There are scenes, designs, and moments that are reminiscent of Wall-E, Star Trek, Starship Troopers, Star Wars, 2001, Alien, and more. More than anything else, Lightyear is a sci-fi adventure that takes place on an uncharted planet 4.2 million light years from earth that just happens to star a version of a character we’ve become pretty familiar with over the past 27 years. And so first and foremost, we just needed to have a different person playing that Lightyear, separate from the toy.” We’re making Buzz Lightyear’s movie, the Lightyear movie.

According to Lightyear producer Galyn Susman, “Tim Allen is Buzz Lightyear the toy, and he’s the embodiment of Buzz Lightyear the toy. This is also why we don’t have Tim Allen returning to voice Buzz, rather having him voiced by Chris Evans, who sounded more like George Clooney to me.

(Kind of like if we had been watching a movie called Skywalker Saga for years where a boy played with his Kenner Star Wars action figures, and now we are seeing Star Wars about the actual Luke Skywalker. So, don’t expect any of Woody’s roundup gang here as this is a completely separate animal about the character Buzz Lightyear, not the toy Buzz Lightyear based on that character. In 1995, a boy named Andy got a Buzz Lightyear toy for his birthday. While Toy Story 4 was kind of a sendoff and farewell of sorts to Woody, with Lightyear, Pixar gives Buzz a spinoff of his own with a bit of an origin story. And along with watching these beloved characters grow, evolve, and change, we’ve also witnessed continual improvements in the quality and detail of Pixar’s animation, which we can appreciate now more than ever with modern 4K HDR displays.

Since then, we’ve seen three followups in the Toy Story franchise, with the most recent, Toy Story 4, released back in 2019.

Download andy watching lightyear