Inside the Lost Version of Toy Story, Where Woody Was a Mean Ventriloquist Dummy and Buzz Was Lunar Larry

Toy Story almost turned out to be a very different movie, one featuring Woody as a mean spirited ventriloquist dummy and Buzz as an astronaut named Lunar Larry. It was also almost a musical, in the style of Disney's other hits of the time, Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin.

Besides being a great film in and of itself, Toy Story is the first ever computer animated feature film. It spawned a whole new industry of digital animation and paved the way for numerous beloved movies to follow. Its success seems like a foregone conclusion looking back, but at the time it was an incredibly risky venture. Had it failed, it could have halted the development of computer animated films, and that very nearly happened. Here is what went on behind the scenes, and what could have been.

George Lucas's search for faster effects led to Pixar

When George Lucas began bringing Star Wars to life, he famously founded an entire visual effects studio, Industrial Light and Magic, to create the effects shots the film needed. His team invented new techniques and technologies, but a lot of that work was incredibly tedious. The glow around the lightsabers came from tracing over live action frames one by one, and the space dogfights during the Death Star trench run required building and shooting each miniature spaceship separately before compositing them together manually.

Lucas wondered whether computers could reduce the time, labor and money these effects took. For The Empire Strikes Back he met with an outside computer graphics company, which created a fully computer generated test of X-Wing fighters flying in formation. Lucas felt the technology was not yet advanced enough for the realism he needed and stuck with practical effects, but he was convinced of its future potential. He started a computer division at Lucasfilm and recruited computer scientists from the Computer Graphics Lab at the New York Institute of Technology, who shared a dream of creating the world's first computer animated feature film.

John Lasseter's firing at Disney sent him to Lucasfilm

That same company went on to create computer animated effects shots for Disney's Tron, opening the eyes of then Disney animator and future Toy Story director John Lasseter to what the technology could do. Lasseter was inspired to make an animated feature of The Brave Little Toaster with backgrounds that were entirely computer animated, and did a short test film to convince the higher ups at Disney. Unfortunately, he unknowingly circumvented one of his direct superiors in getting that test made, angering them and ultimately resulting in his termination.

He quickly landed on his feet at Lucasfilm's computer animation division, where the team was planning a short cartoon. Lasseter intended to repeat his earlier approach, computer animating the backgrounds and hand animating the characters. Ed Catmull, the leader of the group and co founder of Pixar, challenged him to animate the entire thing by computer. The result was groundbreaking, proving computer animation could be used to create an entire film. The team then worked on effects with ILM, and on Young Sherlock Holmes they made the first computer generated photorealistic animated character, a knight composed of pieces from a stained glass window.

Lucas's divorce put Pixar in Steve Jobs's hands

Following George Lucas's divorce after Return of the Jedi, the Pixar team worried he would sell off the division, since he needed money and had refused to give his ex wife any of his companies, opting to give her cash instead. Determined to stay together and make the first computer animated movie, the team convinced Lucas to spin the division off into its own company, and Lucas began looking for investors.

Enter Steve Jobs, who had just left Apple and fell in love with Pixar because it combined art and technology, which was his ethos at Apple. Jobs did not want to invest, though; he wanted to buy the company. His offer was well below Lucas's asking price, but because of the divorce Lucas ultimately had no choice but to sell. Jobs's goal was not to make movies but to sell Pixar's Image Computer and software to a mass market, so Lasseter produced computer animated shorts to show off what the hardware and software could do.

Luxo Jr. and Tin Toy kept Pixar's dream alive

One of those shorts was Luxo Jr., based on the Luxo lamp Lasseter had on his desk, which would eventually become the Pixar mascot. It screened at SIGGRAPH, an annual computer graphics conference, to a standing ovation and was eventually nominated for an Oscar, which convinced Jobs to make new animated shorts each year. But Pixar was losing money, and Jobs had to keep putting his own money in to keep it afloat. By 1988 things were so bad that he made deep spending cuts and layoffs as the company teetered on collapse.

Despite this, Lasseter still requested $300,000 for a short film, and a skeptical Jobs asked whether there were storyboards he could see first. Lasseter walked him 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 agreed to finance it, and Tin Toy went on to win the Oscar for best animated short, the first computer generated film to do so, establishing computer animation as a legitimate artistic medium.

Disney's courtship led to a very different Toy Story pitch

Over at Disney, new CEO Michael Eisner and film division head Jeffrey Katzenberg wanted to revive the company's once great but fading animation department. After seeing Tin Toy, they tried to recruit Lasseter back as a director, but he was now loyal to Jobs, who had believed in him when nobody else did, and refused. Eisner instead engaged Pixar to make a computer animated feature for Disney, with Katzenberg overseeing it.

The original pitch featured Tinny on a family vacation with his owner, getting lost at a rest stop. A junk man finds him and puts him up for auction, where he is sold along with an old ventriloquist dummy. Both hope to be bought by a child, but a collector takes them home and places them in glass cases with other toys. The toys escape and, after a series of adventures, end up at a preschool, which to them is like toy heaven: they will never get lost or outgrown, because every year new kids will come in and play with them.

If that sounds familiar, it is because several of those ideas were reused in later films, like Al the collector in Toy Story 2 and the daycare in Toy Story 3. This story was not used for the first film because Katzenberg did not like it, complaining that the two leads' motivations were too similar, since both shared a desire not to be abandoned or forgotten and to be played with by children. He suggested rewriting it as an odd couple buddy film with contrasting personalities.

Lunar Larry became Buzz Lightyear

The revised pitch more closely resembled the finished film: a boy gets Tinny for his birthday, and Tinny replaces a ventriloquist dummy as the child's favorite toy. The major problem was that it made no sense for an old fashioned tin toy to become a kid's new favorite, so the team needed a toy any boy would love to have. A military action figure like G.I. Joe was considered, but they settled on a space theme and called the character Lunar Larry. That eventually sounded too wacky, and a replacement name was even worse.

Since it was a space toy, the writers took inspiration from the second man to walk on the moon, astronaut Buzz Aldrin, and renamed the character Buzz Lightyear. At this stage Buzz was more like Dudley Do-Right, a dimwitted but cheerful superhero who knew he was a toy like everyone else. It was Joss Whedon, brought in to help rewrite the script, who came up with what I consider the brilliant idea of making Buzz an action figure who is not aware he is a toy and takes his job as an intergalactic Space Ranger seriously.

Pixar approached Billy Crystal to voice Buzz, but he turned them down, believing the film would not be a hit because computer animation was still in its infancy. After seeing the finished movie, Crystal called it the biggest mistake of his career, though he felt he would not have been right as Buzz anyway and that Tim Allen was fantastic. He later rectified the mistake by voicing Mike Wazowski in Monsters, Inc. The change to Buzz also reshaped Pizza Planet, originally a miniature golf pizza place called Pizza Putt. Given Buzz's desire to get home, it became something like a spaceport, which led to the crane game and the now iconic Little Green Men.

Woody was a ventriloquist dummy before he was a cowboy

The ventriloquist dummy evolved to look old fashioned, with a top hat and tails, so it would not look like a kid's favorite toy. Lasseter gave it a pull string, inspired by a Casper the Friendly Ghost doll he had as a child. Character designer Bud Luckey then suggested making Woody a cowboy, which Lasseter loved for the contrast: Buzz, the new toy, represented the future and the frontier of space, while Woody, the old toy, represented the Old West and the past.

Woody remained a ventriloquist dummy for some time, though, towering over Buzz, whose character model was considerably smaller and red rather than his now iconic white, purple and green. Woody was also written more like a classic cowboy. Eventually the team ditched the ventriloquist dummy aspect because they felt Woody looked sneaky and mean, and Buzz was given a green and purple color scheme after the favorite colors of Lasseter and his wife.

Disney wanted a musical, and toy makers said no

Following the success of The Little Mermaid and Aladdin, with their Broadway style numbers, Disney wanted Toy Story to be a musical too. Lasseter and Whedon were against it, 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 characters would not sing, but the film would feature songs only the audience could hear, each about the characters' emotions at that moment. Besides You've Got a Friend in Me, used during the opening credits to establish the bond between Andy and Woody, Randy Newman's ballad I Will Go Sailing No More was used to brilliant effect as Buzz learns he is a toy, perfectly capturing his devastation and disillusionment.

Whedon also wanted Barbie to swoop in and save Woody and Buzz from Sid in the final act, but Mattel refused to license her. It believed girls projected their own personalities onto the doll and worried that giving Barbie a voice would create a persona that might not align with every little girl's dreams and desires. After the film's enormous success, Mattel seemed more than willing to license her for the sequel. Pixar hit the same problem with Hasbro: the animators wanted a G.I. Joe, but when Hasbro discovered Sid was going to blow it up, it refused, so the toy became the fictional Combat Carl.

The movie also originally opened with Andy and Woody viewing a Buzz Lightyear cartoon. The team worried that because the cartoon was so incredible, it would not be believable that Woody was Andy's favorite toy, so the opening was reworked to show Andy playing with his toys. The original idea was repurposed for the sequel's opening, with the cartoon changed into a Buzz Lightyear game.

Jeffrey Katzenberg's push for edge turned Woody into a jerk

In return for financing, Disney had creative control, which made sense since Lasseter had no experience writing features and Disney had a track record of hits going back to 1937. Katzenberg rejected most of Pixar's notes during storyboard sessions and gave extensive notes of his own, famously saying of his role, "I may be a tyrant but I'm usually right." In this case, though, Katzenberg was wrong and almost destroyed the movie. Trying to make it appeal to adults as well as children, he kept pushing for more edge, and Woody became meaner, more jealous and more unlikable with each revision.

It got so bad that even Tom Hanks remarked that the character had been made into a real jerk. In this version Woody throws Buzz out the window, whereas in the final film Buzz falls out by accident when Woody tries to knock him behind the desk. When the toys confront Woody, he blows them off, remarks that it is a toy eat toy world, and berates Slinky for not getting the other toys off the bed. Eventually the toys stand up to Woody and throw him out the window too.

Black Friday halted production

On what became known as Black Friday, Pixar screened the first half of the film for Disney, who hated it so much that they halted production. Katzenberg asked a colleague why the movie was so bad, and the colleague reminded him that it was not the movie Lasseter had set out to make, subtly suggesting Katzenberg's meddling was to blame. Disney tried to force Pixar to lay off a significant portion of its staff and take over the film, but Pixar refused, kicked Katzenberg out of the creative process and took a few weeks to rework the script, with Jobs financing the effort with his own money.

The result was much closer to the film we all know, with some differences. Cut were a scene of Sid torturing Buzz by spinning him on an electric drill and an extended scene of Sid interrogating Woody before smacking him across the room; the editor felt audiences would love the pair so much by then that they would hate seeing them treated like this. Buzz's famous line "this isn't flying it's falling with style" was originally "technically it's gliding," until writer Pete Docter piped up, "shouldn't he say it's falling with style," lighting up Lasseter's face and prompting a quick last minute redo of the dialogue.

The ending changed too. The film originally closed on an exterior shot of Andy's house to the sound of a new puppy, which fell flat with test audiences, so Eisner suggested ending on Woody and Buzz together reacting in shock to the news.

Steve Jobs gambled on Toy Story and won

While the film was being made, Jobs considered selling Pixar, since it had lost money since he bought it and he had invested a small fortune to keep it afloat. But seeing Lasseter and the team's vision come to life made him realize Pixar was on the verge of transforming the film industry. Eager not to rely on Disney to finance future films, he took Pixar public one week after Toy Story premiered, gambling that it would be a hit. It was, and it made Jobs a billionaire.

Still, almost none of this happened. Not only was Pixar close to shutting its doors numerous times, but Toy Story almost turned out as a very different movie, one I think likely would not have been as successful, nor led to the countless computer animated films that followed.

Do you think the Tinny and ventriloquist dummy version of Toy Story could ever have worked?