Trivia / Tin Toy

• Development Gag: Pixar's then-current square logo appears on the shopping bag that Tinny was brought home in.
• What Could Have Been: A half-hour Tin Toy Christmas special was in the works as a testing ground to see if Pixar could manage a production that was closer to that of a feature-length film. In it, Tinny would have accidentally been sold to a toy store where he would discover he was part of a set of toy musicians that sold poorly. Another version of the story involved him being left behind on a family road trip where he'd team up with an abandoned ventriloquist dummy, and the two of them would make their way to a daycare center, where they'd be loved and played with forever. Disney wasn't interested and the studio couldn't afford to produce it independently, so Disney did the next best thing: they told the studio to start work on an honest-to-goodness feature film, which eventually became Toy Story. Elements from the original pitch would slowly find their way into all four Toy Story films. Tinny himself would eventually have a cameo in Toy Story 4.
• Write What You Know: John Lasseter was inspired to create the short after watching home movie footage of his nephew playing with toys (more specifically, putting them in his mouth) and thought what a monster the baby would look like from the toy's POV.