's house or some daycare and you're just like, oh, there's the Army Men. I guess I could knock a bunch of these over. I love how cheap they're even treated in this too, that they just live in a bucket.

Like, it's just a bucket army man. Her mom just probably bought it at $5 or something. And they made sure all of the rifles are bent and they still have like the plastic molding is not perfect on them. So there's like little pieces coming off of them. Yeah, you can see like a plastic circle behind their heads and stuff too. It's so well observed. And this also really feels like, you know, baby boomer generation who grew up with all these World War II movies, like The Great Escape, getting to recreate that in their animated film, too. Yeah.

And again, there aren't a lot of jokes, but this whole scene with the Armymen is just the sheer novelty of seeing this and seeing this happen in front of you. I feel like this movie has no fat. You can cut this a little bit, I guess, but it's really meant to establish even more like being a toy is a very secretive thing. When they're doing their mission and Andy's mom comes to the door, they all freeze and then they have to get in their poses too. And then they get like stomped on and kicked around and one of the toys gets hurt. So it shows like, oh, a toy can get hurt too.

Yeah, it's really good at growing these stakes and also showing their scale and how they have to hide around. I like how crappily the mom treats like Andy and just kicks him to the side. That's really great. It's the only time of the movie where she loses her patience.

He's normally a very nice single mom. But all of this made me think that like the idea of all of these toys moving around is very implausible, of course, in terms of reality, the fact that they can get away with not being seen. Now that we live in the surveillance age

where everyone is filming everything and they're like ring apps on every door and things like that, the toy plot would be found out immediately. The toy conspiracy would be on the news. Like, these toys are moving. Toys are moving. After we set up a camera to watch a babysitter, we saw that toys walk around.

Yeah. Well, I've complained about that just in superhero films. It's like, well, how does anybody have a secret identity when everything is so watched all the time? And, yeah, the same with, we'd know by now if toys moved when we don't watch them. Even in 95, someone would have some video, like, Camcorder footage of, like, the Barbie moved. I swear. But yeah, I mean, again, this scene takes its time, but this year not like, we are used to seeing these toys move around and do fun toy things. But in 95, it's like, it's very novel to see the Army men do an Army mission using like jump ropes and pulling the baby monitor into the plotted plants and like doing recon for Woody. And it's a baby monitor, which is why Woody can't talk to them. They can only do it one way. Yeah. That is, I didn't even think of that. That makes total sense why it can't be too way. And I was surprised that I was surprised that I, went back in the movie. They set every

possible thing up, but they don't set up like there's a baby monitor on the crib or on the nightstand next to Molly's crib. I'm like, well, I know it's a monitor because there's a baby in the room, but I'm surprised they didn't just put it in the background somewhere. Yeah, you know, it's a rare misstep for the show.

And I only noticed it because they set everything else up. Yeah, like when they show matches, I just in the background in Sid's room, I'm like, that's because there's going to be a match later. and like everything, everything fits. Like even when they're pulling out the gifts,

we talked about the battleship thing, but another thing I caught was like the box that has Buzz has Buzz wrapping paper on it. That's right. I never caught that before. It's just teasing it all right there. Giving that gift away. Bad job, kid.

Yeah. Well, oh, you got to blame the mom. The mom had been hiding it all the time. Oh, yeah, that's right. It was the mom. Jeez, come on. I wonder if Amy's mom had to tell other kids like, don't you dare bring a,

Buzz Lightyear. I bought it for him, okay? She briefed them on the other room. Like, you're going to see Buzz wrapping paper. Don't say a goddamn word. Shut your mouth. No cake. This kid's dad is in the ground. This is all he's got. So, yeah, there's a very fun again, like a very boomery war movie scene where you saw this on TV in 1957 where, you know, John Wayne is helping a fallen man. Like, I won't let you go. I won't let you fall behind. And of course, it's Arley Ermey to it. Yeah. Like, the, the drill instructor from Full Metal Jacket who, who, spend the rest of his career doing that character for everyone else, because it is one of the most, like, iconic roles in film history, I'd say.

And earlier this year, he was Leslie Hapapapop on The Simpsons. So he did that before this. Well, he probably recorded Toy Story before even doing that Simpsons' role. But he was available. So all of the presents are being opened. This is off a bravo. This is it. This is it.

Quiet, quiet, quiet, quiet. All right. And he's opening the first present now. Mrs. Potato Head, Mrs. Potato Head, Mrs. Potato Head. Hey, I could drink, can I? A lunch box. Lunchbox. Lunchbox.

Okay, second present. It appears to be. Okay, it's benchie. Who invited that kid? Oh, only one left. Okay, we're on the last present now. Last present! It's a big one.

It's a board game. Repeat battleship. Hey, watch it. Sorry, they're old sports. But it's an accomplished. Well done, man. Pack it up. We're going home. So did I tell you? Huh? Nothing to worry about.

I knew you were right all along, Woody. Never added you for a second. He's really excited about this. Mom, it's a huge package. Oh, you know, what are the kids in? It's a... So we don't learn what it is just yet. Because, you know, the losing reception and Rex is like, what is it? What is he shaking the nightstand? And that's when the baby monitor falls and the batteries pop out.

And the great, hairy acting on them going like, ah, trying to put the batteries back. It's so funny. But they have knowledge of batteries, like Woody knows how batteries work and that certain toys need batteries. Also, the baby monitor has no sentience, not a toy. Yeah, so that isn't, well, like, Battleship isn't alive later either. So it's screaming when he put the pegs in it, like, no.

Or maybe they like it. Oh, God, that's even worse. Yeah, no, they, well, they seem to know enough about, like, society that they know it's, a lame gift to give bed sheets at a kid's birthday party. Like, how do they know that much too? How do they know how to read? There's a lot of questions. Yeah. Again, you dig too far. I like how Andy's mom, it's great mom acting of just like, oh, well, only one present left. Oh, wait, what's this? That's a classic parent trick, the final gift you don't know about. You, once you catch on to it, you just have to ask surprise. It's like, all right.

Instead, you don't want to act all nasty of like, I knew a Super Nintendo was coming. Is this one from Santa? Oh, did Santa bring this? My mom still writes from Santa on some of the gifts. Oh, that's cute. That's cute. Yes, so what he puts the batteries back in, just in time to learn that Andy is coming back. They all scramble back to their positions, and there's a great amount of chaos in the room as all the kids are running around.

We don't see any of their faces because humans are hard to model in 95. So I assume there's just one Andy model and like one Sid model. They should just be distant from us anyway. We don't need to, well, they need to be these strange alien figures really. And then when you know the end of the move or when you know what Buzz is, hearing them describe like, oh, do the laser. It's like they're describing all the things about Buzz. Same with when they, the kid, Andy holds up this menacing shadow of his toy box.

But you know what it is later. but it's just like a scary looking thing. And aside of things that come this early in the movie, like barely 20 minutes in, is that Woody has knocked off the bed and the excitement over this new toy. So already you could tell like, oh, we know the bed's important.

We know Woody's the favorite toy. This is a problem. This is going to be a problem. It's the throne. And yeah, I love when the kids leave and he comes out from under the bed, I like Woody. It's some more great Woody acting of him just going like,

I'm totally, unbothered. He's like, no, it was an accident. I'm not really under the bed. I haven't fallen that far. He's just excited. Too much cake and ice cream. You know how kids are. Potato Head is already celebrating his fall from grades. It's true. And I think the toys are a bit shaken to be like,

oh, this should be happening. I, you know, I do think potato head mellowed out some once he got to miss his potato head. He needed to get late. I think so. Big time. By Estelle Harris. So, yes, Rex, where he's being replaced once again, like,

If you're just new to this movie, you could be like, is this going to be about Rex? And is Rex going to be worried the whole movie? But Rex assumes it's going to be a replacement for him. But we've seen the movie. We know the story of Toy Story. It's clearly not. And then Woody climbs up on the bed. We get the great reveal of Buzz Lightyear.

Like Woody coming up and like peering through Buzz Lightyear's legs as we see a full reveal of him. So great. That is a trailer worthy shot right there. Just him looking at his replacement in this glorious plastic Adonis above him. with all of his fancy bullshit. And another show-offy thing they do is like, we get a POV shot inside a Buzzlightier's helmet. Yeah.

Of him looking around and we see the reflection of his face. Like anytime they're doing something like that, or reflection in a spoon or reflection in a window, like look what we can do with computers. In Toy Story, they partially gave Woody a plaid shirt with all those lines because you can't do that in animation, in 2D animation. If you have to draw every thread of somebody's shirt,

then you can't have too complicated a design. But because it's just the texture level, they can do that. Yeah, I never thought about that. Yeah, so you could do Plaid, but it'll just cost you a lot of money. That's why Plaid is very rarely seen in 2D animation, unless it's a modern flash animation. Yeah, so Buzzlight your talks for a bit. He's trying to contact Star Command,

and he sees that his very cool box he comes in. His ship is mangled. And I love how, I don't know if this point they have, like, a physics engine or have to, like, animate physics. by hand, but I love just the flimsyness of the cardboard when he's pulling on it. Just like, my ship is so damaged now. Yeah, I think it feels more like pretend physics. I don't think they had the full engines for it.

I like Tim Allen, like he said, he's playing it kind of working class, dude. But also, there is a bit of grandiosity of like Shatner to him, too. Yeah, I like this version of Buzz more than the sort of one they wanted to go with originally, the very much, you know, Dudley Doerite-Stuy-Royt style Dufels. hero instead of the down-to-earth gruff cop who plays by the rules. If he's too much of a doof, you can't like him. You're just like, ah, you're a dummy. You're just stupid.

Yeah, his, uh, yeah, the reflection. And then the way, as he's surveilling the room, the way Woody comes with like, hello. Yeah. So funny. In a very, very genial way. But like, he's, he's like, uh, the power of Woody is like, well, no, I'm in charge.

So I'm to be just super friendly to you, but you have to understand, like, I'm going to tell you how this world works. And it's like, it does raise the question again, don't ask too many questions. is like, in Toy Story 2, it's established that like every buzz light year comes out of the box not knowing it's a toy. What a cruel thing to do. Because we see just like it shatters his mind when he learns this. He's like catatonic later in the movie. It's something about the construction of Bud Light Gear that makes him crazier at birth than other toys?

Yeah, it's very strange how that happens. It also wrecks his fear. I love it. He says, like, I'm so glad you're not a dinosaur. He was really happy then to meet a second dinosaur in Toy Story. Story 3. Yeah, at the end of the movie, he's wishing for another dinosaur. Yeah, yeah.

He's, but he'll be forever alone. Named Toy Story 3. Then he gets Kristen Shawl as his new buddy. Hooray. And finally, we meet Buzz in this kind of longish clip. Terrain seems a bit unstable. No readout yet if the air is breathable. And there seems to be no sign of intelligent life anywhere.

Hello. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Did I frighten you? Didn't mean to. Sorry. Howdy. My name is Woody, and this is Andy's room. That's all I wanted to say.

And also, there has been a bit of a mix-up. This is my spot. See, the bed here... Local law enforcement. That's about time you got here. I bus light, year space ranger. Universe protection unit. My ship has crashed landed here by mistake.

Yes, it is a mistake, because you see, the bed here is my spot. I need to repair my turboboosters. Do people still use fossil fuels, or have you discovered? Crystolic fusion. Well, let's see. We got double A's. Watch yourself. Who goes there?

Don't shoot. It's okay. Friends. Do you know these life forms? Yes. They're Andy's toys. All right, everyone. You're clear to come up.

I am Buzz Lightyear. I come in peace. Oh, I'm so glad you're not a dinosaur. Bye, Mike. Thank you. Now, thank you all for your kind welcome. See? What's that button do?

I'll show you. His is a pool strike. Only it sounds like a car. over it. Oh yeah, but not like this one. This is a quality sound system. Probably on copper wiring, huh? Mr. Potatohead's brand of insult comedy is very damaging in this world. It's just like you're

a lesser human existing thing, not even a human. The shame, the shame what he feels when he touches his string on the back. And that also his voice box, very important plot point in Toy Story 4.

There's so many things in this that feel like they have been thinking about it since the first movie. We could expand on this into a whole film. But yeah, I hated those push button talking toys.

I had a talking Spider-Man and he couldn't, it was a talking backpack. There's something wrong with my Spider-Man. But he had the three buttons on the back. And once you've heard

three of those things once, they get old, they get old real fast. Go to hell, go to hell. I will never get tired of this. I love that. But yeah, so we see the differences between Woody and Buzz immediately. There's some emotional and intelligence going on with the other toys.

Like, think of how Woody feels. And they're like, Woody sucks. This guy's awesome. I'm on Team Buzz. They're mostly all impressed except for, but without trying to hurt Woody's feelings, except for Potato Head who is trying to rub it in as much as possible. That is true. Like there isn't an important, I feel it's an important scene very soon after this where

Bo Peep is trying to reassure Woody and saying, well, they're very excited about him because he's new to them too, but after a while you'll see you'll be in charge again. Andy will also love you too. I also caught this time the Mickey Mouse Watch wall clock. It's really good. Okay, I totally missed that. My mom is a big fan of Mickey Mouse watches.

Saying it out loud now makes me think I should get that for her for Christmas. I think she'd like a new one. But she grew up dreaming of having a Mickey Mouse watch. So having it in the movie, it's more of the boomer. energy. Yeah, yeah. Those are popular, like in the 70s, right? Those Mickey Mouse watches.

They were, I think they got big in the 50, actually even earlier than that. But they came back around as being Kitch again in the 70s. And then in the 90s, Kitch once more. It's, oh, and also, I love that Rex somehow knows the business of his company. I really wonder, like, were the toys this aware of the outside world in future movies? Because, like, Rex knows, like, well, I'm from Mattel. Actually, I'm from a Citiary, Mattel. They were bought in a corporate closure or something like that.

We learned that, you know, potato heads from play school and later, Buzz does not know he's from Taiwan yet. But they do want to know what country he was, like, you know, manufactured in. Because it would have to be not made in the USA. There's a little bit of joking about how nothing's made in the U.S. anymore either. But, yeah, I wonder how Rex just knows that Mattel bought out the company that made him as part of some merger. He was born with that knowledge. They do seem a little more other than Ham, innocent in, like, Toy Story 2. Ham's the one who's like, no, I know how television works.

I know how to watch these things. Oh, and the laser envy joke. That again, feels like very PG comedy of a G-rated film. All the jokes that were in the commercials, they really stick out to me because, like, I just remember hearing them over and over. It's like, it's not a laser. It's a little light bulb that blinks. What's his problem, laser envy?

So, yes, look up penis envy. It's an old, outdated Freudian concepts. Speaking of Freudian concepts, the struggle in this is like, who will sleep with God? Oh, yes, yes. I will be the one to sleep with God. You take it my place, sleep addicts to God. And I also like another like skating close to the PG-edge joke is saying, the word I'm looking for I can't say because they're a preschool choice.

He wants to say asshole. You want to say you're an asshole, plus. So finally, things get to. tense. All right, that's enough. Look, we're all very impressed with Andy's new toy. Toy. Toy. T-O-what. Toy. Excuse me. I think the word you're searching for is Space Ranger. The word I'm searching for, I can't say, because there's preschool toys present. Getting kind of tense, aren't you? Oh, uh, Mr. Like here. Now, I'm curious. What does a space ranger actually do? He's not a space ranger. He doesn't fight evil or shoot lasers or fly.

Excuse me. Oh, impressive wingspan. Very good. Oh, what? What? He's a plastic. He can't fly. They are a terryllium carbonic alloy, and I can fly.

No, you can't. Yes, I can. You can't. Can't. Can't. I can tell you I could fly around this room and my eyes closed. Okay, then Mr. Lightbeer, prove it. All right, then I will.

Light beer is the best derogatory nickname for Buzz. He should have had a couple more in the movie. There was light snack, I think. Light beer also feels like a little too close to PJ. Seeing beer in a Pixar movie. Acknowledging beer. I just caught, okay, so I knew that Buzz flying with his eyes closed. It's why it doesn't dispel his idea that he can't fly.

But I forgot that he says, I can do this with my eyes closed. to set up why he closes his eyes anyway in that. I took that as a figure of speech, not that he literally closes his eyes. Yeah, he does that for the trick, which is why when the huge Rube Goldberg device happens that lets him fly, he thinks he's doing it. Yeah, yeah, but it's not just, it's not even unexplained.

It is explained why he closes his eyes because that was part of the challenge from Woody. And like things are looking back for Woody because, you know, he's not getting the intention from Andy anymore or the other toys. And they're all deferring to buzz as, the authority and they're not listening to Woody like no he's a toy listen to me and they're asking him questions about what being a space ranger is like and believing him so like Woody is losing

his position as the authority and like the boss of the toys even it's all right it's falling apart instantly and that's what that's what potato head is loving too like he is he is enjoying how much it's making him suffer and this is basically uh this meeting of buzz and uh between that and you know can where he says i can fly and it does it it's about three minutes long but this establishes the relationship between Buzz and Woody perfectly. There's no need to draw out further scenes of them not getting along. This

sums it up perfectly in this very economical scene. It's all happens here. It's exactly why they don't like each other. But also, well, it shows that Buzz is just condescending to him at best. He's not, he doesn't hate Woody. Like, Woody hates Buzz instantly.

He's very cop-like, but in real life a cop would be beating you at this point. Yeah, it's also, yeah. Well, that's why I think he likes Woodie. when Woody shows up. He's like, ah, fellow cop, all right, let's talk in the cop language. Local law enforcement. The first person shot going through the Hot Wheels track is so cool. That is awesome, yeah. More showing off with that first person stuff. For sure. Even Bo Peep is like, ooh, I want him as my moving buddy, which I don't think,

I think that's a bad move of the screenplay. Like, Bo Peep should always be on Woody's side. Yeah. Because she is outside of this one moment where they need to make Woody even worried about his love life. I think they drop it with no explanation after this one bit. should have, like, it would make more sense if she said, oh, I'm just kidding, Woody. I'm just joking around. But she, after she says that, she's even fanning herself with her hands, like, ooh, I got the vapor. Yeah. I think, like, she was trying to be flattering to buzz, but I think the character wouldn't do that with Woody in the room being so insecure, like,

clearly insecure. She's like the only person who understands emotions in the room. Like, she's more emotionally mature than Woody. But Peep clearly wants to have a relationship with Woody, and she's kind of walking him towards it because he's a little too bashful or a little too cautious about it. And we see Woody being as mean as he was in the earlier versions when he tells Slinky to shut up. Yeah. But at least in this, it doesn't make him become unlikable because you're just like, it's been a tough day for Woody. Yeah.

He just got emasculated in every possible way. He lost his space. He lost his approval of God. And he lost his girlfriend seemingly. Yeah, and it helps that like Slinky doesn't react sadly. It's like it's just impotent rage of what he's experiencing. No one's listening to him even when he wants to chew them out. Yeah, it's true.

It helps in that way. And again, so we get the line that wasn't flying. It's falling with style, which is echoed later. Again, I love that line. I love when like little screenplay lines like that are echoed later in a different context and they pay off. Those type of things that feeling, I think this was the first time I was savvy enough as a film goer to at 13. to when a line comes back in that sort of way, I understood it and could not just say like,

yay, a fun line, but of like, they said that earlier and then said it again later. They knew that they do that. Pretty clever. I appreciated the cleverness. I mean, Josh Whedon, he's not the sole screenwriter for it, so this might not even be his move, but like he's known for his cleverness.

Like, and it's shown off there. And the scene ends with what he's saying, you know, they'll see. Things will be back the same in a few days. And then we smash right into strange things are happening to me. And it's very much Rainey Newman singing about what he sees. He's the night of the sky like a bomb come some little punk in a rocket. He needs a metaphor here. but he is so literal with this songwriting

that it's surprising when the song about sailing is just like, wow, you could do that? A montage like this at least helps with, you know, passage of time and showing how things are changing for Woody without having to have more scenes of him acting like a jerk. But yeah, yeah, this song is just, it's a little too. I think there's a reason it's the least remembered song from this movie, I'd say.

It's not bad, and the montage is fun, and it's very effective in showing, like, in a minute how Andy's life is changing to revolve around Buzz. Like, I love the scene when Woody looks at the bed and there's like a pullback as he realizes that it's all Buzz Lightier sheets. And you see Buzz stuff is all over the room too. So, yeah, it's very, very effective that way. And the way Andy runs back in in a space costume, getting rid of his cowboy thing, which like that is, they reference it even more specifically in the second toy story. but the idea that kids loved cowboy stuff until astronauts were introduced in the 50s and then every kid loved astronauts and Westerns died,

that's what is happening here in the Battle of Buzz and Woody for dominance with this kid. Andy is not really a 90s kid. You should be playing with like ninjas and Ninja Turtles and like Power Rangers, but he is like kind of like a boomer kid in the 90s. Yeah, yeah. Andy is a real special kid. I was going to say this later, but like Andy is so lucky. He doesn't live next to Sid because Sid would bully the crap out of Andy as such a creative young man.

Sid is a 90s kid. He is like butthead, a little butthead. Oh, God, yeah. There's some fun little scenes in this one I just noticed for the first time in that it kind of pays off like Slinky wanting to play checkers with Woody and him being too busy. Like Woody is desperate for attention in this montage and he's looking for Slinky to play checkers with him. And that's why he kicks the checker when he sees Slinky is helping Buzz fix his ship. That's right. Woody is so desperate for getting his friend back that he's like, hey, let's do checkers. I want to do checkers now. And that Slink, who is a below the bed toy, won't make time for him. It really does hurt him.

Oh, the social stratus. I forgot Slinky isn't under the bed toy. Wow. Right there with all the checkerboard, which like what kid wants checkers. Especially if you got like Operation and Mousetrap like he does. We have Tetris now. It's 1995. Let's move on. He should have a Game Boy. That's why at least it worked in the Toy Story 2 that they're able to play video games. It's like, yeah, they should have video games. I agree. Remember, in Toy Story levels of Kingdom Hearts 3 that Rex knows Final Fantasy games?

Yeah, that's awesome. And it's actually Wallace Sean doing the voice, what I love. I mean, he's available for anything, voice acting ways. As an adult watching this now and seeing myself through the eyes of Andy's mom, I would have said that Andy can't put up posters a week before they move. Yeah. Just going to have to take it back down. That is true.

I mean, maybe it's like, well, again, I'm going to say daddy just died or something. Like, let this kid have whatever he wants to be happy, maybe. Yeah, you're right. You just go, we'll just take him down on the last day. It's fine. Have, I'm just happy you're just jumping up and down again. Yeah, he's so nice. He's finally laughing again.

Thank you, Buzz Light here. But yeah, so this song ends with, you know, Buzz is in bed with Andy. again, we don't know why. We can't raise this question anymore, but he's abiding by toy rules. We don't know why. But Woody is slinking into the toy chest at the end, just very dejected.

And I love how the next scene ends with him, like, popping out, like, out of breath. And you're like, wait, Woody breathes? Woody breathes oxygen? There's, I mean, later, Buzz will smell air and be like, I smell that. Like, yeah. It's like the anti version of that scene

in Nightmare before Christmas where Sally just goes like, oh, yeah, I can just jump from here. I'm fine. Yeah. Though that would, if they didn't fear bodily harm, that would ruin a lot of the stakes for this movie. They should just go like,

well, yeah, I'm not in pain, but for Buzz be, or sorry, when Woody gets burned later, it hurts. He is physically hurt by it. And it seems like when you are,

um, in the toy chest, you really are like forgotten for the most part. So seeing the shark guy could pop out with what he's had, like I'm Woody, howdy, howdy, like being made fun of by a toy chest toy is the,

your lowest moment as Woody. I love that. Howdy, howdy, howdy. So, fucking funny. So Woody overhears Buzz saying, you know, your leader inscribed his name on my foot. And we see that just like what Woody is in Andy's life compared to Buzz because Woody's Andy signature is all like scrawled like a little baby wrote it.

And the one on Buzz's foot is a much more proper signature. So we see like, no, Woody, you're in the past now. Like Andy's growing up and this is his new. toy. So even the signature is important, not just because it's there, but what it represents. I mean, what he should know better now, too, that, like, a musty old toy like him is can't compare to basically a Batman figure whose cape extends like that. I think I did have at least one Batman whose Cape flew out in a Buzz Lightyear kind of way. Seems dangerous. Seems like they'd be taken off the market. If there was a Buzz Light Your toy, like the Buzz Light Your Toys that you bought didn't do all this

stuff, I think. Though, I think, too, it's lost in the past that, like, in 95, kids didn't think space Rangers were cool anymore. Only the Power Rangers. Yeah, the Power Rangers, too. It was all about color coding and explosions, not this

backstory with Zirk. Zerg's more of a Skeletor type, though. He is, yeah. And we hear about Zerg in this movie, we see him in the second movie in a big way. So, yes, this is a scene where Bo Peep is trying to reassure what he's saying, you know, like, they care, they love Buzz because he's a new toy just like Andy, but don't worry.

They haven't forgotten about you, and Andy hasn't forgotten about you. He's like, I'm not worried, I'm not worried. And then he goes over to confront Buzz because he clearly is worried. Listen, Light Snack, you stay away from Andy. He's mine, and no one is taking him away from me. What are you talking about? Where's that bonding strip? And another thing?

Stop with this spaceman thing. It's getting on my nerves. Are you saying you want to lock? You're complaint with Star Command? Oh, okay. Well, so you want to do it the hard way, huh? Don't even think about it, cowboy. Oh, yeah?

Tough guy! You open a spaceman's helmet on an uncharted planet. My eyeballs could have been sucked from their sockets. Actually think you're the Buzz Lightyear? Oh, all this time I thought it was. It's the rear! You're mocking me, aren't you? Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Great animation on the faces in this scene. If you didn't buy it now, like, CGI characters can be expressive. This scene is one of the best for that. Oh, God. But the animation on Buzz is freak out when he thinks he's suffocating. So good.

Like, God, his, he's just bulging eyes or the way he's just, like, shaking his head to the side and reaching out his arm. Like, ah, like he's... This is the most Shatnery buzz is, and especially he goes like, you're mocking me. Yeah, too.

Though Woody, I mean, come on Woody. Buzz clearly has mental problems. It's not nice to laugh at him. You need to be like immersion therapy. Like, still like him used to being, you know, a toy in this world. Like Tom Hanks, in the first version of this movie when they were making it, he would express like his, you know, feelings about the character like, Woody is a jerk. Yeah.

Like when Woody was a jerk, even in this version of the movie, he was like, all my character does is scream. Is this going to be okay? And then I maybe realize, like, oh, maybe I like Woody because he's always screaming. I think Woody is my favorite character that could be lame like Mario's your favorite character in Smash Brothers, but Woody is my favorite character in this movie. And in the series.

I mean, it's, you know, the Ren and Stimpy era kind of just like character screaming all the time. That's animation. But I think, you know, Woody is he's the main character at Cs he like him, but also he's he just is so expressive

in all of his movements, like every movement, especially when it's like, oh no, I'm not, look over there. Ha ha ha! Like, his That laugh goes on for so long. I actually cut it off in the cliff. When Woody finally realizes what Buzz's deal is, he's like, oh, I get it now. It's not even that you don't think you're a toy. It's that you think you are the Buzz Light. You're a character that doesn't exist, who's not real ever. And again, they built to this moment where when Buzz is talking about his mission to defeat Emperor Zerg, Woody is standing behind him on the bed. And he's like, turns his head upside down to read the text. Buzz is saying off the bottom. and he's just like, wait a minute. So, like, he's building to this realization, like, you think you're him.

I love on that back of the box stuff that Zerg has an asterisk on it, which makes it feel like it's like Zerg, not included. Or, like, there's some warning about Zerg at the bottom there. Check out, like, the Zerg coming April, 1996 or something like that. The Zerg PlaySense. Yeah, keep an eye out for it, kids. And now this bit of tension is interrupted with the introduction of Sid. And I like that there are no.

hints of Sid before this. This is not an element of danger in the movie until now because of course, Sid would not be invited to this birthday party. Sid is a piece of shit little kid who would just cause trouble and break things. Sid is next door and is not invited to Andy's party. Boy, I got to think he's caused trouble already and that Andy's... I think they need to keep Sid and Andy separate. Otherwise, you just... Andy has to be pure. Bad things can't happen to him other than feeling sad that he lost his toy. I do like that Andy's mom doesn't talk about Sid. Andy does not even know about Sid or think about him.

I like that Sid exists in his own little hell bubble in this world. It'd be too much of a bummer if Sid just showed up like, hey, dork, give me some cake, shoves, Andy. Like, bad things aren't allowed to happen to Andy from other kids. I mean, that's part of him being an idealized kid and said he isn't bullied. And we see Combat Carl, not G.I. Joe, get exploded. And one interesting thing about this movie is, like, they don't have a real particle effects yet. They have to fake them. So you don't see any things like water or explosions.

You see a little bit of smoke come out of buzz, sorry, out of Woody when his head gets caught on fire. But that's basically, like, they don't have the technology to do that yet, so they have to fake it. So that's why you don't see an explosion in this movie. I forgot that's why. They cut around it so well that you don't notice it's missing, you know? I was just watching the start of Toy Story 3 to see them recreate the opening I talked about and in that they have a nuclear bomb cloud

of the barrel of monkeys just showing how many little figures they can have on screen. That's how much changed between 2011 and 1995 there. Yeah, now none of this is a problem, but it's like, well, how do we make it rain? How do we show liquid? These are all things they really couldn't figure out yet.

And I love that Sid's cackling is, Buzz just goes like, you mean that happy child? Yeah. He just, he doesn't understand the context of why this kid would be laughing. He doesn't get anything. But yeah, like Buzz wants to stop Sid. Like he doesn't understand, like, I guess he understands some of the toy rules,

but it's like, no, you can't go down there and fight him. He'll kill you. I think, but he's like, I'd love to see you try because you would be killed. I think Sid breaks a few rules of what Disney would allow. a child character to do in things. Like he's, I mean, just playing with explosives, like in this scene, they'd never, that's too imitatable.

They wouldn't let a kid do that in their stuff. I was thinking about that where it's like, yeah, toy story G-rated, you know, family movie. I'm like, this, this is edgy for a 95 movie by Disney because this is like a little butthead character. Yeah. Well, and all the tools he plays with, like he's,

it's dangerous. These are not things a normal everyday kid gets to do. Oh, and right after the sit scene, It was my mom who she chuckled at the virtual realty side and explained it to me. I didn't get the joke at first as a kid. I think that was a little chuckle in the theater for that line. It's a nice little like, ha, ha, not virtual reality. It's more of the clever wordplay that we come to expect from a CGI film.

And yeah, so it goes from peep saying the sooner we move, the better, and then fade to the next scene where the house has been sold. And basically mom and Andy are going out for one last fun meal. to a pizza planet and he can bring one toy and Woody overhears this while Buzz is like busying himself in the background with like paper clips and pencils and stuff like clearly building or working on something I like that he's doing

so he's got like a bit in the background he's doing still trying to fix his ship I guess I think so and it pays off because the the things he's playing with he'll trip over later when the globe is rolling after him yeah that's right it's all everything's there the pizza planet is we'll go there later but just

the second she says we're going to go to pizza planet you as a viewer know, this is Chuck E. Cheese. She's taking him to a kid's arcade, like the perfect. And especially bringing up pizza. Everybody loves, every kid loves pizza. And so you know that it's like a showbiz, I guess, as well. Yeah, it's more like, it's like the 90s version. No pizza place has ever been this cool.

And for a long time in the movie, this was a place called Pizza Pizza Puts, which was a pizza miniature golf course. But then, like, very late to the right, and they're like, no, no, it should be like a space-themed pizza place so Buzz can get confused. So like they thought like that we were so stupid to not realize that until much later in the writing process. Wow. I didn't

man that's that was very smart of them to finally add that in there. So yes, Woody consults the non-sentient apeal. This apeal is not a living toy to see if he'll get to go with Andy instead of Buzz. The apeal says don't count on it. What he tosses it aside and

realizes that he could get Buzz stuck behind the dresser. Woody would get to go with Andy. Well, that's all his planning is he does not want to kill Buzz. He doesn't want Buzz to be lost forever because that also would terrify Andy if he had lost his toy forever. He doesn't want to hurt Andy in that way either. Yeah, and I assume that he's also not thinking of the long term where it's like, well, Buzz will be mad. I mean, if I do this, this will not look like an accident.

But if I can just buy myself a little bit of time with Andy, that's all I want right now. I mean, it's killing him to be separated from Andy this much. and not be number one. He's still a likable character, but this action is coming from a selfish place, for sure. Like, he is a jealous guy. I do love the sort of Mr. Burns, like, tenting of Woody's fingers when he's, like,

oh, I could fool him now. And basically he just gets Buzz to be like, oh, Buzz, there's a toy caught behind this dresser. You have to help it. Oh, God. The way he has this creepy, like, look over his shoulder as he rises up. Yeah.

That's the closest to classic Evil Woody in this movie, I think. And I do love, like, there are three moments in this movie where Buzz has to play, or sorry, what he has to play into Buzz's reality? Like, Buzz, you have to help me. There's something happening here, Buzz! It's very funny when he's got to, like,

slip into Buzz's reality to get him to do something like, we have to get on that spaceship, Buzz? Come on. Oh, yeah. Also, right before they knock him over, the, we see that they're playing cards, ham and potato head,

but they're Buzz Lightyear playing car. Yeah. That's so great. Is that like another, version of their strip games they're playing. I guess so, yeah, which is like, man, a little too sexy here, guys. He wants to see that naked spud, I think. So, yeah, the plan basically is

to use RC, the car character, which is sort of like a dog in this world, to shove Buzz into the wall behind the dresser. So Andy, or sorry, so what he can go with Andy, what happens is Buzz dives out of the way, the car knocks over a Bolton board, which sends

a globe rolling after Buzz. Buzz dodges the globe, but the globe hits a lamp that knocks Buzz out of the window. So it's a big Rube Goldbergian device. What he only wanted Buzz to get trapped behind the dresser, but he was knocked out of the window. And I like that they don't really say this out loud where Woody's like, maybe if I got Buzz behind the dresser, I'd get to go. Like it's all communicated visually through very good storytelling. It's clear enough that Buzz would be lost behind the dresser, but it wouldn't be found for a little bit and by him time. And he had

the same with like the acting on Woody's face makes it clear he didn't want this to happen. The buzz flies out the window and he instantly feels guilt about it. And then it mixed in with that guilt is knowing that everybody, he wanted to get back everybody's love and instead

this makes everyone hate him. And this is like the half hour mark of the movie. We have not left the house yet. So a character falling out of the house seems like a big deal. Like this is outer space for these characters. And the world eventually gets much bigger for them after this. But yeah, it's a big deal when Buzz goes out the window into a bush.

And then you a lassie gag with RC as well, which I thought was funny. But yes, Mr. Potato Head thinks this was no accident. Hey, he's saying that this was no accident. What are you? I mean, Humpty Dumpty was pushed. By woodie. Do you have what? Wait a minute.

You don't think I meant to knock Buzz out the window, do you? Potato Head? That's Mr. Potato Head to you, you backstabbing murderer. No, it was an accident. Guys, come on. Now, you gotta believe me. We believe you, Woody. Right, Rex?

No, I don't like confrontations. Where is your honor, dirtbag? You are an absolute disgrace. You don't deserve to. Hey! Couldn't handle Buzz cutting in on your playtime, could you, Woody? Didn't want to face the fact that Buzz just might be Andy's new favorite toy.

So you got rid of them. But what if Andy starts playing with me more, Woody, huh? You're gonna knock me out of the window, I don't think we should give him the chance. Period. Man, drag him! Let's string him up by his pull string. I got him on his head.

Would you boys? I mean, Toy Story is really a parable about mob violence. Really? Woody should have a trial. Number one. That's what Bo Peep is trying to set up. And then, yeah, potato head is so quick. Like, it feels extreme just hearing him call Woody a murderer.

It happens later. It's like, you murdering dog? Yeah. Oh, God. And then they're planning to hang him, like, literally hang him on his draw street. Yeah, actually, it's funny when, uh, when Andy comes in to get, Woody, like Woody looks up and, uh, potato head and etcher together and that just gets draws a noose, which is a very dark joke. So dark. Yeah, like we're going to lynch you. I could not

believe that. Like, and also great animation move where when all the figures are converging on Woody, the camera like moves. Yeah. Like that, that seemed like a very complicated show. Moving all characters and the camera in a convincing way. I think it is this shot that they said on the commentary, the person who animated it had a rap party for that shot. It took them so long to do and was so complicated that they had a little party after they finished that shot. My God.

I mean, every single person is moving in it and there's dozens of figures doing it. Like, God, that has to be so, so difficult. Jesus. So Woody is carried to the minivan and Buzz is okay. and he basically like, you know, jumps into the back of the car. To get revenge. Yeah. He's now been pushed too far, which is too bad.

If he wasn't out to get revenge on, Woody, he would have just been saved by the other toys who were just like, hey, come on, buzz. But he's already gone. Also, talk about dated things in this movie. The baby is in the front seat in their baby seat. Oh, I mean, that was dated even in 1995. That's a no-no.

Yeah. I think, I don't know when it was fully popular. that information, but yes, never put the baby in the front seat. Always in your lap, always with the driver. It's because they're front seat airbags and that will like splatter your baby if it open up. I believe it's like facing the rear of the car in the back is the baby seat way to go. I believe that's correct. Yeah, but we're both child. We're not baby havers over here. Yeah, but they stop at the gas station first, Dino Co gas, like sort of a parody of Sinclair gas with a nice dinosaur logo. Which is key plot points in the Cars films.

Dynoco is the thread between them. Dynoco is the original sponsor of Lightning McQueen in the Cars films. Anything to do with The Last Dinosaur? Sorry, the Good Dinosaur, the Pixar movie no one has ever said anything about. I don't know if it's good or bad. I think that dinosaur looks like the dinosaur in Good Dinosaur, but I wouldn't know because I didn't watch. You never saw it? Wow.

What happened to that movie? Was that like the two-a-year Pixar thing where we just didn't see one of them? It's where one got delayed so long they had to like crap. We're putting them out two in one year. And Inside Out was just so good. People didn't have the space in their mind for a film that's not as good as that. Like, yeah. They should have just not bothered with that.

I mean, it's on Disney Plus. Oh, yes. I guess I can watch it right now. Well, when the recording's over. Woody is in the back of the car. Before he feels too sorry for himself, he sees Buzz and thinks he's saved. But Buzz really wants to kick Woody's ass because they don't believe in revenge on his planet, but they're not on his planet.

So he shoves him out of the car and they start fighting on the ground. There's lots of fun toy fighting where Woody's this big floppy doll, but Buzz has all these buttons. You can punch to make noises. Oh, yeah, yeah. And his head squeaks, which happens a few times in the movie. This kind of like cloth doll versus a solid plastic one. Yeah. You get a great sense of their weight and scale and that too, because it's something I like

in the design, too, that, like Woody is about an inch taller than Buzz. but you don't really, like, that probably is left over from the wooden dummy versus little man characters they used to have. Yeah. But I do love, I remember, like, I do remember the laughs in the theater. One of the biggest laughs was the buzz, buzz, buzz, let you to the rescue when he's punching Buzz in the chest and also knocking Woody's head around. And I love how he, like, touches his jaw after gets his head knocked around. Also, that dead bug on Buzz is pretty gross. Yeah.

It was very gooey. I'm glad the stain didn't stick on his helmet for very long. Yeah, and other stains do stay around in the movie, so I'm glad that one kind of went away. And, yeah, we also get to see the car's license plate as A113. Yeah, you'll see that a lot in the movie, actually. Once you see it once you can't stop seeing it. That's the Cal Arts, I believe, the Cal Arts classroom,

where Lasseter and Bird and others were all there. All your favorites. But, yeah, so as they're fighting, the minivan pulls away, and Buzz is like starting to do his space ranger stick again trying to figure out what's going on and Woody like runs at him with his hands out like I'm going to murder you. And that's where there's just a fun fake out where this huge big rig pulls in and they both have to flop down.

I love how it comes so close to crushing Woody's skull. It just like it just like touches his nose. He just nudges his nose ever so slightly. Yeah. And I love that brief moment where he just comes to life. It's like, oh. Yeah. Even though he should have just said like, I'm not visible here.

I can just move. but instead it's an incredibly close call. Like, that's great action there. Yes, but now it is time to panic. According to my Navajo computer, the... Shut up. Just shut up, you idiot. Sheriff, this is no time to panic. This is the perfect time to panic.

I'm lost. Andy is gone. They're going to move from their house of two days, and it's all your fault. My fault, if you hadn't pushed me out of the window the first place... Oh, yeah. Well, if you hadn't shown up your stupid little cardboard spaceship and taken away everything that was important. to me? Don't talk to me about importance because of you, the security of this entire universe is in jeopardy.

What? What are you talking about? Right now, poised at the edge of the galaxy. Emperor Zerg has been secretly building a weapon with a destructive capacity to annihilate an entire planet. I alone have information that reveals this weapon's only weakness. And you, my friend, are responsible for delaying my rendezvous with Star Command. You are! You weren't the real buzz light? You're... you're an... you're an... you're an... accent figure. You are a child's play thing. You are a sad, strange little man, and you have my pity. Farewell. People always quote that first part, but never, and you have my pity. That makes the line even better. You're a sad, strange little man, and you have my pity. I do really like... They still walks away. This scene, I just realized, like, so the van pulls away, and that's a big moment we're like, oh, they're fucked.

But then the truck almost hits them. The truck needs to be there so they can have a confrontation, in public. They need to be disguised by the truck. So I just realized like that's a plot element. The truck needs to be there for them to talk to each other.

That's good writing. Yeah. You know, what's funny, bad writing, but not by the screenwriters, but in universe, Buzz's toy manufacturer just completely ripped off Star Wars

Oh, yeah. What he's describing is the plot of a new hope of that he, there is a death star being made and he has the plans that reveal the only weakness in it. Well, you see that Buzz Lightyer

a Disney product. So Disney was trying to rip off Star Wars before they made it. He's got Disney on his ass. That's right. He took Disney care. Wow. And he also does the Vulcan Hand side too. Those ripoff artists at Disney. But in universe, it's so funny that they're just like, eh, just steal it. Who cares? But one of the best animated, like, emotionally animated, Woody is just how exasperated he is. He goes from, like, furious to just like desperate, like, what are you talking about? He's just like, he wants him to be, like reasonable. Like, please, please, I need someone. Like, I'm stuck with you. I need you to be part of reality with me. Woody's character really is defined by like problem solving. He's, he's about

making a plan, solving problems. Like, uh, part of his arc in Toy Story 3 is when he finally has to accept like, you know, sometimes you just can't save everybody or whatever. That's kind of what he's thinking. In this one, too, he's just like, let's think of a plan and here's buzz with just a bunch of nonsense about his character's backstory. And yeah, I think like an early high point in CGI animation is just the U-R-a-Toy. Yeah, just how it like floppy his arms are, but he's still like very forceful. Yeah. And then he has his hands fly out first and then they pull back in to shove them in his face like a child's play thing. So good. So yeah, it seems like it's over between Buzz and Woody at this point. But Woody has a very good plan. He sees the

Pizza Planet truck. He knows it's going back to Pizza Planet once it makes its deliveries. So he has to like full Buzz like Buzz, I found a spaceship and it's going to take us back to your planet or whatever. He makes up some lie to get Buzz on his side again. He almost is going to abandon Buzz, but he realizes

he will be killed if he returns without Buzz. He can't go home without Buzz. So he's forced to do it. There are a lot of moments in this movie where he is willing to just abandon Buzz until he realizes they need to work together. And then it's constant self-sacrifice until the end of the movie for each other.

It's such a great arc for both of them. But yes, so Woody says he found a spaceship. Buzz climbs into the cockpit so he can buckle the seatbelt, which is a very cute scene. I have to wonder, did that like stone teenager driving like a little over? It's like, why is there a Buzz light your toy buckled into my car? Ah, no, because the giant pizza boxes are between him and where bars are seated. And even when he's delivered all the pizzas, the stack of empty pizza container things, it's between them too

so that explains why he never saw them I'll take it and Woody goes into the back of the car you know like laughing at Buzz like cockpit whatever and then he's just beaten mercilessly by everything in the back of the car that's really funny

it's the least he deserves for his actions yeah Woody is punished physically for being a jerk and because he is the most fun character to abuse like it's not like Buzz is sort of like a stiff toy that it's not really fun to see him getting beat up that much but Woody is fun to see like mangled and twisted around

And also just seeing his classic, like, cartoony reaction of like, oh boy. Like, he's just this short of having birds flying around his head kind of thing. Yeah, I love that reveal on Smash. Woody, when he just pops up. It's so great in the back of the truck. It's really cool. But, yeah, we're at Pizza Planet now. And, like, this is a big moment in the movie.

Just leaving the house was a big deal because you're thinking as a kid or someone who knows about animation, like, well, they can make all these toys in this house. But that's going to be it, right? It's like, no, here's a gas station. Here's a whole new set with lots of children and fake arcade games. What a cool reveal this is. Yeah, all the arcade game jokes in there, too. I mean, especially the wacking alien that's a joke about the alien films. Like, there's like plastic blood on it.

That seems like I think Disney wouldn't allow now either. I love whatever game it is that is like the gopher or groundhog with a machine gun. That's so funny. Yeah, it's very cute. Some classic arcade cabinet art there. But yeah, it's like a real, they're doing another recon mission with, they're disguised as like fast food junk where it's like this could be, thankfully I don't think it was, this could just be part of a video game where they have to like do a stealth mission to get back to Andy. Well, this was part of the 16-bit toy story video games. Oh, it was.

Did you play those? I never did. I rented it for the Genesis mainly as a, by that point I knew that most licensed games probably weren't very good. but this was during the Donkey Kong country days, and this was showing off. It was one of the first, I think it was like right after Vector Man, but it was one of the first pre-rendered 3D graphics things on a Genesis. So I just wanted to see it for that.

And yes, this is one of the stages from it, as I recall. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. I didn't think they would have stealth that early, but maybe it was just a different approach. Well, it was like jumping around. I don't want to say it wasn't exactly a stealth. It's been a long time since I played it though. But luckily,

Woody is, uh, sees Andy and Molly's stroller. He tries to get buzz to jump in the stroller with him, but he is a distracted by the giant spaceship crane game with, uh, just one prize inside, a bunch of green aliens. And actually this, uh, idea of the aliens, well, actually the claw idea was come up with by, uh, the director of Huntrack of Notre Dame, Gary Trousdale, who said like, um, if these aliens were inside of this machine, they would worship the claw. the claw chooses them. So this came from another Disney director.

Man, I mean, the, the claw aliens are a perfect cult. Like, they are so funny. And yes, that they even identify with the thing that destroys them actually or just sends them away is their God. That's so funny. Is that when Buzz does the Vulcan hand signal? Like, I come in peace when he crawls up in there. I love how happy he is to meet all these aliens because it's like Buzz's reaction is

finally I meet some other people who understand things. You're in outer space. Buzz knows aliens. He knows rocket ships. Like he's very home at Pizza Planet. And it is, again, like everything in this movie works so well mechanically. I like, like, this is how Sid gets both Buzz and Woody. It's such a perfect, like, screenplay moment. Like, it would be contrived in any other way if Buzz just or Sid just found them on the floor or if Sid, like, discover them somewhere else in pizza planet, like in the trash can or something.

It's like, no, this is so perfect. Like, he thinks he won these prizes. Yeah. just a bonus that like this, that you just think I found the perfect prize. It's what you dream of when you play one of those games. Like, I'm going to get the diamond ring or the Harvard diploma in one of these things. Lobster harmonica. So yes, let's hear the scene with aliens and Sid. This is an intergalactic emergency. I need to commandeer your vessel to sector 12. Who's in charge here? The claw is our master. The claw chooses who will go and who will stay.

This is ludicrous. So you got a brain in there? Sid. What's cutting into you, Sheriff? You are the one that decided to climb into this. The clock. It moves. I have been chosen.

Farewell, my friends. I go on to a better place. Gotcha. Buzz Light eater. So yeah, Woody tries to pull Buzz back from the crane, but all of the aliens stop him because it's like, no, he's been chosen. He's like, get away from him, you zealots. I love that life.

Yeah. Yeah, just their, they're, they're, excitement of like he has been chosen. They're the cult-like behavior of them. It's so funny. I'm glad they got to come back in Toy Story 2 and join Andy's play things, except they become the children of potato head. That's right.

Yeah. And even though, you know, going to Sid's as like a death sentence, what he says to play by the rules and freeze when he's pulled out of the machine. You can stop. I like, the close he can get is cause, like, pull back on the crane, too. has the kind, he has enough strength to resist the crane,

which is like, I guess you, again, too many questions asking time, but what is the strength of Woody? How much can he lift? Does he need to eat? Does he,

can he, would he drown? What would happen? So yeah, Sid gets Buzz and Woody and there's a sinister line, like, let's go home and play.

Oh, and a zoom in on his skull shirt that fades to Sid's house, which is a nice, like, you're going into hell now. Yeah, and his house is such like a horror movie exterior. I think it's, they use it a lot here.

I think the Dutch angles, the kind of Batman villain angles on the camera. It's tons of fun. And of course he skateboards, too. Yeah, classic. He's every type of bad kid. Bad 90s tween. And I do enjoy that. Their house is so out of date.

It's like, it's the 90s. Everything from the 70s is funny. They have a very 70s, like, tacky house. Yeah, there's like mismatched wallpaper, too. I like that you can, when it gets to the stairs, it goes from the, like, kind of trees wallpaper to the, I guess I'd say, shining design wallpaper. Yeah, I think it is like the reference to the shining, just to be even creepier. But, yeah, Buzz thinks they're safe in Sitt's backpack because they can see Andy's house. But what do you know is like we're going into SIDS house. And they do. And the first... And we'll never get back out. Yeah. It's like a dissent to hell. And the first, like, we see immediately how high the stakes are where the alien toys sacrifice in front of them.

Just torn to shreds. Yeah. I mean, I think that's why they show you that there's dozens of them to make them more disposable. Yeah, and it's a good movie trick in general that for a dangerous situation, you kill a character immediately, like a disposable character, just to show like this is real, this is real problem here. It's like at the very start of suicide squad, they're like, hey, here's this guy's spider. Oh, he's trying to leave. And his neck explodes. There, that's the only reason he was there to show that their experience.

splitting collars work. And we see that Sid is not alone, and that he's got a little sister name Hannah, who apparently he tortures by stealing her toys. And already the rocket is laid in because Sid's like, did my package come yet? And she's like, I don't know. And apparently Hannah, Sid thinks Hannah's being too snotty, so he takes her dolly away and runs upstairs with it. And it's just a hint of what will come.

But I do like, upon watching this once again, I'm like, oh yeah, the rocket is laid in. We don't know what it is yet. but we know that Sid wants it. That's right. Man, it really does set up how he will later say, it's finally here. Like, he's been waiting for it this whole time.

And I, so I think with Sid, you do see like a little layer of creativity to him. I think my, I pity him and wish better things for Sid. I mean, Sid does remind me of a bully, like bullies I knew as a kid. But he also kind of reminds me of like my middle school burnout friends who just life never. got better for them and they just had a shitty

upbringing and then it just continued to be bad for that. I feel bad because on the comment they point out like all the animators grew up being Sid just destroying their toys but also I feel like he's not even a bully because he's just at the bottom of the food chain just a loner who plays his elaborate games

of his toys and you know builds things and things like that but his brain is shattered at the end of this movie. Yeah, yeah. Now I don't think it was fully confirmed but people assume the garbage man in Toy Story 3 who has the skull shirt is him. I think that's the biggest wink in the world.

And that's like Sid's ultimate dream because he can just define all the junk he wants. That's true. I guess, you know, and it's a high-paying job, really. You know what? It's not such a dark image. No, no. I don't like this classism in Toy Story where it's like, look at this poor child who hates his toys. He should have his mind shattered.

Speaking of artropes, I really thought when he removed the dolly's head that it was like evil dead two kind of moment. Oh, it could be. I mean, these guys are of that age that could have seen it when it was new. But first, there's some mad surgery afoot. Oh, no.

We have a sick patient here, nurse. Prepare the OR. Stop! Patient is prepped. No one's ever attempted at double bypass brain transplant before. Now for the tricky part. Players.

I don't believe that man's ever been to medical school. Doctor, you've done it. Hannah. Jenny's all better now. What a little shit. Yeah, great kid. That's a great kid line. Like, well, she says it's not true.

I do like the dynamic here where Woody, he is completely in power in his tiny space. And once he's out of that space, he's powerless. But Buzz has no grip on reality no matter where he is. So he's confident even in Sid's house until he realizes he's a toy. Like, he's like, no, this is fine. Like, we can get out. of this. I don't even know what's happening, but I'm confident. But Woody is full of a fear and

doubt. He's certain he's going to die. I also like, you know, when he comes across, you need to have the scary toys there, not just because they're going to help him later, but also to set up why they can't just escape the second they're left alone, because, you know, you just ask yourself, well, why don't they just jump out the window? If it's, if it's dead, anyway, just they can escape. And now it's like, no, they're more terrified to have Sid not be there, really. Yeah, like any snotty preteen, he locks all of his locks. Yeah.

No one's getting in that room to find out what he's doing. Stay out, mom. And I did. So the next scene we see the reveal of all the mutant toys where Woody tries to escape, the door is locked, and this yo-yo rolls out from under the bed. And I like that, like, little finger twiddle on Woody. Like, all the nervous, from nervous to fearful acting is very good on him. Oh, yeah.

very effective. Especially when he grabs that light and he's like holding it like a sword almost. Oh yeah. He goes from pencil to light. Yeah. He thinks he's predicting himself with the pencil and he's like, no, I need a giant flashlight. Like I got to protect myself. And he shines it on what he thinks is a baby doll.

I was like, oh, hello there. And it comes out and it's a baby doll head on like an erector set spider body. Oh, it's terrified. And it moves out. And I love that like sort of might even be like a Ken doll style thing on this roller toy. Yeah. like pokes the light and turns it off for him. Oh, God. And it's,

it's even creepier because they're all silent. We've seen all these speaking toys before, but all these toys are too traumatized to speak, I want to think. Yeah, I wonder. That was one of Nina's questions like, why can't they talk? And I'm like, boy, I don't know. Because they've seen, they're,

they've seen too much. They're all catatonic, basically. Their brains have been shattered like Sid will be in the future. Now, I mean, Sid's creativity at making that spider erector said and then putting a baby doll on it that actually is like a very artistic touch by him like if he could just direct these artistic impulses away from destruction and hurting people and one thing i noticed in this scene is that when they're in sid's room uh because he's a classic future burnout he's got black lights oh yeah and they

really especially when buzz is in the backpack you can see how all the black lights are making his like neon colors glow and even what he's like a white part of his uh outfit is glowing a little bit which is really nice it's a cool lighting effect yeah they're showing off the kind of lighting effects they can do just with different levels of filters that don't involve like finding new paint sets to use or whatever. Yeah. And well just all the times

like when they were yelling at each other in the shadow of the truck, you see the glow in the dark level of buzz, like his glow and the dark paint on his accents around the chest. Yeah. So yes, they think these mutant toys are cannibals because they pull like basically the doll

torso away under the bed. You don't know what's happening now and it is a cool reveal that I don't know if I realized it at the time and they were actually good the whole time the first time I saw it. I don't remember. I don't think I did. I definitely. I don't, you know, is it kind of an easy lesson of don't jump to conclusions kids? Some things are scary, but they're nice. So I don't think I saw that moral of the story coming when I first watched it either. I mean, you're meant to read their actions both ways. You could see them as, you know, negative, scary actions. But if you see the movie once you're like, oh, I can see how they're helping the entire. time. They're just doing their best. But they also can't talk to explain what they're doing either. So yes, after Buzz says he's going to set his laser to kill and Woody's like, we can blink them

to death. Great. We cut back, we cut back to the house every now and then to see that the toys are still looking for Buzz. And unfortunately, Whiskers, a neighborhood cat, is interfering with the search. I like how they have knowledge of the neighborhood as well. I do love Rex's like Whiskers. He's so tired of

Whiskers. He's had to deal with Whiskers too much that Rex. I mean, Mudif Whiskers has come up to that window and, like, fucked with stuff there. And Andy and his mom pull into the driveway. Andy says he can't find Woody and all the toys are like, wow, he really did kill Buzz. And he ran away. What a loser. Yeah, I love that.

Yeah, they just see him as a coward who ran away. Even believers like Bo Peep and Slink, they don't have anything to say. They're like, yeah, I guess he's not here. Watching this again, I assume, like, Bo Peep would be like, I still believe in you, Woody. But he's like, I hope he's okay. He just doesn't say, like, I don't think he didn't, I don't think he didn't do it, but he's like, I hope that Woody's at least a lie. She wants him to live to stay in trial. Yeah, a fair toy trial. And as a kid, losing a toy like that would break my heart like it breaks Andy's heart there.

Though, I can't recall a toy I just full on lost and confined again. I mean, it was more like, oh, this broke or even one who had a kind of like kung fu action that Buzz as if the arm just lost its tension and would just floop down, I'd be like, I would just be heartbroken. It was no good as a toy longer. You failed me, Kung Fu Toy. So yes, we're back to SIDS, and we see Sid playing fake hostage torture and burning Woody with a magnifying glass. So this joke is darker now that we know about torture in America. Yeah, I was like, oh, this torture joke is a hitting a little too close to home for me now. But I do like that, Woody retains this burn mark on his head until the final scene at Christmas.

Yeah, I guess it's like it can be washed off, but Woody can't wash it off himself. That's another level to it that like, it's them showing off the thing they can't do in 2D as easily because it's just, it's a change to his texture map instead of just a dot that has to be drawn on its head every single frame the rest of the movie.

You can make it look more convincing. And in the special features, they show that they basically did the same thing with a baby doll and like basically scan the texture for the burn mark. Oh yeah. Yeah. But yeah, Woody dunks his head in like some disgusting old cereal and he picks up a spoon. I love the reflection of himself from the spoon.

Again, more showing off. I hope this isn't permanent, but he sees the door is open. So that's when he makes another break for the door. The toys, the mutant toys though, in the room don't want them to leave. And you think like, are they going to attack Woody and Buzz the first time you watch this? The reason they don't want them to leave is because the dog is outside. It's scud, the dog. Yeah, that's right.

They're trying to protect them from scud. And that's when Woody uses Buzz's Kung Fu grip to our Kung Fu like attack to like bash his way through the mutant toys. And Woody basically runs out like leaving Buzz on his back. Yeah. To like deal with it yourself. Also when Woody's running out, he says there's no place like home. There's no place like home which like that means Woody has seen the Wizard of Oz at some point. He's a real film buff, Woody.

I guess if he's a toy from 1950, he's seen a lot of things. as we will find out in Toy Story 2. So even though Woody abandoned Buzz, like Woody does a lot of abandoning of Buzz until they learn to work together in this movie, even though Woody abandons him, Buzz basically pulls it behind the corner of the wall, you know, just to be like...

Oh, yeah, he saves him. Yeah. Yeah, it's one of these reversals of characters here where Woody was saving Buzz from all these things, he didn't realize were threats. But this time, Buzz is like, no, you idiot. There's a giant dog down there. He can't just run away.

And Buzz basically takes, command by doing basically, he runs to cover, and he waves Woody across to run to cover as well, and Woody's like terrified. And as he tries to get Woody to run to the next point of cover, that's when Woody's drawstring gets pulled by the rod iron railing

on the, like the railing of the stairway. That looks dangerous to have it in kids. That feels like a very 70s house kind of thing. I think my grandma had railing like that in like a porch or something. You're just asking for a kid to trip and rip their eye out of it. It's just like impalement fodder.

But yeah, his voice box going off, that voice box causes more trouble than good there. But yes, so they scramble off into different rooms, Woody goes into a closet, and Buzz Lightyear sneaks into, like, the secret dad den. Yes. And I get a feeling that dog knows not to go in there because the dog, like, sticks his head in a very Jurassic Park kind of way and, like, sniffs around and buzzes behind the door. And the dog pulls his head out, and we see that's where, say what you will about Sid's dad. Doesn't seem like a very good life. he's asleep. I don't,

was there like beer cans or anything? I think we see like a soda can maybe. Yeah, I think they wouldn't get away with any darker than a soda can. But I, I just see him as a drunk dad. I mean, this is another of these moments alike.

Oh, well, you know, cuts in a break. He's got a bad situation. Yeah, the dad is watching a bowling. Like,

I had a friend with a dad like this. Like, we never saw the dad like, oh, he's, he's sleeping. He'd just be in this, like,

mysterious room in the house at all times, but just like, he was clearly just drunk all the time. Yeah. was a story. So that's what I think of when I think of Sid's dad. I like that his room has also like, I believe like a deerhead and also like deerhead wallpaper. So he's a hunting man too. I like to think that the scud, the thing he smelled, he couldn't smell Buzz anymore because like his stinky did drunk father or what so is covering it up. She smells like steel like Schlitz or something

like that. And this is when Buzz has his existential crisis by watching a commercial for himself. Calling Buzz Lightyear, come in Buzz Lightyear. This is Star Command. Star Command. Do you read me? Buzz Light Year responding, read you loud and clear. Buzz Lightyear. Planet Earth needs your help.

On the way. Buzz Light Year! The world's greatest superhero now, the world's greatest toy. Buzz. Uncharted space. The crew is a secret mission. It's uncharted space wings. To infinity and beyond.

Not a flying toy. Oh, man. Penjolette is the perfect voice for that. They knew to get the loudest guy. Originally, this is going to be like a kitchy 60-style commercial for Buzz, but then Disney was like, no, make it a modern commercial. And then they realized, like, oh, these are much funnier to make parodies of. Oh, God, the screaming of one of those commercials. Like, ah! Like, I think that also shows you, since dad is drunk, because, like, you can't sleep through fitness. Ben Gillette screaming like that. No man can do that. That's why they had to take him off Comedy Central. But yeah, it's like, I realize like the ultimate gut punches

at the end of this commercial where through the entire commercial, Buzz's understanding like, he's like looking at his parts and stuff and being like, this is what they're talking about on TV. The final shot of the Al's Toy Barn is like rows and rows of Buzz Lightyers.

Like, you're not only not unique. Look how many there are of you. Just at this one place in a chain, yeah. We meet Al in the next movie. He's not voiced by Joe Rand. He's voiced by Wayne Knight. Good, good. casting there

only nine in the second one but Joe Ramp does a great Al's Toy Band just a toy part is such a funny idea

but and we'll even go to that aisle of buzzed toys in that one too but that actually is probably even a harsher thing than being told

not a flying toy but also like you're not special at all you aren't even a little unique you're a mass produced thing

you're not a human and yeah and this is when he like he's basically just like destroyed mentally for the next...

Suicidely depressed. The more you think about it, you're like, what a horrible existence must be, just to realize this fact about yourself and have to just continue living. Every single thing you thought about your life is over. Like, it was never true. Yeah, like, adding this element to the movie

makes it a lot more special. Like, I couldn't see this movie being as wonderful as it is without this element, like buzzes crisis of existence. Also, then, not a flying toy warning. It reminds me of all the... cheating commercials that were like toy things not included whatever the

game pieces do not actually talk that was the one I was thinking of the most too yeah guess who how many kids thought that the game pieces did talk when I was a kid and I saw that they added that to the commercial I'm like what who was stupid enough to think that cartoon would come to life on your card I played guess you before I'm sure enough parents have been

like you told my kid they talk I thought there'd be many many monitors on this game board you uh so yes we smash I guess they could make that now couldn't they I think so. It'd be like a tablet app, yeah. But yeah, we smash right into I Will Go Sailing No More,

whatever it's called the song. It's one of Fixar's first, like we're going to make you cry, you bastard songs. And I'm still, I mean, the song is way too on the nose. At least it's got a metaphor. I don't like the fact that they include

like dialogue in the scene of Buzz thinking about things while the song is playing. They include dialogue from Woody. I feel like that's an executive note. Like, no, make him remember. the dialogue. It won't remember why

that he flew earlier. Like, yes, they will. They should have, it was a rare moment in the movie of not trusting the viewer to remember something. That feels more like a note than a Pixar screenwriting trick.

Totally. But yeah, it is very, still effective, even though the song is a bit much. And I do love just him lying on the ground, just like broken into pieces. But he is at least picked up by Hannah.

So there's a little bit of hope left for him at the end. He's not like discovered by sit or the dog doesn't bite him or whatever. He's given a little bit of, you know, hope out of this scene. The way he looks over at his broken off arm and then just like tilts his head

back, like he's just incredibly defeated. Yeah, it's one of the darkest, it's the darkest bit of this movie. And yeah, I think you're right. This gave Pixar the idea of like, oh, we can get real dark in future movies. Let's fuck around. Let's really

fuck around with the sad this stuff. So Woody comes out of the closet, of course, gets hit by a bowling ball. And this is where the Christmas lights come from, right? Because he's tangled up in them. Yeah. So again, I just thought of that now. A one-off joke that actually is an important plot point. And so Woody sees Buzz and Hannah's tea party and basically fake Sid's mom's voice.

Another weird wool breaking they're doing. Like, these toys can also, like, talk if you can't see them? Yeah, that's... I'm not calling bullshit. It's just interesting. Like, if I was a toy, I'd be fucking with people constantly. That was a question I asked myself, too, like, oh, So if a toy, toys are audible, they can't be heard by humans if they heard them say it.

But I guess the audibleness already was set up by like the Armymen talk into the baby monitor and it is transmitted. Yeah. So it is noise that is made. It's true. So yes, Buzz is having a tea party. Buzz, hey, Buzz, are you okay? Oh, God. Oh, it's gone.

Who see it? What happened to you? When many you're defending the whole galaxy And suddenly you find yourself Sucking down Darjeeling with Rayan 20th. I think you've had enough T4 today. Let's get you out of here, bud.

Don't you get it? You see the hat? Nesbitt. I am just a little depressed. That's all I can get through this. Oh, I'm a sham. Shh, look at me. I can't even fly out of it.

Window. The had looked good. Tell me the had looked. The window. Also, a bit edged you to have a character be essentially drunk in your Disney movie, too.

I love when cartoons make up a thing that is the equivalent of being drunk. Like, drinking imaginary tea made him drunk. It's like in the SpongeBob movie when they were hung over from ice cream. Yeah.

Yeah. The buzz is, it's some of Tim Allen's, I think it's Tim Allen's best voice acting in the movie. A lot of laughs in the theater at this stuff. It's an important, like, an important scene to come after the saddest scene in your movie to be like, okay, now it's wacky time. Let's bring it back up. His cleverness of like Marie Antoinette and her little sister, but whispered angrily,

like Tim Allen's very good at an angry whisper. And yeah, also he's like, one of my favorite physical actings the animators did here when he's like, do you see the hat? Instead of pointing at the hat or whatever, he bends down a little bit to like thrust the hat in the face. Be like, you see the hat? The difference is a little much. He's fully into this role that

Hannah put on him. Well, he's got to live some, he wants to live some other life now. Yeah, I do like it. Again, it pays off plot-wise where Hannah's doll was taken from her. So she's like, oh, this is a replacement for the doll that was taken.

So again, it's very clockworky. They don't need to put so much work into it. She gives like, oh, here's a fun doll I can play with. It's mine now. You know, those dolls with Buzz didn't move when Woody walked in. So I'm thinking if a dog,

it seems to show that if this dolls are decapitated, they don't move anymore. So a doll attacks you, go for the brain. I guess so. Go for the brain stem. We get some zombie dolls later in this. So that fits.

That fits. So we go back to Andy's room. We see Battleship, the game that was mentioned in the birthday party, Potato Head is playing strip battleship with him, giving over his parts. Ham is hitting every single thing, never missing and I love that like for potato head it's just a full board of white like he is only missing he uh yeah he's very bad at this game we're just very unlucky but yes it's a fun game

i i like that game it's okay i i just feel like there's really nothing to it it's fun to it's fun that that is the best part of battleship is the and the little maps are fun too but yeah they see woody across uh in sid's bedroom and i like it's a good visual element that lets you know how close to the air to moving where wrecks emerges from a box and they're like packing peanuts fly out. Oh yeah. So it's like they're so close to moving. They have no time left to get back to Andes. It's a nice little sign of that.

There's a lot of ticking clocks going on here, which is really good. Like, yeah, there is a level of sexuality to ham stripping potato. Yeah. The sexual mind game. So yeah, basically Woody needs Buzz to come to the window and let them know he's okay and they're both fine and Woody didn't kill him. But Buzz is still catatonic. He's playing with his arm like,

it's an airplane. So he's still like, his brain is shattered. He's not, tearing his sticker off too. Oh, yeah. The way he crinkles it up in his hand is really great. A lot of self-harm is happening in the scene or metaphors for it. So yeah, Woody throws the lights across. Slinky catches the lights. Slinky is always thinking, you know, Woody's, you know, my friend, he's not lying. He's okay. But Potato-Head's like, what if we don't let him over? So I think, like, I have a real negative view of Potato-Head around this viewing. He's like, he sees the power vacuum he could fill. Yeah, he y' Now that it even buzz is gone.

Oh, yeah. He's really at the top now. And the way he yanks the lights out of Slink's hand, like, no, let's not. Yeah. And he's still calling him a murderer. It's really intense. So, yes, Woody needs a hand. So Buzz literally throws an arm.

So Woody's got to basically put on a little play pretending that Buzz is there. And apparently, when Tom Hanks was in the booth, John Laster gave him like a fake severed arm that he would like, you know, play with and slamming car doors and stuff like that, that Tom was like using to do ad libs and stuff. So like a lot of this is basically Tom Hanks adlibbing as both Woody and Buzz. So here's,

the scene is very, very funny. It ends in a very tragic way. Oh, why don't you say hello to the guys over there? I have fellows to infinity and beyond. Hey, look, it's fun. Let's show the guys our new secret best friend's handshake. Give me five, man. Something screwy here.

So, you see, we're friends now, guys, aren't we, Buzz? You bet. Give me a hug. Ha, ha. Oh, I love you, too. See, it is, Buzz. Now, give back the lights, potato. Wait just a minute.

What are you trying to pull? Nothing. Oh, that is disgusting. Murderer! No! No, no! For that jury. I hope Sid pulls your voice box out.

You three. No, no. Come on. Let's get out of here. Go back to your live, citizens. Show's over. Slink! Slink, please.

So yeah, Slinky just pulls the blind shut while looking sad. Oh, it's so Woody has lost everybody. Even Slinky Dog, the way he pulls the blind shot. From their perspective, it's like Woody lost his mind and he's dismembered buzz. And it's like a horrifying scene for them. And just walking around with a severed arm, which like, yeah, it really, you get to know how horrible it is because the way Rex reacts, like he is vomiting. It's so disgusting. It's a good thing we don't see him vomiting.

What does he vomit? I would guess it's just dry heaves, I suppose, because he doesn't, I mean, he doesn't have a thing for a throat. Yeah, he doesn't have anything to allow himself to vomit. So, but poor, I mean, it's so sad the way slinky just even he looks. Like a sad dog is, is painful to see. But a sad cartoon dog even worse. But yeah. And great acting on what he is. He goes like, slinky. Just so despondent. And the rain is good for, you know, setting the tone. But it also. is a plot elements. Sid Phillips reporting. Launch of the shuttle has been delayed

due to adverse weather conditions at the launch site. Tomorrow's forecast. Sunny. So some stuff happens before that, but I just want to set the rain. Again, they made it rain be like a sad moment happen. The sun turns to rain and Woody is crushed,

but also this means that Sid can't kill them right now. He was going to kill both of them, or at least Buzz now. It delays things. too and it sets up a ticking clock that also have everything happened in the morning when they move away and when Sid is going to try to kill

them too. Yeah, I also like, so in that bit we see that like the the monsters fix buzz, they yeah, Woody, they finally reveal at least Woody finally understands their true intentions. Yeah, yeah. And we

also, yeah, I get to see, I love where he says when he pulls out the firework, he says, wow, the big one. And it says the big one on the side of it. Like keep out of reach of children. Cool. Sin is pretty resourceful to get such a giant firework in a pre-internet world. This is a smart kid.

You know, everybody wants to look down on him, but he's a smart kid. Yeah, and even after being moved, or sorry, even after being fixed, Buzz still is catatonic and won't move. And Woody, they, like, all the toys scramble out under the bed. And Woody's like, come on, Buzz. He's like, fine, just stay there. I don't care. And he hides into the milk crate. And that's when Sid comes in with the big one.

He's like, where's that wimpy cowboy doll? He picks up the milk crate. And Woody's like up inside of it. And so he puts the milk crate on top of the desk and puts the toolbox on top of it, which means Woody is trapped there. And Woody is trapped under there. And Buzz is a tape to the rocket. So they're both stuck.

It becomes a prison film pretty fully there. Yeah. I love how he's hiding at the top of the crate to not be found because he is the type. he is the type that Sid would love to explode first because he's the wimpy cowboy and shitty old cowboy toy and full of fun stuffing and parts

he'd be more fun to explode than a Buzz Lightyear I mean I like that Sid at first he's excited to get a Buzz Light Year he knows that that is a hot toy probably one his parents are going to buy him because they seem a little worse off

That's beer money Oh what is sad That's settlement money for Sid's dad The mom is there too though too. He has a more normal home of two parents instead of a single parent home like Andy. These weird Andy freaks.

I had a single mom. It's okay. Yeah, so we go back to Andy's and we see that Andy has cooled off a bit about Buzz, his Buzz mania, where they can't find Woody but all his mom found was his cowboy hat and he's clutching the hat as he goes to bed. So he misses both Woody and Buzz.

It's not just about Buzz, but he's like, I care about Woody too. He was briefly enchanted with Buzz because it was new. But he's like, no, these are my two favorite toys and I want them back. Bo Peep was right. It's, you know, the excitement is wearing off. He still loves Woody. It lets you know that he still loves Woody.

That's a good scene there, yeah. And it also goes straight from the happy, perfect child, Andy, sleeping in bed, all tucked in, to Sid asleep like a total dirt bag with his ass in the air. On top of the sheets. Yeah. Yeah, I like there's a literal ticking clock, which is like the alarm clock that's put down. It's like, in the morning I'm going to destroy both of you. Where the bell ringer is.

doll's arm, like, just to make it for... And again, if, from a toy's perspective, this is like being in the Texas chainsaw massacre house of, like, skin upholstery on the... Yeah, it's like a real Hannibal the Cannibal house or whatever. The, the doll's head floating in the lava

lamp, like, that's not kitsy to them. It's disgusting. Ed Gein or something. Yeah. Yeah, I wonder if I hope that dollhead is not alive or a sentience. What a horrible existence. But yeah, One of the things that took them a lot to figure out is, like, how does rain work in this world?

It took them a long time to figure out, like, how do we have, like, rain hitting the windows that cast, like, the rain effect on characters' faces? Because this next scene of Woody and Buzz, like, having a heart-to-heart is played against, like, the rain coming down. And it's very, very effective. So here is that very good scene. I can't help. I can't help anyone. Well, sure you can, Buzz. You can get me out of here.

And then I'll get that pocket off you, and we'll make a break for Andy's house. Andy's house, Sid's house. What's the difference? Oh, boss, you've had a big fault. You must not be thinking clearly. No, Woody, for the first time I am thinking clearly. You were right all along. I'm not a space ranger. I'm just a toy, a stupid little insignificant toy. Whoa, hey, wait a minute. Being a toy is a lot better than being a space ranger. Yeah, right. No, it is. Look, over in that house is a kid who thinks you are the greatest, and it's not because

you're a space ranger pal. It's because you're a toy. You are his toy. But why would Andy want me? Why would Andy want you? Look at you. You're a buzz light year. Any other toy would give up his moving parts just to be you. You've got wings. You glow in the dark. You talk. Your helmet does that, that, that, that, that, wish thing. You are a cool toy. As a matter of fact, you're too cool. I mean, I mean, what chance does a toy like me have against a Buzz light year action figure? All I can do is... It's a great silly line for that scene. It's the corneous thing he could say.

His fault could say. Yeah, this scene is so important. It's where they finally get past all their problems and, like, Woody can speak clearly to Buzz about what actually bothers him about Buzz and why he feels so envious of him. But in doing that, he lets Buzz know he's important, too. He's like, I'm envious to be because of this, but it's reinforcing the buzz. Like, yes, you're just a toy, but you are the best toy, and you're going to have the best toy life because you're the coolest toy.

But I like how it comes out like that. It's a very well-written scene. Yeah, it also is another thing when you think about how negative Woody seemed at one point. Woody's pride in being a toy is one of his most likable qualities. It makes him seem like a very self-sacrificing person. Like, he's always like, well, no, my kid. kids happiness is the most important thing to me. That's why I'm a toy.

Like, that's the pride I feel. That's what's important to him. Though he acts like those claw aliens are a cult. This is cult-like talk there's true. They worship at the feet of Andy. Great physical acting, too, on the way Woody struggles against the crate and how he's trying to do it by himself and he eventually realizes he can't. Yeah.

So, yeah, at this point, I mean, Woody has tried to abandon Buzz a bunch of times, but at this point he's like, you know what, just go on without me, save yourself. I deserve to be blown up. And he looks over his shoulder and he sees that Buzz is gone, but then we realize Buzz is on top of the milk crate, shoving off the Binford Tools from Home Improvement. Oh, I miss that. Wow. The Binford Tools Tool Chest.

Disney owns that too. They probably own it now. They probably already did. It was ABC. But one thing I like about that previous scene is that it's got to play Woody behind the milk crate trappings, and they have to convey a lot of information with that thing in front of him. So very hard to do with him basically like in prison, but even with more bars disguising his face. Yeah, you're right. That's why in most cartoons the bars are so big people can leave them. But in this case, it has to, it's just, but like they probably just scanned a real milk crate,

and so it has the real dimensions of a milk crate that are holding him in. Also, there's, I think the the thing he hides under is like an instruction manual for torture. Yeah, yeah, like improvise interrogation techniques or something like that. It's terrifying. He shouldn't, clearly, Sid didn't become a garbage man. He started working for the CIA. Exactly. I was told we have to respect them by some office guy.

Oh, yeah, no, they're important. Yes, every day I get up and I thank my CIA officers. They torture people, so I don't have to. Yeah, we all love coups. So, yes, when Buzz is shoving, the tool chest off of Woody, he sees the moving van is there. Like Andy's house is being packed up. They have to get out immediately.

Or else they'll be lost forever. Like they really will. They're the, again, ticking clock of when Sid wakes up, but also when the car is going to leave, the moving van. And that's also in this sequence where you see the matches in the background. Yeah. Which sets all those up to, which like I feel like too, and a more aggressive Disney a few years later would have said,

you can't show a kid playing with matches. No way. There's a fun joke later where it's like, Mom, where are the, oh, here are the matches. I found the matches. It's like, he's asking his mom, like, I want to play with matches.

Where are they? That's funny. We can see the permissive parenting happening. With this. That's key parents here, man. All the millennials went wrong. This is how it happened. Buzz keeps pushing the toolbox.

Woody escapes, but he keeps pushing the toolbox to the point where it falls on Woody. Yeah. And you have to pay attention. They make fun of it on the commentary. But like, Buzz is like against the wall.

pushing the toolbox, but he can like hyper extend to push it all the way out. So it's a huge cheat that they admit to. I didn't even notice that. That is pretty inconsistent, yeah. But this tool chest sitting in the ground is what wakes buzz up initially saying, you know, I want to ride the pony. So you were like, whoo, he's not awake. But then the alarm goes off.

And then it's like, yes, now it's time to die. There's so many great fakeouts too. Like I think I heard this is a cliche of storytelling writing, but I think I heard it about Pixar. I'm just like, a coincidence can't get your. characters out of danger, but it can't put them in more danger. I think that's a Dickens thing, where it's like, people will only buy coincidences if it's a negative for the character, not if it's a positive. Okay, I swear I heard that in a Pixar story rules thing as well. They stole from

Dickens. Yeah, they steal from the best. Yes. Or the longest. And it's one of those things too, where like the coincidence is they didn't wake him up, but then the alarm goes off at just that moment and he wakes up. So Sid wakes up. He grabs Buzz because he's going to send the spaceman into space. Woody's hiding into the toolbox. And Woody tries to run out the door, but then he realized, like, no, Scud is there. Like, I can't leave.

And this is when he gets the help of all the mutant toys. Guys! No, no, no, no. Wait, listen, please. There's a good toy down there. He's going to be blown to bits in a few minutes. All because of me. We've got to save him.

But I need your help. Please. He's my friend. he's the only one I've got. Break a few rules. It'll help everybody. So I left all the noises in because it's important to note that every one of these things makes a noise. Yeah.

It's just not a vocal noise. And we didn't talk about the sound design. Like with any animated movie, you have to think, like, what noises do all these characters make? Like, what he makes noise when he walks around or moves his arm, like buzz plastic? It creaks when he moves around. Like, so much thought is putting all this. We take it for granted. It's like, oh, yeah, it's just a thing moving around in 3D.

Yeah, it's, I mean, it's so. close to in 95, it felt so close to live action that you're just like, yeah, it's moving. It makes this noise. But it all makes sense. And like when there's one sound effect that I feel is off later in the film from this, it does really stand out to me because everything else is so well done. Well, there is the Wilhelm scream when Buzz goes at the window. I forgot about that.

Okay. So there's two. There's a Wilhelm scream, but also I'll just cut to it that the Woody, when he gets bit by Scud on it, there's a real like, just kind of like. just kind of like... Chomp. Well, actually, no, it's more like the stock like punch sound effect. Okay, interesting.

It's very plain and distracting. But, yeah, Woody has a great speech here. It's really shows what a boring leader he is. He's found himself again. He's now the boss or the manager of another room full of toy. That's true. Yeah, he's got to use his like managerial skills or leadership skills in this case to concoct the plan. I want to see that rule book again.

He says, we're going to have to break. a few rules. Like, all right, what are the rules? Tell me now. Which dark toy god wrote it, who's enforcing it? But yeah, so he can talk to a sort of great escape plan. And I guess this montage was set to the great escape music

from the original movie before Randy Newman came up with a sound alike, which I really like. It's like a very militaristic theme that evokes that movie. Oh, yeah, no, it is. I think that's better than Shrek would have just had the original music and just paid for it. And so...

Or it's a smash mouth cover. Smash others just like Dun dun dun Dund They just like Do it Acapella I guess I'm making Henry die over here But yeah

Woody we see the planning scene But we don't know what the plan is So Woody has like dominoes laid out on the ground That's like the land of the house And I like that we don't know what's happening Until it all happens Yeah yeah That way it's a surprise

Like if well if you ever get told a plan Before it happens in a movie Then you know something's gonna go wrong because you know what to expect. That's true, yeah. So the plan is this. It's a lot of action, but basically legs and ducky go up into the attic.

They've got to drop down, ring the doorbell, so Scud will run out, and they get rid of Scud that way. And while they're doing that, Woody and the rest of the toys open the door and then escape through the pet door

out into the backyard, and then legs and ducky and the frog all come out through like the rainpipe or whatever. Yeah, yeah. But also the frog, the frog leads him right outside. Oh, yeah.

The frog is the diversion. Apparently, Josh Whedon wrote the line, whined the frog, and they had to make a frog character because that was a very important line. It's funny. Also, Woody has the match put in his pocket there, too.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, so this happens next where Buzz is tied to the rocket. Sid is not there. Buzz sees Woody's like, oh, you're here to save me, Woody. That's so great. He's like, don't worry,

it's all going to go according to plan. Woody just goes limp. He knows what's going to happen now. Yeah, so this is when Sid sees Woody. It's like, we'll have a cookout later, throws him on the grill, puts a match in his holster, his gun-free holster. That's where the match goes. So good.

I feel like that's an accessory that was lost in time. Yeah, over the 50s and 60s. But this moment is so good of the match because I was starting to be a smart kid at this point about

where movies tell stories. And so I was thinking like, well, that match is going to do something later. I swear, I thought that. And so the way it pays off really is one of my favorite moments I've ever had in a movie theater. And I think a kid would do too. Like, I'm just going to stick this in here as a fun little accessory or whatever. But this is when Sid's brain is shattered by the reality that toys are alive and they're all watching you at all times.

Five, four, three, two. So much therapy after this. He's a broken child. Yeah. Like he's destroyed. His sister is a. able to bully him now, which, you know, it's a fine comeuppance, but you do feel a little bad for the kid, just a little, this little sociopath. I feel like in a less smart movie, this would

just be the end of the movie, like, oh, the villain's defeated, but I like how there's another problem after this. Not only do they have to get back to the van, they still think Woody is a villain. The toys still think Woody is the villain. Oh, yeah. There's still so much to get over there. Sorry, I still can't get over. Like, Woody's able to talk to him and nothing. happens. Like he's just he talks to the kid. He's going to go to Toy Hell when he dies. Maybe that is what happens when you bring that rule.

But the, oh God, the animation of the old ones coming out of the water, like living dead. So good. It was supposed to be them coming out of the ground, but apparently they just couldn't do it effectively. So that's why they built a trench full of water they could rise out of. Makes sense. I mean, you know, it was

rain in the night before. It's believable. No, that doesn't make sense. I'd even think of Yeah, that's like, again, another little plot thing where it's like, well, yeah, I could buy that because it was raining before. And we get to see the claw alien survived. He was buried under Scud's food dish there. Can't talk anymore because he's an undead toy, like the mutants. And what he's celebratory dance? Like, we did it. We did it. Very fun. Yeah. Apparently, there's a real quick goodbye because they've got to go, but originally there was not even a goodbye. It's like, we should have them say goodbye to the mutant toys. Oh, wow. That's cold. They didn't even say goodbye before.

But yeah, this is when all of the self-sacrifices happened where Woody and Buzz have to run. Buzz is caught because he's still got the rocket strapped to him. You can't make it through the fence. And he's like, just go on without me. I'll catch up. And Woody goes back for him. Which is really nice. Each of them does for the other in this sequence like, go on without me kind of moment.

They both do it. And neither accepts it. Like that is, I mean, that really makes you like these two characters so much that they start from such. a negative place and now they are like ready to sacrifice their lives for each other. It's really great. And it's a good moment where they watch the minivan drive away and like, oh, no, not again. Like, this is the second time this has happened to them. But then what saves them drives them drives up next past them. It's the moving truck. Like, we need to get on that truck. We still have a chance. So Buzz is the athlete. He makes it very easily onto the truck. But Woody has a very funny

flailing run just trying to grab onto the little, little strap on the truck. Love his floppy-ass run with his like flupy legs going everywhere. And that's what Scud spots them too, which like I gotta say living toys probably do look like the perfect play thing for a killer dog like Scott. And I like that he is still in the mix. Like you think at this point in the movie

well, he's taken care of. He's been locked out of the house. But because he was locked out of the house, this is why he's a new problem for the characters. You're right. See, it all works so perfectly. It's amazing. Like clockwork, just perfect.

So a lot of this is just stage direction. So we can just talk our way through this final action scene in the movie. Buzz jumps onto the string or the little flappy thing that hangs off the truck. Woody makes it. Scud then bites on the Woody's caught up. And basically, this is when Buzz sacrifices himself for Woody, he jumps on to Scud and snaps his eyelids very painfully to save Woody. He really pulls on those things like that.

That's one of the cartooniest effects in the movie is just how stretchy Scud's eyelashes are. It's a good way to stop that kind of a dog. And I like that Woody, he's on the truck. Buzz is back in the street. And Woody is a toy. He can't lift the whole thing of the truck up himself, the door. He lifts the latch up, and the truck comes to a stop, and the stop of the truck is what makes the thing go up.

Yeah, that really makes sense. That would make you go ch-chunk and undo the latch we're not seeing beneath it. A stupider movie would be like, no, he can just open the door. It's fine. But this movie thinks about, like, well, how would he open the door? How could this little toy

Who's probably as strong as a baby? So yeah, Woody enters the truck And the toys are confused to see him alive He's searching for something And they don't know what Until he pulls RC out of the truck And kicks him out of the back And Rex is like, he's at it again

I love that They think Woody's a serial killer Who's after all of them now That's one of the funniest scenes In the whole movie Because you're just thinking about it From their perspective They just saw Woody

Run into their moving van out of nowhere and just kick R.C. off of the moving van. Like that's so seemingly so cruel of him to do. But you can see it from Witte's side as well because he's like

there's no time to waste. I can't explain this. I've got to get R.C. over there now. And he activates RC to drive towards Buzz, to pick him up. And meanwhile, the toys are trying to get him and throw him out of the truck for like killing another toy seemingly. The one thing I think is a cheat. Like so much of this movie is

thought out and quote unquote logical. The one tiny thing I don't like, it's always bothered me, is that when the toys like pick up Woody and spin him around, it also spins the car around, which is like, nah, it doesn't really work. That's rather cartoony. Or like when Ham jumps on Woody, the car also bounces in the air. There's no jump command on the, oh, somebody got fired for a flounder. Yeah, it feels like they think about so much in this movie, like how does Woody open the

door that this little bit of non-logic does stand out. Yeah, yeah, I agree. But it's cute in the moment. It adds some levity to this very intense scene. And basically Scud is disposed of, or I guess like just stop because Buzz drives through an intersection and Scud follows him. But all these cars like crash in a circle to stop Scud. So Scud is not killed by a car. Yeah, I remember in the theater being really scared as a kid like, are they really going to run over this dog?

I know he's not a nice dog, but he doesn't deserve it. to be run over. Fortunately, no, he just gets penned in. And that is the last we see of him, though. And we do see, like, Potato Head is the new leader where he's like, throw him overboard. Oh, that's so good. Yeah. He's, he's leading the mob now. He's finally got the leadership position he wanted. He'll never suffer for this, though. He's going to be a, well, he gets a physical comeuppance at the end of this scene. That is true. That is true. Yeah. He's a real fascistic leader, I'll say. That's for sure. So, Woody falls into the road. And, uh, he's a real, he falls into the road. And, uh, he's true. That is true. That is true. He's a real, he's a real strong man. Woodie falls into the road and you think all is lost for him, but then Buzz comes up behind him and just picks him up with the car. So they're both riding the car together after the moving van. And this is when all the toys realize they're both okay.

Guys, guys, Woody's riding Aussie! What have we done? Great. Now I have guilt. Big laugh in the theater. Now I have guilt. I have guilt. His nebishiness is so funny. And yeah, they finally, you get to see the look on Potato Head's face like, oh, I think maybe this is when he realized, like, I went too far. I'm sorry. In this rush for power,

I forgot my loved ones. Oh, also, I think that the strong doll that like spins him around and opens the ramp thing. He's got a name. I think his name is Rock, like Rocky Mountain, is the name of the character. Okay, well, what he reminds me of is, you remember

in the 90s, when troll dolls, they tried to make him tough for boys. Oh, like Jewel. Jewel protector. Oh, stone protectors. That sounds like a protective guard for your testicles. Oh, man, you've ruined these toys for me. Well, those were never good.

They tried to turn trolls and a ninja turtles, which is a real problem there. They try. But there's real troll dolls in this movie. Yeah, yeah. Very briefly, I like, and they say on the commentary, even like, it's cool how there's a mix of their fake toys and also real toys, which the fake toys would become real toys because of this movie. It's far more popular than a troll doll. Oh, yeah, screw those things. such as awful hair.

So they basically drop the ramp of the truck. They know moving trucks work. They drop the ramp. I like how it drops down. You think, okay, cool. They're fine. Then it unfolds. And they're kind of screwed.

But Slinky goes out on the ramp. And there's a really cool scene coming up next where Slinky is holding on and they're running out of batteries and they're like swerving back and forth on the road. And there's a nice little comedy cut that was a big laugh in the theater. They cut into the inside of the car. Very serene driving with Akuna Matata because every little millennial baby is listening to that on the radio at the time. And Molly sees it, but nobody else does.

So she's, and she's going to keep that to herself. But yeah, the use of Akuna Matata there was so funny. It still is very funny. And it really sets you in 1995, that's for sure. So yes, Slinky cannot hold on. He flies backwards and Woody and Buzz and R.C. are caught in the road. Yeah, so I will say with Slinky, the damage he takes would be junked from this.

Like, I've had Slinkies that I've been. barely stretched out. They're garbage after that. Slinkies are not tough toys. Yeah, that is one of the more unbelievable things about this movie. Actually, in the extras, he was still alive at the time.

Roy Disney is one of the talking heads for like the legacy of Toy Story short on the DVD, and he was just like, you know, I always wondered if that poor little dog was going to be okay after they stretched him out so much. Oh, yeah. So sweet, sweet Roy Disney. Yes, so yes, they're in

the middle of the road, but then they realize that there is a rocket that can save them. Woody, the rocket, the match. Yes. Thank you, Sid.

So I wanted to point out that you said that when you saw the match, you knew, like, oh, he can light the rocket. They put that in there to be like, you think you're clever, don't you? Yes. And that's why they have the car blow out the match. Like, now how they're going to do it,

a tough guy, or smart guy, now how are they going to get back? So, yeah, that moment, is in this movie just to mess with people who thought, well, that's an easy answer out of this problem. Yeah. It's the level of smartness there really got me as a kid. Like that, I just gasped in the audience.

Like, wait, you set up this easy thing that you had to match the whole time. To take that away was such a, you know, clever, just incredibly clever, brilliant moment. Like, I love that. And that then the whole torture scene that Woody went through with the magnified. glass, even that pays off. It wasn't just a joke. You have to pretend that Buzz's helmet is made out of glass, though, because plastic won't do that. But let's find out what happens next. No, no. The physics on Woody's face is the rocket launches and is flapping his face around. That's so good. That, uh, the guy who built

some of the models on the commentary. So he like built the Woody model and a few other models in the movies. Like, I didn't know the model could do that. Like the flapping face of Woody is so hilarious, but so well done again. You go into this movie thinking, well, CGI is very stiff. Technically impressive, but it doesn't really move very well, but this really defies those ideas, conventional ideas. Yeah, yeah. And man,

the artistry to get that thing to do what it can't do or shouldn't be able to do, to wiggle like real flesh is being blasted around by the Air Force. It's so good. And one thing I noticed upon this viewing, the past

three viewings I did in the past 48 hours, is that when R.C. is stuck in the middle of the road when they lose Slinky and are just stuck there before they light the rocket, Buzz has the control in his hand. He puts it down. That control is gone forever. So when R.C. makes it back and he's going to be like, oh, we lost the control. Well, you go in the garbage now. So he's condemned to death. You can hope that he ordered a new controller. Yeah. But probably at worst, at best, he's at the bottom of the toy chest from now on because he can't be controlled anymore. You can't play with that thing anymore.

Yeah, you kind of have to forget about that. But I do love when they're flying up, this was the physical comeuppance for Potato Head that he gets smashed by RC. Yeah, and I like that they wrap up that loose out. Like, what happens to the car? Well, Woody, like, drops him into the van as they blast off into the air. Yeah, so he's safe. But, yeah, the Potato Head still gets some comeuppance for trying to kill Woody.

It's only fair. Yes. But finally, we have a return. of the line falling with style and I like how... I was jumping out of my seat as a kid in the theater in this moment here.

And they defy your expectations where you're like well they'll get it back to the movie fan right? No, even better. They make it even further. Stop! Not today. This is falling with style.

Ah, we miss the truck. We're not aiming for the truck. Great, you found them. Now, what did I tell you right where you left him? That's a great mom acting of like, see, I told you, right? Where you left?

Very supportive, but know-it-all mom. Yes. Well, she does know it all. She's a mom. But yeah, I like how the irony of like, oh, they never left. They've been here all the time. It's like, the journey they took to get here was so epic. The audience knows, but the mom's like, they were just always there. Yeah, they don't even realize how much pain they went through just to get back into there. And it's really cool how the reversal of the lines where Buzz says this isn't flying. It's falling with style. And then Woody says to infinity and beyond, which is great.

He just embraces like, I'm flying. This is awesome. Like Woody does think he's flying. It's now just the reverse of the things like, Buzz, you're flying. No, I'm not. Like that just, God. So, so smart. Like when Woody says to infinity and beyond, it's meant to be cheered at.

Yeah. I definitely cheered in his 13-year-old seeing this the first time. It was a triumphant moment. and then we smash cut from them winking at each other in the car to Christmas at the new house. And I love there's giggles on the commentary when they're pulling into the new house through the window. Like, that's not a real set. We fooled you. Like, they didn't build a new house exterior for one shot.

That's funny. Yeah, it's just like, it might be like an illustration or, you know, just a flat image that they're pulling into. I mean, the interiors are real, but the outside of the house is not. That's clear. I had no clue. Yeah. And I think we like zoom into like. the living room into a reflection of the bulb.

Don't we do that? Yeah. Into the, well, because you barely, if you want to look right at it, you can see Andy's mom's face clearly in this shot, but they're really putting her like up in the corner.

And then it cuts straight to the tree and seeing them in the reflection of the red ornament. Yeah, and the army men are there doing their recon duty as normal. It's Christmas time. And they're doing the same thing they did in the beginning of the movie, you know, finding out what Andy's getting for Christmas.

And when they cut back to Andy's room, apparently there was going to be a scene of like a Christmas party with the toys, like having an office Christmas party. And that's why it looks like Mr. Potato Head is singing into the microphone. There's going to be a karaoke scene with him in it. So the remnant of that karaoke scene can be seen as we cut into the room. And it's a nice, they don't dwell on it or point it out. But like if you look at Andy's room now,

it's a mix of Buzz Lightyear and Woody stuff, especially the bed has a mix of like the old, bed, the old bed sheets and the new bed stuff. Yeah, I just noticed that on this viewing. I thought that was something they'd made up for the second toy story movie where you'd see that he has a mix of love for both of them. I'd also, well, when you say office Christmas party vibe to it, that also makes Bo Peep's move feel like the office Christmas party thing like, hey, we're under the

mistletoe kind of thing. That's what you would see in an office sitcom, including the office, on a Christmas episode. All the kisses come out. No one's photocopying their butt, though, at this Christmas party. But where, I mean, so they kiss, what more can those two characters do? I wonder, and how does she leave lipstick on his face? Yeah, that's another big question, yeah. But with this final clip, we find out what could be the setup for a new movie, but ultimately really wasn't.

Maybe Andy'll get another dinosaur, like a leaf eater. That way I could play the dominant predator. Quiet, everyone, quiet. Holly's first present is. Way to go, Idaho. Gee, I bet it a shame. Bressin'clock. Buzz, Buzz, Light you are not worried, are you?

Me? No, no, no, no, no. Now, Buzz, what could Andy possibly get that is worse than you? That's the end of the movie where you watched the second movie, you find out the puppy is not an issue. They've tamed the dog. It's now like their friend. Well, it's a little schnauzer, too. A little weiner dog. Like, it's not going to cause any problems.

But you could think, like, that, them thinking ahead, like, well, what could the premise of the second movie be? What's it like to be a toy in a house with a pet? Like, we explored part of that with Scud, who was like an evil dog. What if there was a nice dog? Like, how do they live with it? But it turned out to be a very small element of the movie. Basically, they use just to show up fur technology.

Like, look, we can make a dog. We look more real now. Oh, man. And in three, when you see the old dog. That poor. that poor old bastard. Oh, the poor, he's been tortured by toys for so long. The things he's seen.

I also, yeah, the way to go, Idaho, that's a good chance to. Yeah. I guess it basically, he is now married, like, instantly married when Mrs. Potato Head shows up because it's Mr. and Mrs. and Mrs. Yeah, that does pay off in the second movie, the Mrs. Potato Head. Did you have the spud toys, his rest of his family? I had a couple of his kids. Oh, I think my sister might have had that. Okay. I had a couple because I think they were like in a Wendy's Kids Meal thing.

That's probably how I got them, yeah. Or she got them. Man, the Kids Meal stuff, that was, that's again, that is the best Toy Story short is the Small Fry one where they, where Buzz is replaced by a McDonald's Happy Meal Toy version of Buzz. There's a ton of those on Disney Plus now, like including specials I haven't seen with starring like Bill Hanks and Flim Allen or whatever. They're really great. Yeah, I've heard they're good. The quality sticks around, but small fries the best of them. Just because it's a series of jokes about Happy Meal Toys, and I love Happy Meal Toys so much. But I think they added this, made the epilogue Christmas, so they'd have a Christmas sequence they

could use in commercials for the Christmas season. Yeah. It's also a nice, like, resetting of things, like a nice scene to come down with where it's just like, well, here is the new status quo for the characters. And even Andy's okay now. And I guess it's also the next time. he'd be given gifts, so it makes sense to go to Christmas. Yeah, yeah. But good timing for this time of the year.

We're doing this podcast. We're all on the Christmas spirit. I'm ready to go home and make a quaint Thanksgiving dinner for myself. Me too. I'm going to air fry me some turkey. Ooh, you can do that now. It's legal. But yeah, thank you to Henry for suffering through this.

He's had a cold. And there will be a lot of coughs edited out of this podcast. But Henry's working hard for all of you out there. And yeah, this movie, God, again, I watched it three. times in the past, I don't know, three or four days. And it's still so good. Like, even when I thought, like, I'll just leave the commentary on and listen to it, I was still watching the movie. I couldn't turn myself away. But like, it's so compelling. And I just have a greater appreciation for the script now that I've studied film so much and have written so much. And even exploring it now

through this podcast, I'm realizing, oh, this pays off too. And this and this and this. Like, there's so much at work here. And they worked so hard to make this for a CGI movie a thing. They couldn't have it fail. Yeah, to dissect it this much like it, you, you just see the care in every element of it. And it's just like, it's an exciting movie that's always fun to watch. Even if you're, you know, I'm not just talking about watching it from, you know, you mentioned it before, the Robert McKee bullshit kind of way of like, Bob Mackey? Yeah. Oh, yeah. But I, but I do like watching it just as an experience. Like, it's always just such a fun story. And I think the, you compare it to contemporaries of the time. Like,

answer Shrek or any of those other ones. There's no comparison. Toy Story was very successful, partially because of the sheen of the CGI, but it told a great story, too, an incredible story that they worked really hard to do, which I think too many CGI films after were like, well, no, we just need the glean of CGI.

We don't need a story. Get a little of these ants. There's so many of them. Can you imagine all of these ants in one place and what if they kind of look like Sylvester Stallone? And Woody Allen. Sharon Stone. That's right. The other ant movie had Julie Louie Drefer. Again, that's what happens when you get Katzenberg on a free reign.

Yeah, I'm going to make my own aunt movie. You'll see. And I'll get it out before your amp movie. Yeah, this movie was meant to be sold on the shininess and, you know, newness of the CGI. But 25 years later, I can still watch it over and over again and not be like, well, this looks like crap. Or this could be better. Like I just watched 15 minutes of the new toy store And a very nice TV And I immediately jumped into this

And I'm like well I could still watch this It's great and it has outlived the You know the older technology for sure For sure yeah So yes this has been another What a cartoon movie We hope you really enjoyed and have a great Post Thanksgiving

We're posting this right after So hopefully you're still coming down From Turkey Time Or maybe you listen to this after this But we really appreciate all of your patronage We couldn't do this without you And if you're listening to this You're a high bitter, high spender

very generous person and we love revisiting these movies just for you. Yes, thank you so much for supporting us and this is our 13th one. This marks a year of doing what a cartoon movie. Can you believe it? It's been a year since we recorded the Batman Mask of the Fantas. I can't believe it's taken us a year to get to Pixar

but now I really want to jump into more and hopefully we'll get to do Toy Story 2 sometime this year. That'd be fun. Yeah, I look forward to that in 2020 for sure. But in our December 1's kind of, coming up soon. I have an idea of what I'd like to do, but I'll throw it out to the audience then. Stay tuned. Yes.

So yeah, thanks so much for listening, folks, and we'll see you next month for a new, what a cartoon movie. Thanks a lot.