While no one was necessarily asking for an origin story movie on Buzz Lightyear Character Toy Story , the combined powers of Disney and Pixar seem set on making such a concept as engaging and epic as possible. Seriously: if you think the concept sounds like cash-in-direct over VHS on paper, we strongly encourage you to watch Wednesday’s dramatic reveal of Light Year , coming “in theaters” (and no mention of Disney + so far) on. June 17, 2022.
The film’s first 90-second trailer, embedded below, ignores the important context found in its exploration of “learn more” on YouTube, suggesting that the toy version of Buzz Lightyear, which was adopted by Toy Story’s Andy as a toy, animated series character, video game star, and more, was based entirely on someone else. As Disney Pixar explains:
The sci-fi action adventure presents the definitive origin story of Buzz Lightyear, the hero who inspired the toy, featuring the legendary Space Ranger who would win generations of fans.
However, this description does not clarify whether the more realistic version of Lightyear in next year’s film is also real in the Toy Story version of Earth as characters like Andy (and that this version of our planet is patrolled). by “Space Ranger” astronauts) or if that’s another fictional story inside this world, from which more cartoonish versions of Buzz Lightyear eventually followed. While waiting for Al “Chicken Man” McWhiggin to send back our emails on the matter, we have instead found a definitive answer to Entertainment Weekly, whose reporter Nick Romano interviewed director Angus MacLane about it.
“In the Toy Story universe, [ Lightyear ] would be like a movie that Andy maybe saw that made him want a Buzz Lightyear action figure,” MacLane tells EW. In other words: it’s like the Michael Keaton version of Batman comes before camper Adam West turns. (Additionally, if supersonic interstellar space travel exists on Andy’s Earth, it has yet to be recounted with definitive logic and science by Disney Pixar. We’ll continue to wait for that spinoff.)
Lightyear’s first teaser emphasizes exploration and a variety of interstellar locations, as it is otherwise mostly devoid of any dialogue, with the massive exception of new voice actor Chris Evans ( Captain America ) offering a abbreviated “and…” at its conclusion. He says this to his apparent teammate, a new character named Alicia Hawthorne, who begins the sentence with the familiar call of “infinity”. At press time, the voice actor of Hawthorne is not credited, although throughout the trailer we see this new character both in Space Ranger outfits and in an outfit from more subdued control room, so it’s likely to feature a lot in the final film.
If you’re looking for an epic sci-fi universe worthy of Andy’s childhood adoration, this trailer has it in spades. A swampy Dagobah-like planet, which Lightyear examines with a rusty bipedal droid by his side. A NASA-quality preparation, countdown, and launch sequence punctuated by a mysterious power source loaded into a spaceship. A high-speed explosion from a man-made spacecraft to and beyond an apparent version of the Sun of Earth. Lightyear’s eerie, lonely gaze at a colonized planet resembling Mars while clad in tracksuits. A heart-wrenching dive through inky black space, with the only light coming from his own deteriorating spaceship.
The trailer is punctuated by arguably the 18th four-billionth use of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” in a movie trailer, though its traditional guitars and percussion are replaced by a full string section and thundering drums. Today’s reveal crowns a vague mention that escaped many fans in March of this year, when the huge in-house movie roster from Disney, Marvel, Pixar, Fox, and other studios included blurb. only on something called “Lightyear” coming in June 2022. That is apparently what this movie is, although a ton of questions, especially about the connections to other fictional characters from Buzz’s toy worm Lightning, will likely go unanswered until the film nears its theatrical launch.