Recap / Film Reroll: Toy Story

Woody laughs maniacally (and perhaps also mechanically?), with credit to /u/nessanessajoy on Reddit

Paulo goes loco and takes change of planes! Andy gets tackled by a funoodle! We play through Toy Story! Or rather Toy Story plays with us!

Episodes 91-92 of Film Reroll. Based on the 1995 animated film.

In a world where toys secretly come alive when their owners are not looking, Sheriff Woody is the favorite toy of a young boy named Andy. However, competition arrives in the form of Buzz Lightyear, a space hero toy given to Andy for his birthday. Feeling quite jealous over the attention given to the newly arrived action figure, a one-sided rivalry blossoms up between Woody and Buzz, the latter of whom doesn't make things any easier by actually believing himself to be a real space ranger whose ship has crash landed on an alien planet.

This is the second computer animated film covered by the Rerollers, the first being Frozen from way back in 2016. It also has one of the most overt hints to where The One Ring may have been hidden, but it wasn't quite time for it to be found, yet...

Starring Paulo Quiros as Sheriff Woody, Andy Hoover as Buzz Lightyear, and Jocelyn "Joz" Vammer as the Dungeon Master.

Followed by Memento.

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Tropes:

• Ambiguous Situation: Discussed: When Woody is dismayed to be left behind in the van upon arriving at Pizza Planet, one of two possibilites are broached. Either Andy didn't really want to go to Pizza Planet with any toy, or he left Woody in the van so that he wouldn't lose him (after all, he took Woody only because he couldn't find Buzz). Upon realizing Buzz is in the back of the van and still intending to complete his "mission" to Pizza Planet, Woody rallies and doubles-down on the latter option.
• Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!: After knocking out the power for Pizza Planet, Woody (by Paulo's own admission) gets too distracted trying to figure out the dust bunnies when he should be going to save Buzz.
• Awful Truth: Discussed: Due to his experience with the dust bunnies at Pizza Planet, Woody develops an obsession with them. Zax tells him it's not worth finding out what "they're laying down" and having his reality challenged.
  Zax: Sometimes it's good just to take the hand that you're dealt, cowboy.
• Body Horror: At the Pizza Planet, Woody runs into a green Alien who calls himself Zax. His face has started to melt, and Woody has to rescue him from an And I Must Scream situation.
• Broken Masquerade:
  • Buzz is not the only one who ends up questioning his reality in this story. Having met Gold Lemé and the Dust Bunnies, Woody now knows about the existence of magic and unlike Buzz, this doesn't give him closure as much as fill him with uncertainty.
  • Zax managed to figure out on his own the fact that he's a toy thanks in part due to spending some time thinking with his face half-melted.
• Call-Back: Considering Buzz Lightyear's Fake Memories, Joz argues that this is the second campaign they've made starring a replicant.
• Canon Foreigner: The girl Andy has a crush on, who briefly ends up getting a "talking Buzz Lightyear toy."
• The City vs. the Country: Played up with Woody, who is treated like a bumbling country boy by both Buzz and Gold Lemé once he steps out of his comfort zone.
• Companion Cube: Zax has fallen in love with a (non-sentient) glittery bouncing ball he's named Sandra. He feels like Woody should understand this, given that he is imbued with the spirit of Tom Hanks.
• Credits Pushback: Discussed: The literal second Woody hears something from under the bed say "My precious...", Joz declares the end of the campaign. Paulo then has Woody push the credits back in order to try and investigate it.
• Cutting the Knot:
  • Paulo manages to find a way for Woody to supplant Buzz in the trip that won't get him accused of murder. Namely, he outright tricks Buzz into getting stuck behind Bo Peep's bookshelf.
  • In a more direct manner, the scene at the Dinoco gas station is cut from the narrative; we cut straight to Andy and his mom arriving at Pizza Planet.
• Death Seeker: When Woody first encounters Zax, stuck behind a machine in Pizza Planet and at risk of having his face completely melt, Zax openly asks for "the sweet release of death". He gets better after Woody saves him.
• Deleted Role: invoked Sid is completely missing from the narrative; not only is there no mention of him coming home early from summer camp, but he gets relegated to a cameo at Pizza Planet.
• Entertainingly Wrong:
  • Naturally comes into play with Buzz Lightyear, who initially thinks that he's simply crash-landed on some backwater planet, that Woody is a friendly but ignorant hick lawman, that Andy is a local deity, and that his mother is his concubine!
  • The Rerollers question if all Buzz Lightyear toys have these kinds of delusions, ^note Word of God is that yes, they do. and if some never learn the truth about themselves, growing disillusioned over their inability to repair their spacecrafts.
• Epic Fail:
  • Part of the reason why Buzz gets stuck behind the bookshelf is because, in maneuvering himself behind the books, he accidentally triggers his wings, which brace him in place.
  • Five months passed between episodes, with Part 1 ending on the Cliffhanger of Woody and Buzz needing to figure out a plan to cross the street into Pizza Planet without anyone noticing them. As Paulo cheerfully admits at the top of Part 2, despite all that time passing, he still had yet to figure out a plan.
• Foreshadowing: When Andy and Paulo ask Joz what the dust bunnies look like, the latter asks if they look like trees with faces carved into them.
• Get A Hold Of Yourself Man: Zax desperately tries to talk Woody out of his obsession with the dust bunnies, mainly because Woody's his therapist and they've upped their sessions to "twenty times a week".
• Green-Eyed Monster: Woody becomes quite jealous of the affection his friends have for "the new guy", and becomes even more determined to bring him down a peg; but, at the same time, it's not as severe as in the movie. Rather than a true rivalry, Woody warms up to Buzz quicker. This is in part due to Andy leaving him behind in the van upon arriving at Pizza Planet; this causes Woody to become melancholic, and causes him to conclude that the real way to stay within Andy's wheelhouse is to hitch his wagon to Buzz, and sell him on being Andy's toy.
• Has a Type: Zax likes bouncy balls. "I'd like to pretend they're all special, but... well anyway, I've said too much."
• Hive Mind: The Dust Bunnies seem to have this, along with the ability to perform a Fusion Dance. Woody making contact with one very briefly gets him added to the connection, and Joz explains that the sensation "wasn't a good sensation, but it also wasn't a terrible one".
• I Meant to Do That: Buzz insists that he's staying behind the bookshelf to search it properly for a misplaced "fuel rod". He's not stuck or anything...
• Insistent Terminology: Buzz keeps calling tape "bonding strips."
• In Spite of a Nail:
  • While the circumstances are different, Woody still gets Buzz out of the way so Andy would take him to Pizza Planet, and Buzz still slips into the van without him noticing.
    • On the way to Pizza Planet, a toy gets pinned to the back of a truck bed by a loose object, and is only discovered by their partner. It's just the roles are reversed here, and it's a pool noodle instead of a toolbox.
  • Andy still leaves Woody behind in the van; however, to Woody's dismay, this time it happens when Andy and his mom make it to Pizza Planet.
  • Woody and Buzz wind up leaving Pizza Planet with a Little Green Man in tow.
• Laughing Mad: Woody laughs both maniacally and mechanically as he starts taking out the power at Pizza Planet.
• Look, a Distraction!: Woody cuts the power at the Pizza Planet to rescue Buzz under the cover of darkness.
• Mr. Fixit: Buzz actually ends up becoming rather handy with tape, and manages to fix both Rex's Book and Bo-Peep's shelf.
• Motivational Lie: Played with: Once waking up outside of Pizza Planet, Zax asks Woody if Sandra made it out with them. Woody, after a second, mentions that a Sandra might be at Andy's house; Zax openly states it's not the same, but remarks that he'd be okay with it after a couple weeks.
• Mythology Gag: When everyone assumes Woody has been replaced due to him getting knocked off the bed at the start, Etch-a-Sketch draws the same noose he used as an Implied Death Threat in the movie.
• Noodle Incident: When Zax wakes up in Molly's stroller out of Pizza Planet, he remarks:
  Zax: Wakin' up between a spaceman and a cowboy, this is like Halloween 2013 all over again...
• No-Sell: Woody tries to feed dust to the Dust Bunnies, but they don't seem interested and just laugh at him. Gold Lemé the unicorn then informs the Sheriff that dust is actually their excrements!
• Not so Dire: Towards the end of the campaign, during Christmas, Joz alludes to "the last thing [Woody hears]"... which briefly shocks Paulo, before Joz elaborates it's the last thing he hears in the campaign.
• Not What It Looks Like: Inverted: Buzz thinks Woody getting taken to Pizza Planet instead of him was a case of miscommunication that afflicted Woody, rather than Woody intentionally taking Buzz's place on the trip.
• One-Steve Limit: Defied due to another Andy playing Buzz Lightyear, but everyone makes a concentrated effort to keep both Andys separate.
• Out of Focus: The campaign comes to an abrupt end due to Woody and Buzz managing to leave Pizza Planet with Andy, completely circumventing Sid.
• Real After All: The Arcade Ghost is at first thought to be just another delusions of Zax, but they are eventually revealed to be very real indeed, actually being a large unicorn plushie.
• Remember the New Guy?: Both Andy and his mom are unaware of where Zax came from, but they just assume Andy always had him. He even brushes off Zax's half-melted face, saying that he can find a hat for him.
• Shout-Out:
  • Andy Hoover builds upon the Star Wars references from the original series by claiming that Emperor Zurg used to be Senator Zurg and then Chancellor Zurg.
  • The Rerollers point out that from the point of view of Buzz, this campaign is pretty much the Cyclops part from The Odyssey.
  • In convincing Buzz that his current "mission" should be to protect Andy while he's in Pizza Planet, Woody borrows a page from Mission: Impossible: "Your mission, should you choose to accept it..."
• Speaks Fluent Animal: Not "animals" in a strict sense, but Gold Lemé can communicate with the Dust Bunnies by speaking their language.
• Tantrum Throwing: As part of Gold Lemé's Dark and Troubled Past, their original owner, a little girl, wound up throwing them behind an arcade machine in anger after the girl's mom wouldn't let her play one of the Speed Racer arcade machines.
• Take That!: Paulo takes a brief moment to complain how Buzz Lightyear of Star Command kinda missed the point of the film.^note It was apparently made to satisfy the Misaimed Fandom who liked Buzz Lightyear's Captain Space, Defender of Earth! persona nonironically, and ignored that the character is a bit of a Small Name, Big Ego who Cannot Tell Fiction from Reality.
• There Are No Therapists: Averted. Woody gives therapy sessions to any toy which needs it, which Buzz and especially Zax certainly do. Though since he doesn't have any formal education, it's mentioned that he isn't very good at it. But Andy Hoover states that it still helps regardless; you just need someone to talk to.
• Tomato in the Mirror:
  • Happens gradually, with Buzz learning that not all toys realize their true nature, and that he might be one of them. Only at the very end of the campaign does he truly accept his identity.
  • Buzz then goes even further, asking how they know that Andy isn't himself a toy created by some higher being.
• Trolling Creator: In-Universe. Joz ends the campaign with Woody hearing a voice calling "My precious..." from under the bed, adding more fuel to the secret "find the one ring" sidequest found throughout the show (and greatly frustrating Paulo Quiros in the process.)
• Wide-Eyed Idealist: Buzz is presented as rather naïve, taking much of what the other toys say at face value once they decide to play along with his delusions.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: Like in the film, Buzz believes himself to be a space ranger who has fought in a galactic war, crash-landed on some planet, and run into a Wacky Wayside Tribe.
• You Are Not My Father: Because Andy's dad is nowhere to be seen, the Rerollers decide that his mom has divorced the guy and started seeing another man named Jim, who Andy has a hard time getting along with.

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