estefan wrote:Angus MacLane has been mentioning the television series on Twitter and is acknowledging its existence there, saying he basically views it as the Toy Story equivalent of "The Real Ghostbusters" and other animated shows based on movies.
A lot of them would change things from the movie, depending on what the creators and producers wanted to do or what they were allowed to do. I recently read
an article about the three animated series based on Jim Carrey's 1994 movies, where it was revealed that "Ace Ventura" was the only one allowed to use Carrey's exact likeness and the "Dumb and Dumber" series giving the leads a pet beaver was an executive note.
Even Disney is prone to this. The "101 Dalmatians" series existed in its own universe, picking and choosing elements from the animated and live-action film to use. The "Hercules" series had Hades know Hercules was still alive as a teenager, even though the movie has him only find out when he's already an adult.
The documentary said something like "this movie is what Andy saw at the theaters". Because Andy is so excited about his toy, it can't have been more than a few months since he saw it. In the movie it is still summer outside Andy's house, and ends with Christmas, snow and winter. Maybe it was the big Christmas movie of 1994.
If Star Command is not in the movie, but was added later, the animated series would have been released shortly after, or the toys would have been partly used as a marketing idea to promote an upcoming animated show.
Not only is it meant to be made in the first half of the 90s, it is probably also ment to be a live action. Computer animated movies like that would have been impossible, and it doesn't look like it would have been hand-drawn. That would also have made it one of the most expensive movies ever made, shooting would have started at least a couple of years earlier, and the studio would have decided to play it safe to make sure the money invested were not lost.
Recently mentioned elsewhere; the main reason Disney's live action adaptation of John Carter in the early 90s was dropped was because it would be too difficult and expensive to make (it would cost more than Kevin Costner's Waterworld). Even King Kong from 2005, ten years later, was a huge challenge to make.
(What really matters for the studio is of course that the audience is having a good time at the theaters, and most will probably not pay any attention to these details. But it is fun to use the brain trust approach as someone not involved in its making.)
Mooky wrote:And it wouldn't deal with the passage of time and mortality (i.e. it wouldn't be interesting to a kid Andy's age), it'd be a straight-up action-adventure movie without any deeper themes.
I'm in the camp that says the concept behind this movie doesn't work the way they're trying to promote it. Between the polished look of the movie, muted colors/cinematography, and diversity in characters, there's no way a sci-fi movie like this would have been made in the early 1990s, let alone the '80s. It's probably not that big of a deal for most people, but things like that take me out of the movie.
The only way it'd make sense is if this were a modern reboot of a movie Andy saw as a kid and Andy's taking his own kid to see it. Kind of makes you wonder why they didn't go for that if they didn't invest time and effort into making it look and feel like a true "old school" sci-fi.
Repeating myself, it would have been a very expensive live action movie, and I don't think they would have dared to explore such themes directed towards children. Andy would probably not have been so obsessed about it if they had. If the original Star Wars had been about the importance of good family values and the things that matters most in life instead of just being a rollercoaster of fun and action, it would most likely not have become the phenomena it was.
Instead of making it a remake of the movie Andy saw, or even the "original", Pixar could simply have called the movie a Toy Story spin-off. The 90s movie Andy was could have been made for Disney+.
