To Be a Kid Again & Not Over Analyze

Movie Star?  Fisher-Price HQ Lawn Displays 

I’m hesitant and more than a little embarrassed to admit this, but I spent my afternoon seeing Toy Story 3…finally. If emoticons were still cool, I'd be posting the little blushing one right about now.  I fear what protective parents must've thought when they saw a single, 20-something year old in the theater by himself. 

At this late date writing a review is futile. It’s all old news now. And for the record, I did not—unlike Buffalo News’ Jeff Simon and many others—tear up at the ending. What struck me with Toy Story 3—typical in Disney movies—are all the little “adult” details in the background. There’s always a joke in there for mom and dad, and always some little Easter egg if one is to view between the lines.

I’m assuming you’ve either A) Seen the movie OR B) Don’t give a care. Let that serve as a spoiler warning. In the late scene that takes place at a landfill, it was like déjà vu. The heroes of the movie are trapped on a conveyor belt of trash, quickly headed for the shredder. Of course a last-minute rescue is inevitable—you don’t want a theater of crying kids. But wouldn’t it have been something if the rescue had come in the form of something jamming the shredder’s high-power blades? Something like an old toaster…that would’ve been a great wink-wink joke for those of in the audience who grew up in the 1980s/early 90s and were feeling that déjà vu. There was a Disney movie from our era that involved a very similar scene in a junkyard.

Otherwise, the pluggola and marketing placements especially intrigued me. Mattel has always had its products as main characters in previous Toy Story renditions. But in number three, East Aurora-based Fisher-Price (a Mattel subsidiary) got a significant cut of screen time. There was the classic Chatter Phone, whose FP logo was prominently featured. There was the Corn Popper—a completely worthless push-along toy that makes popping sounds by launching little plastic marbles inside it. I had one as a kid. In one scene where numerous toys are seen scattering, viewers need not look far to see Teddy Bear and Buzzy Bee FP classics swarming through the melee. East Aurorans are inundated with larger-than-life renditions of these toys in town parades and parked on the lawn at 636 Girard (Fisher-Price headquarters).

While the story itself is necessarily void of any serious conflict, analyzing the product placement, pluggola, and hidden jokes in Toy Story 3 made for a good time for this over-analytical mind.