The Toy Story Films: An Animated Journey

So I was wandering around a store one day when I found a wonderfully gigantic book called "The Toy Story Films: An Animated Journey", and the blurb described the book as covering the entire history of the Toy Story brand, media-wise. Obviously I was interested as to whether or not it had a section regarding BLoSC, so I opened it up to some chapter between TS2 and TS3 called "Buzz and Woody in Limbo", as if they had been dead or forgotten or something in those years. It did indeed have a BLoSC section, and I thought I would review it here to save you all the trouble of buying the book for it (I think you can tell by that statement that I wasn't impressed...).

The text was pretty poor. It described how Disney, raring to make more money out of the Toy Story brand and eager to keep it in the public eye, went ahead and produced some show called "Buzz Lightyear of Star Command". No detail is put into the description of the production process, it simply states the excruciatingly simple main reasons why the show was made, without any kind of depth whatsoever. It then described the plot of the pilot movie, to the point at which it claimed Mira was from "Tangeah", whilst subtly decrying Buzz's chums as predictable characters. To finish the one paragraph dedicated to the series out of the massive 192 page book, the author, Charles Solomon, writes that the series passed "with little fanfare"... not taking into account that the DVD did better in its first two weeks than the home releases of two blockbusters, one of which was a James Bond movie, and the fact that the series was popular enough to be rerun for 7 further years. Assisting the text are two relatively regular pieces of art - the one of Buzz flying alongside Mira, Booster and XR (though I could have sworn that this is fanart), and the images of Buzz and Zurg from the DVD back cover dropped onto a background from the series. The book claims that both of these are stills from the series.

If it isn't already clear, I hate that whoever had primary control over this book (I assume Solomon, but Pixar could have had some part by just providing crap information) neglected the fact that there are people out there who would genuinely love to see both the art and creative processes behind this series, and, more importantly, that BLoSC, profitable or not for its creators, is still a part of the Toy Story series, and that it deserves an equal focus. I love Pixar, but the one thing I hate about them is how they handle the existence of the series. Presumably they hate it because Disney took three of their original characters and created a whole world of mythology and brand new characters to surround them, despite the fact that Disney consulted Pixar during the creation of the series (to what extent we'll never know, let's face it). Just because they hate it, it doesn't mean our knowledge of the series, and our appreciation of it, has to be hindered. It's like a director retracting art books of their popular film from sale just because they don't like it.

I suppose my giganto-rant links in some ways to the DVD boxset issue that Nothing but Cartoons analysed in the post that Rook linked to in the boxset discussion. Anyway, how do you feel about BLoSC's inclusion in this book? Do you think we should be thankful that it got in, or angry that it got mistreated?

Blargh, it sounds like whoever wrote that didn't care much for BLoSC. This makes me sad. D:

Anyway, thanks for posting this.

I don't believe I heard that podcast, but I'll look it up. It disappoints me that, like you say, the big bosses of the franchise don't have much respect for it. I suppose you could say that Stones was assigned a franchise when he wanted to helm an original piece of fiction, and that Lasseter had the fun of watching a bunch of other guys toying with his characters, but is there no way that them, let alone everyone else at Disney, can look back with any good feeling?

I'm afraid I can't scan the book as I didn't buy it - I simply flicked to the chapter to see what was written, and left it alone . One of the images is this one:


The other I know I've seen on the internet, but I just can't find it on search. It was literally Buzz crouching and Zurg pointing at him in front of a Hornet factory background. The characters were the images from the DVD box.

But yes, not a good buy if a) you've already got other Toy Story art books and/or b) you want some in-depth production info.

Bob Schooley is on Twitter. I'm not sure about Mark McCorkle.

Steel wrote:

Yup, that's the one, only without logos or text.

Steel wrote:I'd have loved to know how they went about character designs, etc.

That's always been the dream for me. Even with more popular Disney animated shows, production drawings/materials are relatively sparse, but I would love to see the concept designs and model sheets for BLoSC, if only to see what our favourite characters could have looked like! Also, if BLoSC began production before Toy Story 2, were designs for Zurg for the series finalised before the classic design was decided upon?

Ranger-Nova wrote:Bob Schooley is on Twitter.

When I have time, I'd like to ask him about the show.

Using the camera on my terrible, terrible phone, I have been able to extract the BLoSC text from the book:

The Toy Story Films - An Animated Journey wrote: While the idea for a 3-D Toy Story 3 languished, Disney produced Buzz Lightyear of Star Command: The Adventure Begins, a direct-to-video feature in drawn animation that served as a lead-in to a sixty-five-episode TV series of the same name.
Emperor Zurg's agents steal the "Unimind", a device that allows the aliens to function as a single intellect. The aliens form the support crews that keep Star Command running, but individually they're inept. During the course of the adventure, Buzz acquires the sidekicks who form "Team Lightyear": Booster, an overeager doofus, XR, a robot who's one of the aliens' less successful inventions, and the inevitable spunky girl, Mira Nova of the planet Tangeah. Tim Allen provided the voice of Buzz for the feature, but Patrick Warburton replaced him for the series. Buzz Lightyear of Star Command debuted in October 2000 on ABC, but attracted little attention.

There's that, and the two images above.