Inside the Lost Version of Toy Story

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Besides being a great film in and of itself, Toy Story is the first ever computer animated feature film, spawning a whole new industry of digital animation and paving the way for numerous beloved movies to follow. And while Toy Story's success seems like a foregone conclusion looking back, at the time it was an incredibly risky venture, and had the movie failed, it could have halted the development of computer animated films. In fact, this almost happened, as Toy Story started out as a very different movie, featuring Woody as a mean-spirited ventriloquist dummy, Buzz as a bumbling astronaut named Lunar Larry, and the movie was almost a musical, like Disney's other hits at the time, Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin. So let's dive in and find out what happened behind the scenes, as well as take a look at what could have been Toy Story. When George Lucas began the ambitious task of bringing Star Wars to life, he famously founded an entire visual effects studio, Industrial Light & Magic, to create the numerous effect shots needed for the film. And while his team invented new techniques and technologies, unfortunately a lot of that work was incredibly tedious, such as the laborious process of tracing over live-action footage, frame by frame, to create the glowing effect around the lightsabers, or building and then shooting each miniature spaceship separately, before compositing them together manually to create the space dogfights during the Death Star trench run. However, Lucas wondered if using computers could streamline the process, reducing the time, labor, and money it took to produce these effects. For The Empire Strikes Back, he'd meet with a company called Triple I, who created a fully computer-generated test of X-wing fighters flying in formation. And while Lucas felt the technology wasn't advanced enough to achieve the level of realism he needed for the film, ultimately deciding to stick with practical effects, he was convinced of the future potential of the technology, and decided to start a computer division of his own at Lucasfilm. To run it, he'd recruit a group of computer scientists from the computer graphics lab at the New York Institute of Technology, who all had a shared dream of creating the world's first computer animated feature film. Meanwhile, Triple I would go on to create computer animated effects shots for Walt Disney's Tron, opening then-Walt Disney animator and future Toy Story director John Lasseter to the possibilities offered by the emerging technology. From here, Lasseter would be inspired to make an animated feature film of The Brave Little Toaster, but used backgrounds that were entirely computer animated, and chose to do a short test film of Where the Wild Things Are to convince the higher-ups at Disney to move forward with his plan. Unfortunately for Lasseter, he unknowingly circumvented one of his direct superiors in his effort to get the short test film made, angering them and ultimately resulting in his termination. He'd quickly land on his feet, however, at Lucasfilm's computer animation division. As the team began planning a short film cartoon called The Adventures of Andre and Wally B, Lasseter intended to do the same thing he did with his Where the Wild Things Are test and computer animate the backgrounds, while traditionally animating the characters by hand. However, Ed Catmull, the leader of the group and co-founder of Pixar, challenged Lasseter to animate the entire thing by computer. The result would be groundbreaking, as it proved that computer animation could be used to create an entire film. Following this, Lasseter and the Pixar team began working on visual effects sequences with ILM, where on young Sherlock Holmes, they made the first computer-generated photorealistic animated character, that being a knight composed of elements from a stained-glass window. Unfortunately, following George Lucas' divorce after Return of the Jedi, the Pixar team worried that Lucas would sell off the division as he was in need of money, since he refused to give his ex-wife any of his companies, opting instead to give her cash. Determined to stay together in order to create the first-ever computer animated movie, the Pixar team convinced Lucas to spin off the division into its own company. To finance it, Lucas immediately began looking for investors. Enter Steve Jobs, who had just left Apple and fell in love with Pixar, who were combining art and technology, which was his ethos at Apple. However, Jobs wasn't interested in investing in the company. Instead, he wanted to buy it. And while his offer was well below what Lucas was asking, Lucas ultimately had no choice but to sell due to his divorce. Jobs' goal, however, wasn't to make movies, but to sell Pixar's image computer and their software to a mass market. But to show off what their hardware and software could do, Lasseter would produce computer-animated short films. One of them would be called Luxo Jr., based on the Luxo lamp Lasseter had on his desk, which would eventually become the Pixar mascot. Luxo Jr. would screen that SIGGRAPH, an annual computer graphics conference, to a standing ovation and eventually be nominated for an Oscar, which convinced Jobs to make new animated shorts each year. Unfortunately, Pixar was losing money, forcing Jobs to continuously put his own money into the company to keep it afloat. Things got so bad by 1988 that Jobs was forced to make deep spending cuts and layoffs as the company teetered on collapse. Despite this, Lasseter still requested $300,000 for a short film, leading a skeptical Jobs to ask if there were storyboards he could see first. Lasseter would then walk Jobs through a film about classic toys, told from the perspective of a one-man band toy named Tinny, who meets a baby that terrorizes him. Jobs would agree to finance the short despite the company's financial struggles. The short film, Tin Toy, would go on to win an Oscar for Best Animated Short, the first computer-generated film to do so, establishing computer animation as a legitimate artistic medium. Meanwhile, over at Disney, new CEO Michael Eisner and head of the film division Jeffrey Katzenberg wanted to revive the company's once-great-but-now-fading animation department. After seeing Tin Toy, they began trying to recruit Lasseter to come back to Disney as a director. However, Lasseter, now loyal to Jobs, who had believed in him when nobody else did, refused, leading Eisner to engage Pixar to make a computer-animated feature film for Disney instead, which Katzenberg would oversee. The original pitch for Toy Story featured Tinny, the wind-up one-man band toy from the Tin Toy short film, on a family vacation with his owner that sees Tinny get lost at a rest stop. From here, he'd be found by a junk man who puts Tinny up for auction, where he meets and is sold with an old ventriloquist dummy, who both hope to be bought by a child so that they can be played with, but are instead bought by a collector, who takes them home and places them in glass cases along with other toys. Together, the toys decide to escape, and after a series of adventures, they end up at a preschool, which to them is like toy heaven, because it's a place where they'll never get lost and never get outgrown, as every year new kids will come in and play with them. If any of that sounds familiar, it's because several of those ideas would end up being reused for future Toy Story films, like Al the Collector in Toy Story 2 or The Daycare in Toy Story 3. As for why this story wasn't used for Toy Story 1, it's because Disney's Jeffrey Katzenberg didn't like it, complaining that the two main characters' motivations were too similar, that being their shared desire not to be abandoned or forgotten, and to be played with by children. Instead, Katzenberg suggested that they rewrite the movie as an odd-couple buddy film, and give the two main characters contrasting personalities. The revised pitch would more closely resemble the finished film, as it would be about a boy getting Tinny for his birthday, which replaces a ventriloquist dummy as a child's favorite toy. However, there was one major problem. It didn't make sense that an old-fashioned Tin toy would become a kid's new favorite toy, forcing the team to come up with a toy that any boy would just die to have. And while a military action figure like G.I. Joe was initially considered, they ultimately settled on a space theme, calling the character Lunar Larry. But after a while, they felt it sounded too wacky, so the name was changed to Tempest from Morph. But that was even worse. Eventually, since it was a space toy, the writers would take inspiration from the second man to walk on the moon, astronaut Buzz Aldrin, and renamed the character to Buzz Lightyear. At this stage, Buzz's personality was radically different and more like Dudley Do-Right, a dim-witted but cheerful, heroic-like superhero who knew he was a toy, just like everyone else. It was Joss Whedon, however, who was brought in to help rewrite this script, that came up with the brilliant idea to make Buzz an action figure who isn't aware that he's a toy, and who takes his job as an intergalactic space ranger seriously. To voice Buzz, Pixar would approach Billy Crystal, but he'd turn them down, believing the film wouldn't be a hit due to its use of computer animation, which was still in its infancy. After seeing the finished movie, however, Crystal would call it the biggest mistake of his career. Regardless, Crystal felt he would not have been right as Buzz anyway, and that Tim Allen, who had come to voice the character, was fantastic. Crystal would later rectify his mistake of turning down Toy Story by voicing Mike Wazowski in Monsters, Inc. The change from Tin Toy to Buzz would also have an effect on Pizza Planet, which had originally been envisioned as a miniature golf pizza place called Pizza Putt. But with Buzz's strong desire to get home, it made sense to turn Pizza Putt into something that resembled a spaceport, which also led to the creation of the Crane Game with the now iconic Little Green Men. For the ventriloquist dummy, it had evolved to look old-fashioned with a top hat and tails, so that it wouldn't look like a kid's favorite toy. Lassiter also gave it a pull string after being inspired by a Casper the Friendly Ghost doll that he had when he was a child. However, character designer Bud Lucky suggested that Woody should be changed to a cowboy, which Lassiter loved because of the contrast between Buzz, the new toy, representing the future and the frontier of space, and Woody, the old toy, representing the Old West, or the past. However, he remained a ventriloquist dummy for some time, and towered over Buzz, whose character model was considerably smaller, and also red, instead of his now iconic white, purple, and green. Woody's characterization was also written more like a classic cowboy. Eventually, they ditched the ventriloquist dummy aspect of the character, as they felt Woody looked sneaky and mean, while Buzz was given a green and purple color scheme after Lassiter and his wife's favorite colors. Due to the success of recent Disney animated hits like The Little Mermaid and Aladdin, that featured several Broadway-style musical numbers, Disney wanted Toy Story to be a musical too. However, both Lassiter and Whedon were against this, with Whedon saying, "It would have been a really bad musical, because it's a buddy movie about people who won't admit what they want, much less sing about it." As a compromise, the animators agreed that although the characters wouldn't sing, the movie would feature non-diegetic songs that the characters would not be able to hear, but the audience would, with each one being about the emotion of the characters at that moment in the film. Besides the now-famous "You got a friend in me" that's played during the opening credits to establish the bond between Andy and Woody, another song that was written for the film that would be used to brilliant effect was during the sequence where Buzz finally learns that he's a toy, which would be set to Randy Newman's emotional ballad, "I will go sailing no more," perfectly capturing Buzz's devastation and disillusionment. Writer Joss Whedon also wanted to include Barbie in the film's final act, and have the doll swoop in and save both Woody and Buzz from Cid. However, Mattel objected to the idea and refused to license Barbie for the film, believing that girls who played with Barbie projected their own personalities onto the doll, and thus worried that if you give Barbie a voice and animator, you'd be creating a persona that might not align with every little girl's dreams and desires. Obviously, after the film's enormous success, Mattel seemed more than willing to license the character for inclusion in the sequel. Pixar, however, would run into the same problem with Hasbro, as the animators wanted to feature a G.I. Joe in the movie too. But after Hasbro discovered that Cid was going to blow it up, they refused, leading the animators to pivot and change the toy to the fictional combat Carl instead. The movie originally opened with Andy and Woody watching a cartoon of the Buzz Lightyear TV show. However, the team worried that since the cartoon was so incredible, it wouldn't be believable that Woody was Andy's favorite toy. As a result, the opening would be reworked to show Andy playing with his toys. However, the original opening would be repurposed for the opening to the sequel, with the Buzz Lightyear cartoon being changed into a Buzz Lightyear video game. In return for financing Toy Story, Disney had creative control over the project, which made sense considering at this point, Lasseter had no experience writing feature films, and Disney had a track record of producing hits going back to 1937. Jeffrey Katzenberg, who was overseeing the film on Disney's side, would reject most of Pixar's notes and ideas during storyboard sessions, and instead give his own extensive notes, famously saying of his role in the creative process, "I may be a tyrant, but I'm usually right." However, in this case, Katzenberg was wrong, and almost destroyed the movie. In an effort to make it appeal to not only children, but adults too, he kept pushing for the film to have more edge, which resulted in Woody's character becoming meaner, and more jealous and unlikable with each new revision to the script. It got so bad that even Tom Hanks remarked that the character had been made into a real jerk. For example, in this version of the film, Woody throws Buzz out the window, whereas in the final version he falls out by accident, when Woody tries to just knock him behind the desk. Not only that, but when the toys confront Woody afterwards, he blows them off, and remarks that it's a toy-eat-toy world, before yelling at Slinky to get the other toys off the bed, and berating him when he doesn't. Eventually, the other toys stand up to Woody and throw him out the window too. In what would become known as Black Friday, Pixar would screen the first half of the film for Disney, who hated what they saw so much that they halted production. Afterwards, Katzenberg asked a colleague why the movie was so bad, leading his colleague to remind him that it wasn't the movie Lasseter had set out to make, subtly suggesting that Katzenberg's meddling was to blame. While Disney tried forcing Pixar to lay off a significant portion of their staff and take over the film, Pixar refused, and kicked Katzenberg out of the creative process, so that they could take a few weeks to rework the script. While Steve Jobs financed their efforts with his own money, since Disney had halted production. The result was a film much closer to the final version we all know, but there were still some differences. A cut from the film was a scene of Sid torturing Buzz, by spinning him around on an electric drill, as well as an extended scene of Sid interrogating Woody, before smacking him across the room. The editor on the film felt audiences would love Woody and Buzz so much by this point in the film, that they would hate seeing the toys treated like this, and so he cut the scene. Also different was Buzz's famous line, "This isn't flying, it's falling, with style." Which originally was, "Technically it's gliding, but let's not ruin the moment." Until writer Pete Docter piped up, "Shouldn't he say it's falling with style?" Leading Lasseter's face to light up, and ordering a quick last minute re-record of the dialogue. And finally, the ending was slightly different too, with the film closing on an exterior shot of Andy's house to the sound of a new puppy. This ending, however, fell flat with test audiences, so Disney CEO Michael Eisner suggested to Lasseter that the film should end with a shot of Woody and Buzz together, reacting in shock to the news of Andy's new puppy. While the film was being made, Jobs considered selling Pixar, considering the company had been losing money since he bought it, combined with the fact that he had invested a small fortune into it to keep it afloat. But after watching Lasseter and the team's vision for the film come to life, it made him realize that Pixar was on the verge of transforming the film industry. Not only that, but eager not to have to rely on Disney to finance their future films, Jobs decided to take Pixar public one week after Toy Story premiered, gambling that the film would be a hit, which it was, making Jobs a billionaire. Still, almost none of this ever happened, as not only was Pixar close to shutting its doors numerous times over the years, but Toy Story almost turned out as a very different movie, which likely wouldn't have been as successful as the one we got, nor led to the creation of countless computer-animated films that have followed. Thanks for watching everybody, and don't forget to like and subscribe to Bullets and Blockbusters for more great content.