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My daughter Katie loved to collect stuffed animals. It was something of an obsession, a harmless one, and we were happy to oblige. By the time she was 8, the menagerie had become so huge that we needed to string up a net over her bed to free up some floor space.
It was not unreasonable, then, for my wife to ask her one day if she might pick out 10 stuffed animals — old friends she no longer played with and who had been usurped in the pecking order — to give away. Katie agreed without protest.
I listened to this conversation warily, all the while thinking: Why not just string up another net?
As my wife tells the story (over the years, this has become family lore), sometime later she looked out the bedroom window into our backyard and spied me going through the trash, fishing out a threadbare lion, its once-mighty mane all but vanished.
“Glenn, what are you doing?” she asked me. “The child made her choice.”
“But we used to play tea party with this,” I replied, rescuing the lion and bringing it back inside.
I tell you this not to say that I was right — I wasn’t — but to tell you that nostalgia sometimes gets the better of me. Like Vito Corleone, I have a sentimental weakness for my children and I spoil them.
So it won’t surprise you that the “Toy Story” movies, with their bittersweet themes about growing up and letting go, have a way of piercing my heart, making me wistful for playtime with plush toys on Sunday afternoons that seemed to stretch forever.
With “Toy Story 5” arriving in theaters Friday, it felt like the right moment to revisit the earlier movies, take in the new one (which, like the fourth, is enjoyable enough but makes you appreciate the perfect journey the original trilogy delivered) and offer a personal ranking of my 10 favorite characters. None of these toys will ever be thrown out.
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10. Forky
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Here’s a toy firmly aligned with my wife’s minimalist ideology. Created by young Bonnie as she navigates through kindergarten orientation in “Toy Story 4,” Forky, endearingly voiced by Tony Hale, is a spork (or a “fapoon,” if you’re Jordan Peele enjoying a hotel continental breakfast) outfitted with googly eyes, pipe cleaner arms and Popsicle stick legs. Bonnie loves Forky, but Forky sees himself as trash, not a toy, and tosses himself into the garbage at every opportunity. Randy Newman even wrote a song about his compulsion, “I Can’t Let You Throw Yourself Away.”
Forky, of course, is right. He is trash. And yet, every Christmas when we open up the storage tub containing decorations, we come across a plastic bag full of Forky-like holiday creations our kids made in school. It has been a good decade since any of these items made it on the tree. But we keep them all the same, zipped tight in that storage bag just in case they get any ideas.
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9. Sarge and the Bucket O Soldiers
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Plastic Green Army Men were ubiquitous in the ’70s, though whenever some well-meaning relative gave me some — this gift was just a step up from socks — they came not in a bucket but in a polyethylene bag, befitting their subpar status. The paratrooper, outfitted with a cheap plastic chute, never lived up to his promise, even if deployed from the second floor of a school classroom. (That mission landed me in the principal’s office.)
The “Toy Story” team probably had the same experience and decided to give us the Bucket O Soldiers we dreamed of, making them exciting action figures capable of executing important missions like spying on Andy’s birthday party in the opening moments of the first film. They go AWOL in “Toy Story 3” for reasons that my tea-party lion could appreciate.
“When the trash bags come out, we Army guys are the first to go,” says Sarge, voiced by the great R. Lee Ermey from “Full Metal jacket.” His exit foreshadows the peril to come at Sunnyside Daycare.
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8. Slinky Dog
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The toy that no one ever gave me was a Slinky, though I repeatedly asked for one because everybody had a Slinky. C’mon. It wasn’t like I was begging for a Pet Rock. A Slinky finally showed up at my house, left behind at a party. Yo-yo-ing its coils, I soon understood my parents’ reticence. Slinkies stunk. They tangled easily and wound up in a big knot and eventually under your bed, never to be seen again.
“Toy Story’s” Slinky Dog, voiced by Jim Varney in the first two films and Blake Clark in the third, never gets tangled, even when dropping from a second-story window to deposit the toys on the ground. Like the Green Army Men, Slinky Dog is the ideal that we pictured while watching the commercials. Reality, sadly, bites. An early childhood lesson: Keep your expectations low and you’ll never be disappointed.
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7. Bullseye
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You know what other “Toy Story” character is, for all intents and purposes, a dog? Bullseye. Yes, he neighs and whinnies and you can ride him and, as Woody notes, he gallops like the wind. But he’s loyal and playful and licks your face when he’s feeling love. He acts like a puppy. And before all you horse lovers come at me, I know ponies are capable of affection and friskiness. But the way that Bullseye gazes at Woody with those big eyes? That’s pure dog.
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6. Big Baby
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The “Toy Story” movies have gifted us with a host of grotesque dolls: the mangled mutant spider baby that Sid creates in the first film, the dead-eyed ventriloquist dummies that Gabby Gabby commands in “Toy Story 4” and Gabby Gabby herself, one of many evil dolls owing a debt to “The Twilight Zone’s” Talky Tina.
But it’s Big Baby, a crayon-tattooed, life-size enforcer in “Toy Story 3,” that still haunts me. The shot of the battered Big Baby, one eyelid drooping, sitting on a swing gazing at the full moon, is far more chilling than anything in the “M3GAN” movies. Bonus points that Big Baby ultimately sees the error of his ways and finds redemption and, one would hope, a fresh bottle of milk as a reward.
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5. Mr. Potato Head
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Who would have ever thought that Don Rickles, the insult comic famous for brutally roasting people for their looks, their ethnicity and anything else that came to mind, would have a late-career renaissance voicing a talking potato in a family movie series? Rickles’ vocal turn as the sarcastic but devoted Mr. Potato Head along with John Ratzenberger’s wisecracking piggy bank Hamm gave the first three “Toy Story” movies a sharp edge that balanced their sentimentality. And they also won over my dad, who loved Rickles, if for no other reason than starring in the TV series “CPO Sharkey,” the same rank my father held in the Navy.
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4. Lots-o’-Huggin’ Bear
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When I brought my kids to the Disney lot for an early screening of “Toy Story 3,” Katie was 10 and my son, Sean, was 7. As we left the theater, a team of publicists pounced. “Are you OK?” one woman asked them with genuine concern. “What did you think?” They loved it. But you could see why the Disney reps wanted an early read from kids about a movie that, near the end, finds the toys clasping hands and facing their demise with a quiet grace as they’re dragged toward an incinerator on a conveyor belt.
Who put them on this road to ruin? Lots-o-Huggin’ Bear, the greatest villain of the “Toy Story” movies. Sure, Stinky Pete has his moments in the second film, bitter from a life spent trapped in mint condition. But Lotso’s nihilism, borne from being accidentally abandoned and then replaced, made him a despicable despot, far removed from the good old days when he smelled like strawberries.
“You’re all just trash waiting to be thrown away,” Lotso spews. Ned Beatty’s vocal turn, starting warm and folksy and ending with a raving ruthlessness, is one for the ages.
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3. Buzz Lightyear
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Buzz’s “To infinity and beyond” catchphrase connotes adventure and exploration, and the character’s journey from self-serious bravado to emotional vulnerability has given him a superpower far greater than the ability to fly. If you need a rescue mission leader, Buzz is your guy. But I love him best when he’s silly and sensitive and Tim Allen really shines at providing the spaceman with an emotional depth. An unlikely role model for boys — and their dads? Brené Brown would approve.
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2. Jessie
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The opening four minutes of “Up,” the wordless montage depicting Carl and Ellie’s life together, is often cited as Pixar’s pièce de résistance of heartbreak. But the “Toy Story” movies offer their own contenders for that crown. Andy playing with the toys one last time before leaving for college in “Toy Story 3” will gut you. Woody croaking out, “So long, partner” as he drives away? That got me and at that time, I had no idea what I was in for later in life.
And then there’s the flashback scene in “Toy Story 2,” set to Sarah McLachlan singing the beautiful Randy Newman song “When She Loved Me,” telling us how the spunky cowgirl Jessie once had a “special kid” until she was forgotten. Years later, she was found under the bed (yay!) and then abandoned to a donation box (nooooo!). It’s another poignant expression of time passing and the inevitability of change and, with it, grief.
Jessie also has a big heart and bigger spirit and can yodel when she isn’t ruminating on her abandonment issues. (She’s cool enough that Katie dressed up as her one Halloween.) Plus, Jessie, still voiced with such beautiful feeling by Joan Cusack, owns “Toy Story 5,” with the movie even revisiting the aching piano notes of “When She Loved Me.”
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1. Woody
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Woody can be bossy and controlling, jealous and vain. But he’s the hero of the “Toy Story” franchise, “the rootin‘-est tootin‘-est cowboy in the wild, wild West” and the loyal friend and caretaker we’d all be lucky to have. He’s also charged with expressing the films’ thoughts on love and loss, aided, of course, by the sensitive way Tom Hanks puts them across.
“You watch them grow up and became a full person and then they leave,” Woody tells Forky in “Toy Story 4.” “They go off to do things you’ll never see. Don’t get me wrong. You still feel good about it, but then somehow you find yourself after all those years sitting in a closet, just feeling useless.”
If you’re a parent, you know your kids are going to leave. But it’s one thing to know it and another to deal with it when that day when it comes.
Woody understands this. It’s a relief someone does. Because then they can help the rest of us get through it.
The post A highly personal ranking of the 10 best toys in the ‘Toy Story’ movies appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
