It’s been four years now, but the premise of Lightyear is still kind of confusing if you think about it too much. It explores the origin story of Buzz Lightyear, but not the beloved Toy Story character. Instead, it centers on the human (but still animated) Buzz Lightyear, a real space adventurer in the fictional Toy Story world who inspired the toy collected by the kids in the Toy Story movies.
With that tangled ball of yarn hanging over it—you kind of have to admire Pixar for pretzeling its universe so much, to be honest—Lightyear failed to catch on with audiences. So much so that in the years since, you might have forgotten the studio hired a different actor to voice the human version of Buzz in his spin-off movie: Chris Evans.
While Captain America himself is a suitably heroic choice, and this version of Buzz is a younger version of the real guy who inspired the toy, it was still a little odd that Lightyear didn’t tap Tim Allen, who’s been jovially shouting “To infinity and beyond!” since 1995.
In a new interview with Entertainment Weekly, Toy Story 5 director Andrew Stanton (also a Pixar exec and the co-writer of all five Toy Story films) was asked about what it was like telling Allen he wouldn’t be voicing his signature Pixar character in 2022’s Lightyear.
“We talked early on. There was the talk before Lightyear was made, there was a talk after Lightyear was made, and he was way more professional about it than people probably would assume,” Stanton told EW. “He’d been in the business a long time, and he knows that things change, people try things. We were always clear that this has no bearing on Buzz, the toy. It will always be you until we can’t make it you, which, hopefully, we will always find a way that’s to your liking. So, no, it was never that uncomfortable, thank God.”
EW also pulled up an Allen interview it did back in 2022 in which the actor weighed in on the casting swap. To hear him tell it, the Lightyear Buzz wasn’t his Buzz, so he was fine with the change, just as Stanton is suggesting all these years later.
“This is a whole new team that really had nothing to do with the first movies … It’s a wonderful story. It just doesn’t seem to have any connection to the toy, and it’s a little… I don’t know. It just has no relationship to Buzz. It’s just no connection. I wish there was a better connection to this.”
Casting Allen would have definitely helped make that connection, but that’s water under the bridge now. Allen reclaims his Buzz Lightyear turf from Evans when Toy Story 5 hits theaters June 19.
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