It’s 2020. Of course the cute talking toys you love from those animated movies can die. Stop asking if things can be worse because they can and will be worse. All the bad things can happen and are happening right now, including the revelation that Buzz and Woody and the rest of the Toy Story gang possess the same fickle and flimsy mortality as everyone else. This news comes to us from Twitter, the actual Bad Place, where Toy Story 3 director and noted sadist Lee Unkrich—whose optimism, like ours, has been completely eviscerated in quarantine—confirmed the very worst fears of every person who’s seen a Toy Story: Those toys can fucking DIE, man.
Over the weekend, a Twitter user who goes by the name of “mustard clown” (tell me more) tweeted that he and his girlfriend were having an argument over the mortality of the toys in Toy Story. “mustard clown” says he thinks they’re immortal, while his girlfriend (ketchup… puppet?) thinks they can die. The question sparked an interesting conversation in which Twitter users ruminated on horrific existential concepts like what happens when you dismember a toy, or if you take two of them apart and fuse them together—like Sid did in the first Toy Story. Some users posited a terrifying reality in which the toys can undergo traumatic physical transformations and feel pain, but are ultimately immortal, so even if you melted one a whole bunch, it still has a soul but it just can’t move around anymore. Or something.
This is where Unkrich comes in. He’s an authority on the subject, given that he directed Toy Story 3—which features a climactic scene where the toys come face to face with a trash incinerator. Buzz and Woody, et al., are visibly terrified, signaling to the audience that, oh shit, these guys MIGHT ACTUALLY DIE?!!??! Turns out those fears are very much founded:
So what Lee Unkrich is saying here is that anyone with the right attitude and a little elbow grease could kill a toy, if they tried hard enough and really wanted it. America!
93 Comments
I mean no shit. It was the whole reason the end of Toy Story 3 was so terrifying.
“Don’t worry! Don’t worry! Maybe they’re all still alive and just like…a big…multisentient ball of melted-together arms and legs!”
Getting melted didn’t slow Chucky down!
Even getting rebooted didn’t slow him down. That doll has moxie, I must say!
poor box office returns were the only thing that could kill him
“wE arE AndY;s plAYthinG”
Didn’t Harlan Ellison write that story?
Arnt Jensen, actually.
I Have No Pullstring and I Must Scream
Love. I can’t begin to tell you how much I love kids.
There’s a whole arc of Steven Universe about that.
The implication that the Toy Story movies and the video game Inside might have a connected universe really was the last thing I was expecting 2020 would throw at me.
it’s ALL inside the extended Tarantino universe too
I’d be more terrified if I couldn’t die, experiencing the full pain of being incinerated followed by an endless existence as a lump of molten plastic.
“Buzz? Buzz buddy? I can’t see! What’s going on?”“Shh, shh Woody. This is just the last sparking fragment of your individual consciousness spasming before you melt into the collective mind you now share with us. The rest of us have already transcended. There is no Buzz. There is no Potato Head. We are now simply the Toy.”“I don’t understand any of this Buzz. I’m so cold, Buzz. So … cold …”
Ah, Toy Story 3, the film that my friend Paul and I were in tears because of, while his two kids (aged 4 and 6) looked at us in a bemused fashion.
One of my friends describes Toy Story 3 as the film where all the kids were looking around the theater and thinking “Who broke the adults?”
Watch it again when your kids are teenagers.
Because you know Disney does have a tendency of wiping out full casts of characters in it’s animated movies.
I’m more terrified that there’s a Toy Story 3.
Toy Story 3 made it all pretty clear they were all very scared and sad which would imply death. Although they can survive dismemberment it seems.
But they also, at least momentarily, feel pain.What I found most interesting, though, was stuff like RC. Who was clearly battery operated, but still lived even after his batteries had died.But he couldn’t move.Which would be the real hell if you consider how many of us as kids had battery operated toys that we just dumped in a corner somewhere and after a while never went back to.
Lou Gehrig’s disease for toys? That’s just sadistic.
We all know Rosebud turned out to be a sled. But what this article posits is that the sled actually represents Charles Kane’s lost childhood innocence. The twenty-eight-minute youtube video goes in depth to back up this notion with several carefully hidden easter eggs which unintentionally confirm this theory.Great Job Internet!
But can Rosebud die?
Say, in an incinerator? Game over.
More importantly, can Rosebud kill?Be right back, I have a horror movie script to write,
Someone has already made the poster for you.
Would you describe the 28-minute video as an “Oral History”?
Charles Kane isn’t a real person. The entire film is just a dream Rosebud the sled has while sitting, unsold and unloved in a dusty toy shop.
Actually the sled’s dream is also just a dream that Marion Davies’ vagina had.
Live your life, do your work, then take your hat.—Woody
Could God make a toy so invincible not even He could burn it up?
It’s called a Furby.
Satan made the Furby , not God.
Nah – Furby made Satan.
Hear me out:God is Satan.
Isn’t it that if they get caught out of place they get frozen forever? Or am I just thinking of the very similar The Christmas Toy?
You’re thinking of Christmas Toy. Woody reveals himself to Sid in the first one along with Sid’s mutant toys and they don’t freeze.
Yes, you’re right.
That is exactly the one I’m thinking of. And “frozen forever” sounded like the worst thing ever.
Sorry, it double posted for some reason
Sorry, it double posted for some reasonI know the reason.
They all died in the incinerator at the end of TS3. The rescue and reunion with Andy was a fever dream, exactly like the end of Brazil.
It explains the deleted scene where they are all brought together in a church and walk towards a white light
That’s when Macauley Culkin comes down and leads them up the stairs, right?
Descending in a magical ‘flying golden Lincoln Towncar, Culkin (now no longer wearing the nose prosthetic he wore earlier in life to confuse us) freezes the Nazis,rounds up a horde of homeless hippies found living in a park/cave and whisks them away to a magical planet where they will live with one less eventual James Bond villain trying to ruin their lives via the Eurovision Song Contest.You know, like you do.
Boooo, get Lost with that theory of yours.
Actually the whole trilogy occurs in the split second between when Buzz is knocked off the window sill and lands on the driveway. Working title, An Occurrence at Andy’s Room Window.
“…was a fever dream prior to the lobotomy, exactly like the end of cinema masterpiece Sucker Punch.”
Genuinely in awe of anyone who made it to the end of Sucker Punch.
Well, yeah. It happens early in the very first movie. The gang has a moment of silence for the Combat Carl that Sid blows up.
I’ve only seen the first one, but whenever I read any comments about “the incinerator scene,” I just assumed that they all died at the end. It didn’t make me any more likely to go check it out, but when I heard that 4 was announced, I was a little disappointed that Pixar didn’t stick to its guns and decided to retcon what had been a hardcore ending.
Like when Duke . . . went into a coma?
Good.
“It’s a Combat Carl…” (KABAMMM)
Pieces of Carl flying everywhere. Yeah, toys die…
There was an old Tales of the Crypt comic from the 1950s (maybe it was even made into an episode of the 1990s show but I read it in a reprint) in which a man is granted his wish to live forever. Shortly after the wish is granted he is attacked by an axe murderer who chops him into bits. At the end of the story you see all the bits are still alive and wriggling around.
That was one of the segments of the 1972 Tales from the Crypt movie.
Terry Pratchett did something even worse . In his book “FAUST Eric”.,the titular Eric wishes to live forever ,and in doing so gets sent back to the big bang as an immortal being* . If you want to live forever you need to have been around from the start of ‘ever…_________* he gets out of it though , as Pratchett wasn’t that cruel to his characters, well mostly.
Did he wear a giant purple headdress and have to eat planets for food?
There was a bit of that in Torchwood: Children of Earth as well.
The alternative to them being able to die is that after they fall apart and get thrown away, they are condemned to continue to exist pointlessly for all eternity: helpless, alone, forgotten. I think they’re better off mortal.
No they can’t, they’re fictional characters.
The dumbening continues.
“They live as long as they exist.” implies the worst of both worlds, in that the can die, but nothing short of complete annihilation (ie the incinerator) will do the job. This raises so many additional questions about the souls of Sid’s hybrids… are all of their component parts in there simultaneously as a plural system, or does a toy’s “life” coincide with their identity, so the fusion process kills its component parts and creates a new individual?
It’s my understanding that a hybrid would have a new life, soul, consciousness, whatever. It may be some kind of mix of its components, but it would still be its own personality.
But now I’m thinking about if a toy lost an arm or something and attached a different toy arm in its place. Does something like that happen in the movies? It’s been a while since I’ve watched them. I suppose it would make sense for it to still be the same toy, just with a prosthetic. So when would it be a different toy? Suddenly this is becoming a real head scratcher.
If we want to bring a little bit of Jung and Descartes into it, it sounds to me like a toy’s “life” is tied directly to their sense of self.“They live as long as they exist.”As long as a toy believes itself to ‘exist’, it lives. If a hybrid considers itself a new individual, it will become a new individual. A transplanted arm or leg won’t stop a toy from thinking “I am me”.
If we want to bring a little bit of Jung and Descartes into it, it
sounds to me like a toy’s “life” is tied directly to their sense of
self.
That’s why Toy Story 4 kinda helps but also simultaneously makes things really confusing.Forky is literally garbage that Bonnie glues together. But it gains sentience because Bonnie treats it as a toy.Which if you think about it for more than a few seconds starts to get reaaaallly weird with all the different arts and crafts projects kids make.
Yeah, I like that. It definitely simplifies everything.
Potato Head puts his parts onto a tortilla to get through some tight spots and doesn’t die, so who the hell knows.
I’d forgotten all about him until after I posted my comment. There was way too much to unpack, so I didn’t bother editing.But the original Mr. Potato Head toy was just the plug-in parts, so I guess it stands to reason that those would be what “make” him an individual.
The Toy Story world holds together better than Cars, but anything along these lines starts to present more questions than it answers once you start pulling on the string.
The perfect toy for Sid’s kids!Just for funsies
In this case, I’m a mass murderer because I’ve smashed so many hot wheels in my time, I could fill a jacuzzi with their mangled bodies.
Oh, also forgot about the stuffed animals my friends and I melted/burned in a fire pit for fun…. I guess we were a little sadistic as children.
I was hoping this would be a revelation of a more existential type of toy death. Like maybe after a long enough time of not being played with, the toy’s “soul” fades away and departs. If the toy is rediscovered and a new child plays with it again, the toy comes to life once more, but it will be a new individual, similar in some ways but distinct from the original inhabitant of the physical form.Also, “mustard clown”s girlfriend is clearly relish mime.
That’s what I assumed happened to Woody – a toy from a 1950’s television show is the favorite toy of a kid who wasn’t born until either the late 80s or early 90s. Woody never seems to remember having a kid prior to Andy, nor is he aware of his origin or associated toys until Toy Story 2, but yet we know he’s been around the entire time. So likely he was someone else’s toy (maybe Andy’s unseen dad) who, after living in a box for 40 years, was given new life with Andy.Compare that to Jessie, who clearly remembered her abandonment by Emily (even though it appeared to have been a while ago); perhaps she was simply not left alone for long enough for her soul to fade.
Also compare to Forky, a piece of trash made sentient when Bonnie named him and identified him as a toy. He didn’t have a soul as a plastic fork, but once he “was” a toy, he got one – theoretically if no longer seen by the universe/God as a toy (if dismembered into trash no child would want to play with), he would likely lose his soul and die. This is different from Sid’s toys, however, because even though he broke them and re-combined them into strange forms, he always saw them as toys.
Toy Story 5: Midsommar
He wears his mask and stays home to play with his toys
Who knew Sid would become such a paragon of civic responsibility 25 years after the fact?
Tangentially related: in the Cars universe, how exactly do cars die? We know Doc Hudson died between Cars 1 and 2, but… of what, exactly? Rust? Old age? An accident so horrific that he couldn’t be rebuilt like he was before? Are the rules for cars the same as they are for toys?
It wouldn’t be 2020 if we didn’t nail down every fucking detail of every fictional universe in every movie.It starts as a joke, then gets riffed on (because there’s nothing funnier than pretending you’re in an early Tarantino movie yakking about the rules of Scooby Doo). Then it gets REALLY over-discussed, then it gets contemplative, then it gets argumentative…. next thing you know there’s a goddamn “canon” wiki for Toy Story.
Did anyone involved in this Twitter discussion see any of the movies? Because it doesn’t sound like they did. The first one alone has dismemberment and fusing.
Everyone’s posting about the terror of dying for these toys. But he says they live as long as they exist. Imagine a toy being lost in some location they will never be found and can’t get out of themselves. Stuck eternally.I had already assumed they were immortal as long as they weren’t destroyed. My wild imaginings included the above scenario and also some more science fiction-y takes, like one where the toys outlive humanity and inherit the Earth. Anyway.
Now imagine a toy that is slowly decaying. How long does it endure decomposition before it dies?
That was a thing on a kids’ show from the ‘80s whose name escapes me at the moment. It really messed me up.Basically, the toys all knew, amongst themselves, not to go through the door to (I think) the attic, because they could get lost in there and would basically be stuck forever.
That was part of Toy Story 2 – yeah, being immaculately restored and honored by some collector seems great, but do you want that to be the rest of your immortal life? Sitting behind glass, looked at but never played with? Forever?
The scenes of the TS crew packed in a box brought out all kinds of terrible mental sidetracks for me. Some of the toys they encounter have clearly gone crazy, which is not at all surprising.
Aw Jesus, I already felt horrible about the Dagobah Luke action figure I lost in a canal in Galveston, Texas when I was ten.
Take heart, assuming he could animate he probably simply swam to shore.
We knew toys could die from the moment Sid blew one up in his back yard.
Ah, Toy Story 3, the movie so perfect it’s why I didn’t really care for the perfectly-fine Toy Story 4.
Forky was created out of whole cloth from bits of trash. His personality: a bit of a mess.
Which leads me to believe that the toys are alive for as long as their physical body maintains its sense of self. They take on the identities of whatever they “are.”That’s why Buzz Lightyears, fresh from a box that actually looks like a spaceship, actually think they’re Space Rangers. More blatantly “toy-ish” toys like Slinky Dog don’t have that problem, but the little green soldiers still sound like soldiers, and Barbies still act “Barbie-ish.” And “lost” toys like Bo Peep and Lotso Huggin Bear are forced to expand
their personalities beyond their own sense of utility as a plaything. Point being, the toys die when they are damaged beyond recognition. If they can’t recognize their own form, they die. Which is why Sid’s toys are all mute, but the antique Zebra that got ripped in half by the cat in TS4 is still chipper and chill. The more secure the toys are in their identities beyond their assigned roles, the harder they are to kill. A toy could theoretically become immortal if its sense of self entirely transcended its physical form. Even if you completely incinerated it, it could recognize bits of scattered ash as parts of its body and continue life as a moving, talking, sentient cloud of ash, if it didn’t simply take non-being as it’s rightfully state and subsume the entirety of spacetime within its consciousness. That’s right: God is a toy.Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.