'Toy Story' Facts (15 pics)

1

The animation team perfected the movement of the toy soldiers by nailing a pair of sneakers to a sheet of wood and trying to walk around with them on.

2

When Woody is sitting on the bed talking with Slinky, and later when he fights Buzz, there is a drawing of him on the wall behind them. This is actually an early sketch of the Woody character.

3

Woody and Buzz Lightyear are inspired by John Lasseter's own childhood toys. He based Woody on his own pull-string Casper doll, and once he grew out of Casper, he moved on to a G.I. Joe, a flashy toy at the time of his childhood.

4

Early scripts for the film featured a Barbie doll in a prominent role as Woody's love interest. The original ending sequence, in which Buzz and Woody chase the moving truck, was scripted to have Barbie drive her Corvette off the truck and rescue Woody and Buzz from Sid's dog, a-la Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991). Mattel, the company that owns the Barbie character, declined on the basis that they thought the film would be a failure and that they didn't want Barbie to have a defined personality, preferring to let children imagine Barbie's personality traits on their own. Thus, Barbie was dropped from the script, and her character was reworked into that of Bo-Peep (minus the Sarah Connor stuff).

5

When the film proved a huge success, Mattel did allow Barbie to appear in Toy Story 2 (1999).
This was the first animated film in Oscar history to be nominated for a Best Screenplay Academy Award - Adapted or Original.

6

Originally the main character was going to be Tinny, the title character in John Lasseter's Oscar winning short film Tin Toy (1988). The story would have involved Tinny being left behind at a highway rest stop and joining up with a sarcastic ventriloquist dummy to try and get back to his family but they eventually make it to a preschool. 

7

The writers soon realized that Tinny was too old-fashioned to be a child's favorite toy. So he was replaced with a miniature toy astronaut initially named Lunar Larry and later Tempus from Morph. Eventually he became taller and was renamed Buzz Lightyear. 

8

The ventriloquist dummy, meanwhile, also changed and evolved; becoming less mean spirited and eventually turning into a cowboy rag doll named Woody. The first (and as of 2014 the only) animated film to receive a special achievement Academy Award. It was given to John Lasseter for "the development and inspired application of techniques that have made possible the first feature-length computer-animated film." More than fifty years earlier, Walt Disney received an honorary Oscar for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937).

9

It was the second highest-grossing movie of 1995, after Die Hard with a Vengeance, and beating hits like Apollo 13, GoldenEye and Batman Forever.

10

Disney pushed hard for the film to be a musical (like most animated features of the time) but John Lasseter was against the idea. He felt the film would work better as a buddy comedy, rather than a musical. Eventually he and Disney reached a compromise in that songs would play at key moments but not be sung by the characters.

11

Pixar wouldn't make a musical until Coco (2017), 22 years later. Randy Newman wrote the film's signature tune "You've Got a Friend in Me" in just one day.

12

John Lasseter knew he had a hit on his hands when he heard adult sobs coming from the preview audience when Buzz lies apparently broken. An early possible title for the film was "You Are A Toy".

13

The Jim Henson Company produced the Muppet's television movie The Christmas Toy (1986), about toys who come to life when their human owners aren't around. In it, Rugby the Tiger becomes jealous when he discovers he's about to be replaced as the children's favorite toy, and inadvertently releases the new toy, Meteora: Queen of the Asteroids, who doesn't realize she's a toy, and thinks she's landed among aliens. It's then up to Rugby and the other toys to convince her to accept her role as Christmas toy and get back in her present before Christmas morning. The Jim Henson Company was later bought by Disney, just like Pixar.