Pixar’s Lightyear turns Buzz into a non-toy astronaut—with new voice—in 2022

Enlarge / Coming in June 2022 to "theaters." (credit: Disney Pixar)

While nobody was necessarily asking for an origin story film about Toy Story character Buzz Lightyear, the combined powers of Disney and Pixar sure seem intent on making such a concept look as appealing and epic as possible. Seriously: if you think the concept sounds like a straight-to-VHS cash-in on paper, we strongly encourage you to watch Wednesday's dramatic reveal of Lightyear, coming "to theaters" (and no mention of Disney+ thus far) on June 17, 2022.

The film's debut 90-second trailer, embedded below, skips over the important context found in its "read more" crawl on YouTube, which suggests that the toy version of Buzz Lightyear, who was embraced by Toy Story's Andy as a toy, an animated series character, a video game star, and more, was based on someone else entirely. As Disney Pixar explains:

The sci-fi action-adventure presents the definitive origin story of Buzz Lightyear-the hero who inspired the toy-introducing the legendary Space Ranger who would win generations of fans.

However, this description doesn't clarify whether the more realistic-looking version of Lightyear in next year's film is as 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 this is another fictional story inside that world, from which more cartoonish Buzz Lightyear versions eventually followed. While waiting for Al "Chicken Man" McWhiggin to return our emails on the question, we instead found a definitive answer at Entertainment Weekly, whose reporter Nick Romano interviewed film director Angus MacLane on the matter.

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