Toy Story 4 is About Religion (and Organ Harvesting)

➡ This text is a conversation from a podcast discussing the Toy Story franchise, focusing on Toy Story 4. The hosts discuss the concept of inanimate objects coming to life, particularly the character Forky, a spork turned into a toy by a child. They question what makes a toy sentient in the Toy Story universe and reference other movies in the franchise. The hosts also share personal anecdotes about their experiences with toys and movies.
➡ The text discusses the double standards in the Toy Story universe, where creating life is seen as adorable when Bonnie does it, but monstrous when Sid does it. It also explores the idea of consciousness and hierarchy in the Toy Story universe, suggesting that humans are like gods who can create life, and toys are like golems. The text also questions the rules of the Toy Story universe, such as why toys can’t let humans see them move. Finally, it discusses the idea of a sliding scale of consciousness, from rocks to humans, and where toys might fit on that scale.
➡ This text seems to express a chaotic situation involving conflict, possibly war, and a struggle for power. It mentions a sense of paranoia, a desire for peace, and a critique of those who criticize without understanding or contributing to the situation. The repeated phrase “you’re welcome” might suggest a feeling of unappreciated effort or sacrifice.
➡ The text discusses the use of AI for specific conversations and its limitations. It also explores the concept of consciousness in toys, as seen in Toy Story 4, comparing them to guardian angels who can influence human decisions. The text further delves into the idea of a caste system among toys, with Woody being seen as a high priest. Lastly, it discusses the shift in Toy Story 4 where toys can be made from anything, challenging previous notions of value and ownership.
➡ The text discusses the evolution of characters in the Toy Story series, focusing on Woody’s transformation from a beloved toy to a mentor figure for other toys. It explores philosophical themes such as the purpose of existence and the importance of faith, likening Woody’s role to that of a priest or missionary. The text also mentions the upcoming Toy Story 5, hinting at potential plot developments. Lastly, it comments on the commercial aspect of the franchise, suggesting a shift towards promoting creativity and reuse over buying new toys.
➡ The text discusses the irony of buying expensive toys that resemble trash, the challenges of crafting with children, and the rules of the Toy Story world. It also touches on the transition of directors during the production of Toy Story 4, and the potential future of AI in movie creation, with Disney possibly leading the way. The text ends with a brief mention of an Avatar screening.
➡ The text is a conversation about a unique movie experience with 4D and 2D projections, and the evolution of Disney and its influence on the film industry. It also discusses the complex themes in Toy Story 4, comparing characters to religious figures and exploring dark themes like organ harvesting. The speakers express anticipation for future developments in animation technology, reflecting on the progression from the first Toy Story to the fourth.
➡ The text discusses various religious beliefs about death and the afterlife, including the concept of ‘Endura’ from the Cathars religion. It also talks about the idea of preparing oneself for death and the possibility of preserving oneself through spiritual practices. The text also mentions the phenomenon of people dying between December and January, possibly due to seasonal depression or a desire to see loved ones through the end of the year. Lastly, it discusses the voice actors in the movie Toy Story and their performances.
➡ The text discusses the evolution of animation movies from 1995 to 2025, highlighting how technology has made it faster and cheaper to produce such films. It also mentions the increase in the number of movies being released each year. The text further discusses the popularity of characters like Groot and Baby Yoda, and the author’s personal experience with watching movies, particularly Toy Story 4 and Avatar. The author concludes by expressing his preference for shorter movies and his difficulty in sitting through longer ones.
➡ The text discusses a unique movie experience where the chairs move and provide physical sensations to match the on-screen action. The author also debates about the concept of sentience in toys, as portrayed in Toy Story, questioning if a child’s act of naming a toy or writing their name on it gives it consciousness. The text ends with a humorous yet thought-provoking question about whether a crayon, if named and used by a child, would gain sentience and then suffer as it’s used up.
➡ The text discusses the concept of inanimate objects becoming sentient, like in the Toy Story movies or a children’s book about conscious crayons. It also explores the idea of these objects being consumable, meaning they cease to exist after use. The text further delves into the origin of sentience in these objects, questioning whether it’s a divine intervention or a human-induced phenomenon. Lastly, it mentions various upcoming projects of the speakers, including comic books, video games, and music albums.

It’s a story of Demiurges and Jesus and Moses and gods and nihilism. Ask about Illuminati sister Charting the upbeat Is it Disney mind control? Is this MK Ultra Deluxe? I call Disney. We go from real to real. I go dance there. Oh, hear me moving and I feel A co business ask about to move A co business teacher come to everybody A co business. A wish upon a star A co business, you know, got to just find, oh, a convict, a new brand, you know, walk. Hello, welcome to the Ault Disney Podcast where we look into all of the secrets inside the mouse and the toys.

The toys in your room. Looking at you, judging you, thinking of running away. Happy New Year 2026. Have you ever had to sleep in a room full of dolls before in any point in your life? Oh, I mean, I had, I have toys in my room, right. So if I watch Toy Store, I could just imagine they’re. They’re staring at me at night. Okay, fair. I had, I had an aunt that we would visit like once every year a couple years. And there was like her extended room was where she stored all of her daughter’s old dolls, but it was an entire room filled with like Victorian looking dolls.

And it is legitimately a creepy thing to be in a huge room full of toys that feel like they’re watching you. I’ve had, I’ve had that. Yeah, the weird, not the weird aunt, but the aunt’s weird doll room. Yes, I’ve been in there. Have I slept in there. I’ve had a sleep in one of those. It was, I think it was only the one time, but yeah, it was. I still remember it all the way. You know, this is like three decades ago in. My aunt has always been a bachelorette or whatever, and she also had like a shrine or has a shrine to Lady Diana in her house.

Well, why are we talking about this? Well, because ultimately what makes that scary is that you. It feels like they could be alive. That when you go to sleep or when they’re not watching you, they can come to life and they can do things. And we haven’t really kept to this, this standard lately, but remember I uncovered that index of all the different folk tales. Well, this is apparently a very well known trope that’s been used over and over. It’s called ATU503, the Helpful Elves. And the Helpful elves are essentially these little golem homunculi that they bring to life to help them make shoes in the middle of the night.

And then they sell the shoes out to the people, and it, like, brings them out of poverty. But this is one of the old archetypal original stories of these inanimate objects coming to life. But Toy Story adds one extra level where humans aren’t allowed to know about it. Right. And then, remember, if we do want to go with that Pixar timeline, then in Brave, an elderly boo who, you know, creates the first inanimate objects that have sentience in that movie. So that’s one of the parts of that timeline I like, because I do like that idea.

Well, because even if it’s not necessarily her, it’s. It’s whoever starts the ball. Yeah. And I. And clearly the little van. I. I think that there’s plenty of character to that. I might make a good argument to that. It’s actually Mickey and Fantasia, but potato, tomato, right? Yeah. Oh, we didn’t do introductions. Matt here, the paranoid American there. You’ve been listening to us for a few minutes already. Here we are, Toy Story 4 going a bit out of order. It’s New Year, so that’s actually exactly New Year where you’re sitting for this recording. January 1st, it’s turned over to the second here.

But, yeah, we went a little out of order because just a few days ago, I don’t even remember what we were talking about, but my family was like, oh, we never saw Toy Story 4. I was like, oh, maybe we should do that. And my wife’s like, yeah, But Toy Story 3 seemed like such an ending I don’t think I’d want to watch for. I spent about four years having that same thought when Toy Story 4 came out, you know, I was like, why would I see Toy Story 4? 3 ended it. Right. Was this your first watch? Second.

I watched it about a year ago, and she was like, yeah, I haven’t watched. Why would I want to go past 3 3? And I’m like, oh, actually, you probably do. It’s. You know, I. I think this one’s pretty good. I. I guess we haven’t done your critical assessment yet, but, yeah, so we. We went to what’s called jail, but basically we went to a blockbuster on New Year’s Eve 2025, and rented a movie. How’s that for Trippy? I mean, that’s actually a pretty long standard in, like, a tradition in the US Is that they’ll always have a movie come out on Christmas Day.

Even so it ends up being one of the few traditional things that people continue to. To do during the holidays. Oh, yeah. I’m just telling you, I Had like basically a Blockbuster Video experience, like yesterday. Well, I think there’s one left here. There is. There’s a documentary about it, I think. Yeah, I talked to the guy who directed that documentary a few years back. So it’s Eugene, Oregon, maybe, something like that. Yeah. But I’m okay with Blockbuster being long and gone and dead. I hated that whole experience. Everything about it was predatory. People don’t remember having to pay like the four or five extra days late fees for all kinds of dumb reasons.

So good. I’m glad Blockbuster said, I’m happy I said it. See, from the mid-90s, I never rented movies. I would go and I would look in their previously viewed movies and I’d buy those. So I didn’t. I never had late because I bought the thing. Well, I mean, that’s how you also end up with a room just full of things that you have to move from, you know, apartment to apartment. Especially in like the early years. Oh, yeah, I had a huge. I had a huge collection of all kinds of analog, VHS and old vinyl. And after, I don’t know, like four or five apartment moves, it was like, man, it would be so much better if I didn’t have to worry about this wall full of crap every time I moved.

And then slowly and slowly it just turned into a hard drive. If I turn my computer and hopefully not destroy everything. You can see this is just one wall full of crap here of several walls of crap. So Those are all CDs. You’re living in the past. I am living in the past. And all the grades too, man. Like, it’s. I’ve had CDs that I pulled out that I haven’t listened to in 20 years and the tops were just peeling off. And I go and look online and it’s like, oh, yeah, that one album, apparently they use this type of ink or that DVD used this type of ink and it just flaked off after X number of years.

Yeah, I have some pretty old CDs that still play. I don’t know if it’s just because they’re always in the room. Like, I don’t keep them in the car. Like, if you kept them in the car all the time, you got Summer and then you, you got Winner. And yeah, I could see that happening. But that, that’s the Toy Story programming, isn’t it? Because I have this room full of crap that I feel like I at least have to maintain. I’m like, this CD hasn’t gotten any attention for a while. I guess I should Play this one.

Well, okay. Well, let’s just jump into. I guess the most profound question this movie puts up is, why am I alive? And how. And how does it happen? But ultimately, it’s. It’s debating on, like, where’s the exact line between a toy worthy of becoming conscious and it? And it all revolves around this forky character, right? Which is what? This child takes a plastic spork and glues two boogly eyes on it, not even aligned, not the same sizes, wraps a little pipe cleaner around it, and then puts popsicle sticks on the bottom as feet. And that becomes a sentient character in the Toy Story universe.

And it’s like, well, could. It could have been a pet rock. Can she just pick a rock up off the ground and be like, your name is Rocky and put her initials on it? Does that become a sentient thing? Right. That was the great child do that. Is. Is Bonnie, like, metaphysically attuned in some way? I mean, she wouldn’t know. But again, if you do want to draw the line all the way back to brave, we have, you know, a magical person starting these things. So it’s like, can anybody do that? Sid’s toys were. Well, In Toy Story 1, Sid’s toys were.

He didn’t do that. He didn’t make a craft, but he was recombining, and it seemed like, I don’t know, shatter their. Their personalities or something, because none of them doctor anything. Well, see, you’re gonna. You triggered me just now because the double standard is so real that when Sid did it, he’s a horrible Victor Frankenstein. He’s creating monsters, and he’s a villain, but when Bonnie does it, oh, isn’t that so adorable that she just created her own little cute homunculus, right? They’re. They’re both doing the exact same thing. And that’s exactly what I thought was, like, how come Bonnie’s allowed to create life and she.

It’s, like, glorious, you know? Oh, my God. She made a little spork into a character. But when Sid did it, he was making monsters just because it was an erector set and it was, like, damaged goods a little bit. But. But here we’ve got Bonnie using literal trash, right? And when he does keep throwing himself into the garbage can, what is supposed to happen in there? Does he just, you know, get crushed to death once he gets thrown into the back of the truck? Now, run by Sid, as we think is the case from Toy Story 3, does his consciousness, like, drift away? Because he’s only been alive for 10 minutes at that point.

I mean, I do crafts with kids. Sometimes they make cool ones. And then like, an hour later, I’m like, oh, there it is in the trash. I didn’t take any home or anything. I think that his draw to the trash without getting too spicy. I don’t want to just straight up say suicidal in the Beastie Boys song only the only time I’d bring that word up. But, like, his affinity to going back to source on his own terms so quickly, it’s actually kind of a deep thought, right? Like, maybe he’s so fresh in the world that he realizes that he should just return back to the void in a way, instead of being trapped in this, like, inferior body.

Because the. Because. Because slowly, right, I’m starting to archon now, keeping him trapped. Well, and it really made me think, because, like, where would Christopher Robin fit within the Toy Story universe, too, right? Like. Like the analogy of Winnie the Pooh to Christopher Robin we’ve talked about before. Maybe there’s, like, a demiurge kind of thing. Maybe there’s, like, an alchemist homunculus kind of thing. And there’s something similar in Toy Story, but now that we’ve got Andy, we’ve got Andy’s parents, we’ve got Bonnie, so we’ve got, like, this different hierarchy of gods, kind of, right? So are we talking, like, old pagan gods where, like, oh, that’s my dad, Zeus.

Right? Like, he’s the old cranky guy. Are we talking Old Testament, New Testament? Like, I’m trying to still figure out who the characters in the Toy Story universe align with. And I think I kind of got it. The one that makes the most sense is that God is still God. Humans are still human. And then the humans in the Toy Story universe are all basically high priests, or they’re all alchemists, and they’re all capable of creating golems, which is what most of these things are, because they even mention that the child writing its name on you, like, physically, is some sort of a magic sigil that makes you more important than other toys.

So it feels like, like, golems. Like, that’s what all the creatures in Toy Story, but they’re golems that aren’t allowed to let you know that they’re sentient. So they’re almost like guardian angel golems. Well, since we’ve done several of these movies recently, let’s draw the line, because Winnie the Pooh, only Christopher Robin knows about it, and it’s most likely his imagination. It’s not real. In the physical world. I lied to my family when we were watching this movie. I was like, oh, they got the same guy that did the voice of Olaf, Josh Gad, to do the voice for Forky, you know, and.

And I was like, oh, it’s. It’s not that. It’s. It’s Buster Bluth from Arrested Development does the voice of Forky. But I. I concede on that. Although right now, that’s canon with Winnie the Pooh. But it seems the Winnie the Pooh universe, Christopher Robin could easily invite somebody else into that universe, and it would be natural that they would also now see Winnie the Pooh and everything else. But maybe that’s also just like Christopher Robin is in a padded cell somewhere, and whoever’s talking to him shows up there. I don’t know how it all plays out, like, if he’s crazy or not.

But I think the reason I was saying they’re being like, oh, it’s the same voice who did Olaf is like. Because it’s almost. It is a very similar character. Weirdly innocent. In the world of Frozen, it seems only Elsa possesses the magic and. Anyone listening? We haven’t gotten to Frozen 2 yet. Maybe they, you know, get more into the stuff that I’m talking about. But, you know, yeah, like, Elsa has the power. Nobody else in Frozen. And Olaf is allowed to walk amongst us. You know, he just doesn’t want to get in the summer. Probably Toy Story, like you said, they have a fully, like, you know, like, breakaway society going on that.

That we can’t know about. So even if something’s important, you know, the worst foes just have to stop moving because the humans are there. That. That trumps any other thing they can do. And I know there is a canon that was hinted at a little bit of like, or else what. What happens? And I think that it’s just bad for the toys themselves. But if. If you were to keep expanding on that now, if you’re the kid that thinks your toys are alive legitimately, you’re going to be crazy and you’re going to be locked away. So I guess there’s like, an risk of being ostracized if.

Because, like, your toy knows that if you see it, then you’ll tell other people and you’ll seem crazy. So they’re helping you by not letting you see them because it’ll drive you crazy if you see them. Not Disney. So you can’t draw the direct line. But that’s what happened in the Borrowers already, right? The father’s like, if you got spotted even by someone really nice, we have to leave now because things are going to go bad, even if they’re nice. So I. That’s what happened. He was right. Well, there’s this concept of, like, can a God create a rule that wouldn’t be kept, right? So is it that the toys can’t allow the people to see them, or is it that people can literally just never see them and at whatever cost, like, something horrible happens to the toy if it came to that exact moment when they would see them out of place, like, maybe the toy loses its life or something.

Well, but then the animals, right, they can ride the cats. The one in this one just goes chasing the toys because the cat can’t tell the human. So the animals are, like, in a weird, like, between space. Well, so that makes sense though, because. And this, I’ll get a little abstract here, because I’m still forming my theory. I don’t have a solid one yet, but that we’ve got this, like, hierarchy of consciousness being bestowed, and certain people are allowed to bestow it on others, but it degrades over time. So if God makes the human, then now the human has this.

This godliness in them, right? Like some kind of a. Like a spirit in them. But now the humans, they can technically make little homunculi, because even in the Toy Story universe, all these toys are ultimately made by humans. So now the little homunculi can be bestowed with the same sort of, like, spirit in them, but it’s not being bestowed by God himself. It’s being bestowed by humans at some part of the process, either through magic sigils or through just like, who knows? Fill in the blank. But because it’s being bestowed by humans, it’s at a lesser quality.

So, like, we’re the demiurge. And then the toys, they could potentially. At this point, my first thought was like, well, could Woody make a forky? I’m sure he could. They could all get together and make a forky little friend and put, like, Woody’s name on it. So, like, how fractal can this Toy Story universe go? Now if we can watch life being created mid movie, some metaphysical stuff. I think I’m talking 70s and 80s here. Let’s consider Jane Roberts, Seth Material and Dolores Cannon’s books, which kind of the. The. One of the. Both of those kind of suggest, you know, the creating your own reality as a collective consciousness or whatever.

So the idea is like, actually a rock is conscious. It’s just that, you know, at that lower Level, because it has to be used to be in a rock. Once you get past that, why not be a tree? You can do a little more. The secret life of plants, all of that. You move up to animals, maybe you move up to humans, you transcend. Where would the toys fit in on that scale? You know, so a sort of a sliding scale of consciousness. We want to keep it more simple, right? Bottom would be rocks. Top. Top that we know of are humans.

But maybe there’s more than that. You know, dolphins, whales. Right. I mean, you know what? Echo the dolphin, he wants to reprogram your mind, man. AI. A server farm. Who knows? Yeah, Yeah. I mean, I. Is. Is everybody now talking to AI? I only started really talking to AI like, last week, and it’s all gear talk about guitars, like, insanely specific gear questions. That’s awesome. I mean, I think. I think that’s what it’s for. It’s to have a conversation that nobody else wants to have with you. It’s your literally, your last resort. If you have no other form to get that out, it’s a good last resort.

But beyond that, I don’t know if I suggest it for a lot right now. No, I wouldn’t. I don’t want to have this conversation. AI and also, I mean, you very quickly start to see the limitations, right? It’s like, you know, reviewers say this. I’m like, do they? Who said that? And then it’s like, I don’t know. Like, no, you don’t. You’re telling me what I want to hear, aren’t you? I guess I’ve gotten to the point now, too, where it’s. It’s been so inundated that I can see through it. Like, I just read past it.

Like, I Like, it does the whole, like, oh, what a great idea. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And, like, it’s not just this. It’s this. I can kind of see through those patterns and just pick out the information that I even want. Every once in a while, I’ll even let it know. Like. Like, you’re being super annoying right now. But the information is being presented. Okay? So just so that you know, I know. And I’ll do weird things. I’ll be like, describe the pickups of a US Stratocaster using the voice of Buddha, you know? Well, so.

So the. The AI thing, though, is a good analogy for the same fractal premise in Toy Story 4, right? Because we’re getting that. We don’t get toys are different scale of consciousness somehow. Like. Like a Could a toy create a toy in the universe right now? As a. As up To Toy Story 4, I don’t know about 5 or 6 or 7 or however many goes up to. But in Toy Story 4, they don’t lead on that toys could create toys. But already, even if that’s the case, the toys can affect human decisions. So therefore, the toys could orchestrate an event to make a human want to create another toy and thereby create another toy.

So they do, even if by proxy, have the ability to create new life, which is a simulation of that, like, fractal system, which is only one tiny step away from them doing it without the human’s intervention whatsoever. Right? I mean, Toy Story 1, the toys do mentally scar Sid in some way, I’m pretty sure. And in this one, you know, dad’s going to jail because of the toys. They didn’t actually go, Joe. I did like the line, though. I was like, oh, that’s intense. The toys. I mean, he should have gotten arrested after that, you know, driving his RV into the carnival.

He should have gone to jail. It was Toy Story 2, I think, too, when they. They lost that one business owner a whole bunch of money who was going to sell them to Japan to some original collector of, like, all the western toys, right? So it seems weird. It’s like, oh, we can’t let humans see us or know of our existence, but we can profoundly shape their realities. So the closest thing that I can think of, maybe someone in comments can mention a better example of this, but would kind of be like a guardian angel. Because as far as I know from the 80s and 90s after school specials, that guardian angels, for the most part, don’t let you know they’re real because it would destroy your faith.

Because if you know that an angel is real, then you know that God is real and that it gives up the whole game. You’re like, you’re not, like, if I tell you, hey, you just lost the game, right? That’s kind of like an angel showing up and letting you know, oh, crap, like, I’m here to help you. But now also, you’re screwed because I just took away your. Your freedom of thought and choice. But angels show up. They shoot a laser through the sky. Sorry, I was just. When you were talking about the angels, I was like, we also talk about some very different angels in different contexts.

Well, that’s an. That’s an alternate timeline, but it’s the same premise. So in. In this Toy Story, I think that that’s the closest analogy, though, is that Toys are kind of like guardian angels where that it’s on them to make sure that humans don’t see them, because if humans see them, it just creates more problems. But that in. In theory or in practice, they could reveal themselves to people, which is kind of like an angel thing to do. Like the angel decided to reveal. That’s how we get religions, right? Is an angel reveals itself to a person, and then they create a religion out of this.

So. So through that kind of line of logic, I’m starting to see Woody as kind of like this high priest. And he’s. And he’s got. Forky comes into the fold. And Forky is kind of like, I don’t need to worship any God. I don’t have to worship this Boo character you keep talking about. And Woody’s like, no, not only do you have to worship Boo because she’s your God, but you’re going to probably have another God after her. Like, I had a previous God named Andy, and. And Andy’s gone. So now like Samaria. Now he got a new covenant, right? It’s.

It’s a just regular syncretism, but it’s also him kind of like trying to grasp on, because with Andy, he was the high priest. Andy’s the one that created him with the sigil, right? Or he at least anointed him high priest with the name on his feet. So Woody’s high priest. Everyone else is kind of like under the priest class. So there’s like, definite cast system within Toy Story that’s unspoken, but I think that’s one of the first criteria. You got the name, you got the speak about on this movie. And, well, in this one, it takes over because not only does this piece of literal trash have the girl’s name on it, so it throws the caste system all over.

Now it’s like, however much the human that created you cares about you is what puts you in the society. So technically, Forky could aspire to be like a high priest if he wanted to, but he just is the second coming. He’s kind of like the new Jesus of the toy world story. Like, he’s the new religion. And the new religion is that anyone can be made out of anything at any time, which is a. It’s completely radical. This is like New Testament versus Old Testament sort of radicalism. And also, we do have to acknowledge, and we talked about this when we did Toy Story one, I think that Andy kind of sucks.

He’s not creative. He never made a forky. Sid was making his forkies in the house Next Door. But Andy seems wildly uncreative for the most part. And honestly, that was my biggest complaint about every other Toy Story movie so far. Not, not like critically, right, but. But that they ultimately are teaching you to love and cherish your inanimate objects and that your inanimate objects are looking out for you. They’ve got like your best interests in mind and which is kind of like a surreal dystopian pushing away from humanity. It’s kind of like an anti human approach in my opinion.

And I feel like that’s the most insidious part of it. And this one starts to retreat a little bit from that because in Toy Story 1 and 2 it’s, it’s also. And it has to be name brand and it has to be store bought new. And it can’t be a hand me down, otherwise you’re a monster like Sid. But now In Toy Story 4, it’s almost inverted that it’s like actually you don’t have to spend any money. You can go through the garbage and assemble something with just glue and put your name on it. And now you’ve got the best toy in the entire world, which does have some ultimate truth to it, right? Like some very profound truth to it.

This is also though, the, the movie where Woody basically loses and or renounces his religion, right? I mean by the end he’s out. He’s, he’s. He’s off the grid now with Bo Peep, right? He doesn’t. Because his original God left him Andy and his new God, Bonnie is. Doesn’t really love him enough. And he can. He won’t be able to make it to that level. He’ll never be the high priest in this new religion. So even though he gets to keep his knowledge as a high priest, it’s for a dead God. Just like. But. And it’s.

And it’s weird too because he does have value. Him and Bo Peep ironically have value. So they could be resold and owned by someone else to give him some attention. By the end of the movie, they don’t have much value. They have become somewhat trash. Keep in mind, Bo Peep has. Is tied herself or porcelain together with tape in several places. Try selling that on ebay. Woody has had his insides taken out, right? So he’s been permanently altered by the end of the movie. And he ain’t gonna be worth what he was in Toy Story 2 anymore, you know, I guess, yeah.

To humans he won’t. But the fact that he can now act as like this High priest to these young bucks. Because ultimately Forky also kind of represents like an atheist or a nihilist maybe a nihilist might be a better example of this. But he doesn’t care. He doesn’t understand the rules of why would I care about this creator or like what even is a creator? I’m just a piece of trash. Let me go back into the trash. I think that that ultimately is something that Woody has to teach him out of. He has to be like, no, no.

It’s like life is worth living. Don’t back to the void all of a sudden. Now there’s, there’s things that you’re here to do and it’s that you have to pay this God respect, otherwise your God will die. Which I think is ult. Like that’s a very Frasier golden bow take on it. But that’s that the original religions, it was a two way thing. It wasn’t just God has to like even know you exist and you’re just worshiping him as a thank you. It was that in order for you to keep living and your kids to keep living that you have to keep your God alive.

And you can only keep him alive by doing things for God and praying to God. So that’s kind of the dynamic here. I guess that’s. So I said he renounced his religion base. I guess it’s more like he’s become a missionary. Him and Bo Peep. You know, it’s like going on my parents church growing up. They’d always be like in the prayers as big so and so and so and so who have, you know, gone off to develop in places to be do missionary work. So you know, Woody hasn’t, he hasn’t lost his faith as much as he is now a missionary.

Him and his crew trying to hook up toys with kids, but not themselves. They’re over it, you know, they’re past it. Well, he so what is over the hill like Tom Hanks. He’s priest class and priest class meaning that every other role in society is someone that has a very utilitarian, focused role. Like for example, Buzz is basically the bodyguard. He’s the guy that’s out policing things, making sure that, you know, he’s kind of like the brute force guy. Woody, he would have been that guy. He would have been the old sheriff in the wide west that just kind of shows up and shoots and takes the bad guys out.

But since Buzz has ultimately taken it over and Disney has gotten rid of guns for the most part now, Woody only has to ponder, like the nature of reality. Right. He’s out there pondering like the mysteries of nature itself, which makes him a de facto priest, because that’s the only role that that person in like an informing society or religion. They start out with the priest and then eventually they turn to philosophers, like thousands of years later. But I think that’s, that’s what we’re looking at is, is that like this new priest class being constructed. I was thinking of one other route, which would be the Hindu one.

The idea being, of course, you can, you know, go and become a monk as a, as a child or something if you want, but the idea that’s perfectly reasonable to be a, a house, a homeowner, and then at age 60 or whatever, now you become like a ascetic, you know, like meditating eight times, eight hours a day sort of guy. Right? Like, that’s another route where you just live your life normally. And then right at the end, you kind of get serious, like, I’m gonna live my life and then I’m gonna get like, you know, dive real deep into Hindu stuff.

I wonder if there’s like a bell curve meme to that too, though, where the person that goes all the way in eight hour meditations a day, they’re only halfway through the bell curve. And then eventually when you get to that top tier again, it’s like. And I just, I just meditate for, you know, 20 minutes here and there as needed. And that’s the real way to do it. I mean, that’s basically I do, although I never did the eight hours a day. So I’m not going to, I’m not going to put myself out. You got to go through it, I think.

Yeah, yeah, you got to go. Got to go through it. Yeah. It’s like you learn it, then you forget it. Right? So I think that the, the thing that perplexes me the most still about Toy Story and other movies like it. There was a Christmas movie by Jim Henson, I can’t remember the exact name of it came out in like the late 80s that had the same premise, that all the toys came alive when a human wasn’t in the room. And that the ultimate thing was like, you couldn’t be caught out of place. Otherwise the world explodes.

I don’t know. It’s always this implied doom. But I’m still trying to figure out in the Toy Story world, why does that rule exist? Because it seems to create all sorts of complexity and it seems like the most profound question, and then the ultimate one is what Forky throws in at the end here, where he just goes, why am I alive and knifey or whatever. What is the other one’s name? She’s coming back in a new one apparently. But so those. Apparently Bonnie is now eight years old and still has four kisos. She kept that thing.

I might be concerned. But also, whatever. She might have like a puzzle piece on her backpack. Right. And just. I mean, this is like the poster shows it too. Basically, Bonnie gets a, a kid’s tablet. So that takes her attention. I don’t, I don’t know how Woody comes back. Coming back in June. Toy Story 5 is coming out in June. And that’s the basic premise, apparently, that she’s got. She’s an iPad kid now. She’s an iPad kid now. Right. So, okay, this might be. I don’t want to make any predictions, but I think the next iteration is that your apps can love you and ultimately I can love you.

Yeah. It says that, that Tim Allen is Bud Lightyear. Alan also voices the multi Buzz, a group of 50 high tech buzz Lightyear units stuck in demo mode. Okay. Which might be good because I was saying this out loud. Watching with the fam yesterday, I was like, buzz Lightyear doesn’t need to be in this movie at all. He has, like, very little to do with the story. I mean, the inner voice thing is fun, but I’m like, he narratively has no purpose in this movie. Well, just that he is there as Woody’s backup and equal. Otherwise, in this movie, Woody has zero peers.

There’s no one else on the same level as him that can converse with him. Aside from Buzz Lightyear. That’s kind of his only role. They spend most of the movie in, you know, different places. So you got basically talking to himself with his button, which I, I thought that was a good bit. But. But, well, Buzz also says, like, I can take over at one point when he’s doing watch. And what he’s like, no, no, don’t worry about it. You know, I got this on this mission. But it. I think his only role in here is to let you know that this universe has a Buzz sidekick because they’ve already invested enough money in, so they can’t just let him, like, you know, turn into a completely secondary character.

Yeah. Production wise, I don’t think it’s a surprise to anyone that when Toy Story 3 made all the money in the world, they started thinking about this. The idea being like, oh, this one’s going, oh, that did take, what, nine years? But they’re like this one’s going to be like a love story, which actually makes sense. That is pretty much what we got out of it. So a little bit, I mean, I think that I maybe just because the way that I watched it, it was way more about these deep philosophical concepts about life and creation, less about the.

But here, here’s one that I think is really funny is that the story of this movie is on its surface that you can create your own toys. If we just like a superficial version, you can create your own toys. You don’t need to buy toys. Or if you do buy toys, you can get used toys. The first time that we see all of those as acceptable alternatives. And it’s the opposite of you need to go to the store and buy a brand new toy out of the package. You get the inversion of that. Yet when this movie came out and still now there are like Disney forky toys, but you would go and buy an actual toy that was made to look like a piece of trash.

So you’re still buying a real, like a real name brand expensive toy versus just getting your kid their own fork and googly eyes and pipe cleaner to make their own. So I just thought there was something like obscenely ironic but also entertaining about that whole dynamic. Here’s something. For Christmas, I’m doing crafts and it’s supposed to be like this reindeer mask. But it’s just I have like small children that I have to do a lot of the work. They can color, whatever, but I do, I have to do a lot of cutting and putting together. We just, there’s no time to do it.

It was too elaborate of a craft that the, they had chosen. So what ended up happening is they colored. It was like a top piece of paper for the head and then a bottom for the jaw. And then you would tape, you know, tape around the thing so you could wear it and you would add the antlers and the ears. But I didn’t have time for the strap that makes it a mask, the antlers or the ears. So the kids were basically walking out of my classroom with like dog heads because without the ears and antlers they were like, they were like, you know, like they thought it was a dog.

I was like, yeah, I’m just going to let them believe that. And, and they’re, you know, you can make it talk but you can’t put it on your head because we didn’t have time to do the straps. So I was just sending kids off with bizarre dog heads. And are they, are they sentinent? Do they go home, and if they put their name on it, did they start going around, you know, like a psycho dog in the Toy Story world? Probably. Again, I mean, there’s. Think about all the things that a kid might write its name on.

You know, like NES cartridges, underpants. Does happen. Is it a dog now? Because the kid thought it was a dog and put their name on it. So now it’s imbued with the spirit of a dog, even though the materials were meant to be reindeer, I guess. Yeah. What is Forky, though? Is Forky a person? Forky’s a Forky a dog. Actually, Forky is the wrong name. Forky’s a spork. They even call it out in the movie. Right? It’s. It’s Sparky. But again, I think it goes back to the same. And then here. Here’s another rule that. I don’t know how effective this was because it’s immediately broken.

But the rule in Toy World is toys don’t go to school. They literally say, that’s a rule. Toys don’t go to school. And then Woody immediately breaks it by jumping into this backpack. And it does seem that, like, the. The backpack is almost this portal. It’s like the way that you can tran. Like, actually jump between this point of no return. It’s kind of like crossing the void is entering a backpack or entering any sort of little pocket that, like, a toy can sneak into. Because that’s the way that they, like, traverse worlds in Toy World, because otherwise, they’re not allowed to go anywhere outside of maybe the room that they’ve been put in.

Well, it could be, like, denominational as well. Like, you know, at my church that people are drinking wine at, you know, New Year’s and stuff. Why it’s wine at the communion, whatever, all that. Another church, man, those people are never drinking any alcohol. So it might be in, like, there are immutable rules of the religion, you know, like, you cannot let humans know you see you move. But maybe it’s like in Bonnie’s room, you can’t go to school, but in Sid’s room, who cares? I go. Who sets the rules of Bonnie’s room if Woody is the original high priest of Andy’s world.

But, like, who’s. Because I don’t remember consciousness. Because she’s imbuing these with consciousness, I guess, so that they. They’re all still feeding off of her life force. So any rules that. That bind her are also binding the toys in, like, indirect ways. Although I think by the end of this movie, it’s clear that it’s not like the child is imbuing the consciousness. The consciousness is just there. Because once you are a lost toy, there is no child to imbue you with consciousness anymore. I get. So it’s just a one off. Like once you’ve got it, you got it and there’s no losing it unless you die in that pit of fire in Toy Story 3.

Right. Something else. I haven’t done too much of the production stuff, which honestly I don’t think we need to. But there is one very important thing to mention that you’ve already alluded to how some of the philosophical things seem a little different here. This is where the key turn happens with John Lasseter, because he was going to come back and direct this. He directed one and two, he executive produced three and probably put a fair amount of attention on it. He was, he was the director of this until 2016 when he became lots of Huggin Laster was asked to leave the company.

So the movie is half done by the original Toy Story guy and then half done by. Actually when we do Inside out, that was this director’s previous movie for Pixar or whatever. And Pixar of course is always like a. Seems to be a very committee sort of thing. You know, it’s not like alternative theory really works here, but we are going from the original Toy Story guy getting, you know, kind of forcibly booted out in the middle and other people completing it. So. So basically Lassiter is Woody and then the new director is going to be forky.

Yeah, you could look at it that way if you want to. But Bonnie, I guess is just the project manager of whoever was running this particular movie. Exactly. But yeah, that. That is probably why. And then Toy Story 5 is going to be the first Toy Story with zero, you know, creative contributions from. Well, it’s going to be completely created by Chat GPT, I believe probably. Or will it. I do know. And do we know this is the truth? But the new Avatar does have a disclaimer at the beginning saying no AI was used in the creation of this movie.

Okay. I feel like you have to believe him in that case. I mean, how are you going to check, you know, But I guess, yeah, I guess so. Although if anyone could do it, like they. They have the resources to do it. And. And Disney actually just signed a huge deal, I believe, with OpenAI to have all sorts of exclusive rights. So now you can go, or eventually you’ll be able to go to Sora or any of these other tools. And be like, put, you know, show me Mickey Mouse doing X, Y and Z. Because Disney’s got a massive library that they can use to just feed AI training.

And they’ve done that. So it doesn’t seem like it’s too far away for Disney being one of the first companies that says, make your own Disney movie. Pick. Pick the top five characters you want in your movie. Pick the locations. Okay, hit generate. Now you can, you know, sit this in front of your kid for the next hour and a half, and they’ve got a dynamically created movie. Like, Disney will be one of the first companies that’s making that a real thing. I mean, pop culture conspiracy theories. I mean, I have no evidence to back this up.

This is my feeling. Or maybe I’m just turning into a spiteful fart. But I’m like, I swear I’ve watched Marvel movies in the past three years that must have had the script at least partially written by A.I. you know, you tell the A.I. what you want and then you just go and edit. Right? That sort of thing. I think really what we’re seeing is that the, the low end of what we already accept from humans is maybe not as good as the high end of what we could accept from AI and the more that those two lines bump in the middle, at some points, AI will make something superior to something that, like a person in Hollywood that’s got that job and has been doing it, AI will make something better than what they would have made by default.

But I don’t know if you’ll ever get like an AI Kubrick or like an AI Fill in the blank of whoever one of your favorite directors is. Right? Yeah, we’ll see. I mean, that’s the fascinating thing about it because it’s a. You know, in 10 years, this conversation is going to be anarchaic and weird, you know, because who knows what. What the deal is in that case. Oh, quick tangent. My, My Avatar screening. You as a non theater guy especially, I have to talk about my Avatar screening. Not in 3D. That was a little. It’s like going to see Avatar.

You. You have to choose from like 16 different permutations of what you’re going to see. So I got the 4 dx, I got the moving chairs. They were spraying water in my face. And you. Wait, the 4D is not also 3D? I thought it might be, but it wasn’t. I guess, I guess if they, if they give you 3D glasses and spin you around in a chair for three hours, they’re worried you’re gonna vomit. There were signs that said, no alcohol, which I ignored because they sell at the concession stand. But. But yeah, when I sat down, I actually had a guitar.

And I sit down, a lady sits next to me, and I. You might want to check that guitar. I was like, oh, yeah, maybe you’re right. And I went and checked the guitar. Movie starts in the entire theater, all the chairs, like, okay, yes, that was good advice, lady. We don’t want to have a story of jazz in 4D. It was fun. It was entertaining. And then the screening was direct X. Have you ever heard of this? So it was in 2D, but the entire front wall of the theater was projected on, which allowed them for most of the scenes to also project on the sides of the theater.

So you’re also seeing the movie in your peripheral vision. Interesting. Okay, no, I’ve never heard of that before. I didn’t get the 3D, which was disappointed, but I definitely got the weird. I think the thing with Avatar is that you get a weird theater experience. That’s the whole point of Avatar. I’ll probably never watch that movie again. I’ll probably never watch the second one again. I’m like, I did it. Completed. It’s an experience. It’s an experience. Right. I can’t imagine trying to just sit around at home watching those. Well, maybe we’ll make our way to them at some point.

Yeah. Actually, this is Disney now. They have a whole theme, parkland. So Avatar is in the purview of things we do. And they’re pretty animated. I don’t know. As Disney swallows up more companies, it’s like, oh, now all of these are on deck. Right? Any. Technically, anything on Disney plus is fair game for us in the future. Well, that’s the big news. Now it’s like, oh, okay, one. One more media company down. Is this just. Yeah, let’s buy Warner Brothers. Why? Because we can. Well, yeah, wasn’t it. There was someone that was offering by Disney. Oh, yeah, I’m sure.

Yeah. So I. I don’t understand how the corporate world works. That’s why I live the life I have, but I barely understand money. Another fun topic that comes up in Toy Story 4. Organ harvesting. Okay. Yeah. See, I put it as just like, Woody’s not valuable anymore because he’s not in his original condition. But yeah, we’ve. We’ve taken out his kidneys, haven’t we? Absolutely. Well, he. He actually is confronted with the person that’s like, oh, you’re the same blood type as me. I How’s that kidney work? Oh, your kidney’s working well. Oh, that’s crazy, because my kidney’s not working so well and it becomes sort of a very nuanced.

Right. If. If you’re watching that as a child, it’s probably like the first time that you even ponder that particular dilemma. That I can be in a situation where there’s something inside of my body that somebody else wants and they’ll just take it from me. It’s very dark, right? If these weren’t toys. This is one of the darker themes you can put into any movie is that someone kidnaps another person and is threatening to surgically remove something from them. Gabby, Gabby, Gabby. That she is interesting as the villain or whatever of the movie. Like, you know, like Lotso, of course, is just a horrible villain.

You can hate lots of. Right. We don’t hate lots of too much around here. But is he gonna murder me at night whenever I go to bed? Yeah, I think Matzo might get up at night and try to murder me. I don’t know. But I didn’t put my name on his foot or anything. So I guess. You know what, though? They can all. Everyone can be reformed. All these different toys ultimately get reformed. I don’t think we’ve ever actually seen a truly bad toy lot. So he chose. He could have been reformed and he chose no and then ended up, you know, like toy hell as he strapped to the front of a dumpster truck.

You know, I. I think that he just didn’t have the right people to convert him. He could, in theory, he could have been converted. And I wonder if that was like, maybe even an in house complaint about Toy Story 3. And they’re like, huh, we need to make a more nuanced villain. Which they didn’t need to. Lots is great. But I did find it interesting that they wanted to really grayscale the villain of a children’s movie. I think they did a decent job with this one. And then right. Right after the organ harvesting plot line, there was a line that someone said.

I think it was Bo. I can’t remember who they were talking about. And they said, what would Woody do? And it brought me right back to that whole, like, spiritual hierarchy. It’s like, wait, is Woody Jesus now? Like, hold on, let me, let me rethink this. Because he’s trying to bring this, like, old message or, like, a message of, like, don’t return to the void. Here’s a reason. Here’s this, like, law that needs to be upheld. But the more I thought about it. I think that the closest archetype, if he’s not a homunculus, if we, like, put him into, like a God Jesus kind of dynamic, I think he’s like Moses.

He’s kind of the one that’s saying, hey, there’s these laws that these gods care about and let me try and help you, like, follow all of them and establish this order. But eventually he gets phased out and then he gets evangelical about, you know, cooking up toys with children from the sidelines. Well, and it’s going to be a slow progression, but I think that ultimately, yeah, it’s because once if you look at a person watching Toy Story, like, and, like, going through all the different movies in order, it starts with inanimate objects have emotions and spirit.

And now we’re at Even trash can have spirit. So the very next step is going to be that, well, then what is spirit? If spirit can be contained in trash or in toys or in people or in anything else, then why couldn’t it just be in your iPad? And I. I guess that’s. That’s the trajectory. I guess so. Hey, now, you know what? Us talking. This is making me more excited to see five now. Like, it looks like they are going to keep drawing some of those lines. Honestly, when it comes to Disney movies, I don’t think that there’s always an immediate reason to be like, oh, screw, they’re on.

They’re on. You know, number seven. Now I can’t go and see that. You can, because it’s a temperature check. It’s. It’s a just like what Pixar movies always were. Even when we started watching the very first ones, it became a checkpoint in how far along is the industry. Right. And at Toy Story 4, even, it’s far enough along that it looks convincing. There was some scenes in here where it shows like a stuffed animal. And I swear, if you squinted the right way, it just looked like an actual person in a furry suit dancing around. So we’re kind of at the Fidelity.

Yeah, because up. And we are skipping about four years to get here. So we’ll see a little more. But even as recently as, geez, what was the last time we were doing? I don’t remember, but, you know, like, oh, this like, like Frozen or whatever. It’s like, oh, they’re using this engine now. Toy Story 4 is like, whatever. This is what these movies look like. The technology is there now. It does. I mean, can you develop it more? I guess. But I’m like, this is pretty much looks Like, I think what it would in, you know, someone’s.

But therein lies the whole entire case is that When Toy Story 5 comes out, that’s what is going to let you know what’s the new thing? Like, what else can you do now that you couldn’t do last time? That’s where you see it are in these high scale Disney and other kind of like blockbuster movies. Like, that’s usually where you get to see what. What kind of Psyop technology are they going to be using on me in the news. Let me get a preview of it in a. In a movie that I just paid for. I mean, I do remember seeing Toy story in 1995 and being like, oh, this is very cool.

It’ll be cool how they can make this look better in the future. Right. Toy Story 4. You don’t think that all you’re like, this is what it is. You know, it’s a. It’s a story of demiurges and Jesus and Moses and gods and nihilism. And even if you want to look at Forky trying to continuously, like, off himself, I need to just bring up another fascinating angle that. That has been traditionally a taboo in almost every single religion across the board, regardless of how wacky and crazy your religion is. Except, and I swear I didn’t do this one on purpose, but I’m.

I don’t know if you can see I am wearing my Heaven’s Gate shirt. So technically there are some religions that endorse it. One of them being the Cathars, had a something called Endura, which was also known as like the faithful death or something like this. But it was like, if I’ve already been forgiven, all my sins have been forgiven and I’m in the right eyes of the Lord mine as well. Like, quit while I’m ahead. Like, I don’t want to live for another year because I might screw up in a year from now and no longer be in his good graces.

So that I’m at this point, it was called Endora. I don’t think that’s what Forky is doing necessarily. Well, it’s like the rainbow body that we’ve talked about in the past too. If you’re at a certain level, you can prepare yourself to die. Right? Right. And I mean, there’s other versions of this and some every once in a while they’ll scan like a golden Buddha statue and be like, oh, there’s a skeleton in there. Like, there’s an actual dude in there. Because there’s other concepts. Another Version of, like, a spiritual homunculus where if you focus long enough, you can turn yourself into this, like, forever preserved being.

But ultimately what you’re doing is you’re just starving yourself to death intentionally. I want to look up one of the weirdest is the Autobiography of a Yogi. It’s. Is it the bee guy? There’s something to do with, like. Like, honey or something? Oh, no, no. I just. I wanna. It’s been a while since I looked at it, so I’m trying to find how he. How he passed. So. Okay, there you go. He looked very, very healthy. Went and made a speech and basically said, out, folks. And then he, like, had a heart attack or something. Maybe he knew it was coming and he was like, okay, I might as well make a cool show out of it.

Or maybe it’s yogic powers, right? It’s hard to tell not to just get immediately. Well, I guess we’re 50 minutes and I can get a little bit dark. But there are statistics that are interesting that a lot of people die between the end of December and January, like, more proportionally than anywhere else on a calendar. And that some of the theories of people trying to explain why, aside from just the, you know, seasonal depression, the fact that there might not be as much warmth and light and stuff out, but one of it is that maybe people spiritually, like, they want to hang on through seeing, you know, their friends and family through, like, a very specific, you know, end of the year season.

And they hold on just long enough, and then they’re like, okay, I saw everyone I needed to see. We’re out of here. Okay, I. I have to read what happened because this is so bizarre. He attended a dinner for the visiting Indian ambassador to the US blah, blah, and Los Angeles. At the conclusion of the banquet, Yogananda spoke of world peace, blah, blah, blah. He read from his poem My India, concluding with the words, where Ganges woods, Himalayan caves and men dream. God, I am hallow. My body touched that sod. And then he slumped to the floor and he was dead.

He knew how to make an exit for sure. I know. That’s why it’s stuck in my head. It’s been like 10 years since I read that or whatever. I was like, that’s. Imagine. Imagine trying to follow that. He forkyed, tried to forky. So I don’t know. There’s another. There’s a deep conversation there to have with a kid. Not just the organ harvest thing, not just the what makes a God? But now it’s like. Like, mommy, why Does Forky want to keep returning back to the trash? And it’s like, we’ll talk about that. Well, here’s a brand new song to that with you.

I do. Honestly, I. I know I smack talk Randy Newman a fair amount on these soundtracks, but that was a. That was a great use of Randy Newman in a. Randy Newman. Please don’t kill yourself. Yeah. Don’t throw yourself away. Was it. Was the specifics there? I’ll make it lighter for a second before we get darker again. How many of the voice actors did you pick up on in this one? This one has some fun celebrity stunt cast. You know what? I recognize some, but I wasn’t taking, like, an Indexer account. Okay. Because I watched and I knew this.

I forgot it again. And after a movie, I was like, oh, yeah, I get it. Ducky and. Ducky and Bunny are Key and Peel. Okay. I like that. About the time Peel’s becoming a horror director, but you can still put him in with it. Because I was like, oh, they get Cheech and Chong as. Oh, Key and Peel. Same. Same line of thinking. And then crash. What’s his name? Duke Kaboom. Duke Kaboom is Keanu Reeves, which was, I thought, a fantastic. Oh, wow. That one of his better performances. I know. Now think about. You’re like, oh, yeah, that was Keanu Reeves for sure.

When you think back, one of his. You don’t even have to watch it. Yeah. And he was. Yeah. Like a 1970s evil Canadian, evil Knievel playboy slash with a porn star mash. Yeah. And just. Yeah. He comes across very much as a. Yeah, I. I thought it was great. Makes the leap of faith just to keep in the religious angle. He couldn’t make the leap because that. What’s the commercial? That’s not reality. You can’t really make the leap. But I do love. I couldn’t do it with my eyes closed. No, don’t do that. And then, of course, he does it with his eyes closed.

But that’s. That’s the major leap of faith. Right. On his part. I really like that specific point too, though, because they’re describing how he got abandoned by his God or his kid. And it was because the kids saw the commercial, and when the kid tried to do the exact same thing, he didn’t, you know, launch as far or whatever, and the whole reality was shattered. And. And he was kind of like, you know, of course I can’t live up to the commercial, you know, kid. Like, I’m just. I’m just a toy. Almost implying that the kid’s the idiot for falling for the lies at the commercial, but that it also implies that these characters, these toys, are somehow in cohesion with the corporations that are lying about their abilities, and they’re in on it because they know that they need to be sold and they need to be out there.

It’s. It just implies an extra level of depth that isn’t in the first few Toy Story movies. But Buzz didn’t have that in the first. They had to train Buzz to recognize that. You know, there’s also the imagery with Duke Caboom, where in the commercial, he’s, like, flying through something that looks like a sun. Rajan has the same thing. He can’t get through it. So that’s fine. That comes with the toy. But then when he is at the carnival and makes the final jump, he goes through the exact same image, but now it’s carnival, you know, decoration.

I mean, I like it. It’s fun, but it’s like. Is that an Icarus thing? Like he has, you know, flying too close to the sun or can’t reach the sun? I don’t know. I. I think that it’s just that the people, the humans need to lower their standards of what these homunculi golem can actually do. Yeah. Were there any other names? Oh, I don’t. I think maybe he had one line in this by. And I might have said this in the last movie, too, but I have to read the credit, which is Mel Brooks as Mellifant Brooks.

He’s the plushie elephant. So Mellifant Brooks. I don’t know. It’s such a bad pun. I love it. I’m hoping for a Mel Gibson voice in Toy Story 5. Why not? Okay. I guess people do have answers to why not. But I. I’m not going to say no to it. People who are going to show up In Toy Story 5, I can actually do a bit of that, too. Conan o’, Brien, apparently is going to show up in Toy Story 5. Anna Ferris, the. The Scary Movie. I might have gotten her name wrong there, but a couple new names.

I’m doing this from memory because I can’t find where I put the link. Well, we’ll have to, after five comes out, maybe do, like, another full breakdown on just the entire series and the progression through them. Or maybe that’ll just be part of the five review. Yeah. Because, you know, I’m OCD and I don’t like going out of order with our movies. But I was like, ah, New Year. We want to Watch it in this house. Five’s coming out this year and this is kind of, I feel like this is the main franchise to draw threads about what’s going on from 1995 to 2025.

You know, it’s, it’s wild too, because when we first started this series early on, skipping four years was sometimes mandatory. That’s like, that’s how long it took between movies to come out. Now you skip four years, you’re skipping over, you know, maybe double digits. Number of movies. Yeah, it’s becoming like weirdly exponential, which is interesting to think about. I mean, I guess that’s partly technology. You can do it faster and cheaper. I mean, still expensive, but yeah, faster and cheaper in the past. I mean, clearly, if you compare the output of traditional animated movies with these 3D generated movies, it’s night and day.

There is no comparison between the two. There’s just no reality in which the same volume of traditionally animated movies would even exist. And hey, let’s take it all the way back to Snow White. Massive success. MGM is like, let’s rip that off. That’s why they were making wizard of Oz. But why is it not animated? Because animation is too freaking difficult, especially for a 90 minute movie at that point. So it’s like we’re doing a live action. Still kind of is. I mean, yeah. And I think though, that we’re seeing, especially in Toy Story 4 is a good example, is that you can be a lumination crap out a minion movie at will these days.

It seems. Okay, hot take. We’ve discussed before that this house hates the Minions. I don’t hate them. I watched them again recently. So I did a show like Megamind so much. We also had a controversy a few days ago where, where my daughter and I think that Groot and baby Yoda are cute. And my wife hates Groot and baby Yoda. Grogu, if anyone wants to be dorky enough for that. Oh, I mean, that sounds like something your wife needs to work through. Because I think universally Grogu has been adopted as like, you know what it is? It’s like when someone has a puppy, but it’s one of those ugly puppies, but it’s still like it’s cute because it’s a puppy.

She loves Yoda. She hates Grogu. The reason she said, is because they took Yoda, which she liked, and intentionally tried to make him cute. Maybe the same with Groot, because you first see adult Groot if we’re going with movie Groot, and then later movies he’s cute. Groot, they’re now forcing the cute on you from this original character. This is. What is it pronounced? Chibi? Is that what it is? Chibi. That’s essentially what Chibi is. No, it’s like, you take any character and you just, like, make a cute version of them. Yeah, Chibi. Japanese. Yeah. I’m gonna go yell at her after this podcast because her Facebook image, I believe, is a Chibi.

Yes, it is. She has achieved as her Facebook profile. So that’s exactly. That’s. That’s Grogu. So I’m gonna go tell her you like Grogu and Baby Groot after this podcast. You do. What else do you have in your notes, by the way? By the way, I’m rocking. No notes today. I just. I was like, I saw it yesterday, talked to the family about the movie. I guess we’re good to go. Also, this is one where, like, it’s like, you can talk about corners of this movie all day. You know, I. I think that this might be my favorite Toy Story movie.

Although with a caveat that I don’t think you can just drop directly in and understand what the hell is going on. Like, you have to know about Andy. You have to see at least Toy Story 1 and 2 and probably 3. You kind of have to see all three of them to even understand how deep this particular movie is. Otherwise, it just looks like a suicidal spork. Yeah, that’s the thing. Now, again with that new Avatar. Enjoyed it. But I was like, if this is your first Avatar movie, it’s going to be completely incoherent, which is a kind of a turnoff because those Avatar movies are a good two and a half hours.

When this one, 317, man, that’s how long I wrote a 4DX chair. How many hours? Three hours, 17 minutes. Wow. Over three hours. See, and now whenever I do any of these episodes, Colt Disney or Cartoon Cabal or any of them, my eye immediately goes to that play time, because I’m trying to figure out, like, all right, how. How much time did I just dedicate for the rest of this day? This movie came up. It was a smooth, like, hour and a half. It wasn’t even really that close to two hours. So you can knock out all the Toy Stories in the same span that it would take you to get to, like, one and a half Avatars.

Although, just to give this movie a little more praise, one, Toy Story 4 is not that long. It’s fine animation. Still, they tend to keep it two hours. And under still, which is nice. But we watched the first half of the movie. And my daughter’s, you know, Japanese student, she’s like, I’m gonna study this afternoon. I’m like, I’m gonna go to a hot spring. And I was like, maybe I’ll watch half the movie and then go to the hot spring. And I stood up. I never sat down again. But I watched the entire half of the movie just standing there.

That’s when I emailed you and I said it was just two. Toy Story 4. I actually did just watch the whole thing. And it held my attention even when I was planning to leave halfway through. So, yeah, I say that this movie can hold your attention. And it has some. Some of the fidelity of the animation is, like, really good. I. It’s. It’s a hard one to say to, like, not watch it. Although I don’t know if it’s like, top 10 material. Right. Well, I can’t remember the last couple. We had a recent, like, high top 10 one that we just watched.

Zootopia. Zootopia. Oh, yeah. Huge. And two is supposed to be good. You and I have not watched 2 yet. I haven’t because. Well, you because you don’t like the theaters, and me, because it’s. It’s all dubbed in Japanese. In Japanese theaters, so. And also, as I said before, it’s like, well, I’m going to be watching in a year or two. Why bother now, you know? Yeah. Honestly, I’m not in a rush to see any of them. There’s a few movies I like. For example, I went to the theater. I went to IMAX to see Beetlejuice. Beetlejuice.

But that’s the only movie that’s brought me, you know, to an act, to a physical theater. In better part of a decade. I’d say my theater’s going. Has slowed down a little bit. Probably partly because of after Covid and strikes and stuff. I guess there aren’t that many movies right now. And a lot of times, like Raga, the Hot Spring, and that’s what I do. Probably what they need is a hot spring movie theater. Well, I have been in saunas or that they play TV in. It’s like the TVs behind plastic, so it can run. So it’s not at sauna temperature.

Right. I get. Yeah. Not the same feel, I guess you can get yourself some, like, little AR glasses and then you can bring the movies with you everywhere. I’m trying to think of if we have any particularly bizarro theaters. I need to Talk about. There’s. There’s some nice scary looking ones near my work. There’s a functioning movie theater. It looks like it’s from, you know, like it looks like it’s decayed from the 30s, but it’s still open and stuff. Looks perfect horror movie setting. I don’t know if I could even appreciate going to an actual movie anymore.

A, I’ll fall asleep halfway through it. No matter how hyped I am to watch it or how awake I am when it starts. Like, no matter what, after about 40 minutes I’ll be dozing off. But also I’m probably the worst person to watch a movie with because I want to pause it and like think about something or take a note or just go on some ADHD tangent and then like come back and return to it. To actually sit down sequentially. Hour and a half maybe, but man, if we’re talking three hours, there’s just no way. Well, here’s how I actually acquired that movie.

I was in Tokyo, right? And I was like, I actually had, I had a reservation that you can easily end at Disneyland for a restaurant. I was like, I could get an evening ticket and do that or I could go to Avatar and it’s about the same price. So I was like, ah, both of them are kind of like going to a theme park if you’re riding this chair the whole time and it’s like, let’s do the movie, do something different for once. Did you get sick of it after three plus hours of being in the 4D chair, moving around and spraying you in the face? One, the spray is not too hard.

And I learned after the movie you can turn it off. The spray didn’t bother me. It was kind of fun. The one I was like not annoyed by. Oh, and I think you and I have talked about where if it’s tough to be a bug and it punches you in the back in the end, I hate does it much softer and nicer with the current chairs. And what was. Oh, the one thing I didn’t like is whenever there’s an explosion and it’s fire and ash, there’s a lot of fire. They like put hot air around your neck.

So I didn’t love that. But that might actually keep me awake though, if it like keeps moving me around and like jostling me every 15 minutes or so, that might actually be the thing that I need. Oh, I looked around the theater a few times, especially during the flying scenes or action scene. It is fun to just look around the theater and you See the whole sea of chairs just all moving and it’s. That was actually kind of. That’s the image I’m going to have stuck in my mind the most for my viewing of Avatar. Nothing that was on the screen but looking around the theater and a whole.

It was a packed theater of moving chairs, you know, trash. So I don’t know if I can get this experience. When Toy Story 5 comes out, I bet I can see it. Subtitle in Tokyo 40x yeah, there’s only a few that would make sense. Avatar would be the one that I would be like. Okay. Because, you know, they probably actually put the money behind trying to make sure all that stuff lined up there. I’ve seen some where someone phoned it in. Right. I think Beetlejuice. Beetlejuice is one of those. I didn’t do the 4D, but I looked up the reviews on it and you can tell that whoever put this, the sequences together phoned the entire thing in.

Yeah, but that’s, that’s James Cameron’s reputation. You’re like, well, no matter which one I choose, I assume it’s going to be relatively technically, you know, on target. Right. Same temperature check. Cameron will show up and punch you if you messed up, you know, that sort of thing. Although he does seem more chill in recent years, I guess. I think he said his family did an intervention and told him to quit being so intense and disappearing for 18 months to go to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Yeah, I mean, the worst things that he’s doing now is he’s like going back and like retrofitting movies and taking guns out of them, right? No, he just made bad transfers of his old movies on Blu Ray and they look all waxy.

Well, he. I guess he had a hot take that if he had a do Terminator again or something, that he wouldn’t have had as many guns or wouldn’t have made it as. Oh, no, no, no. Terminator has guns in it. Well, tell him that. He’s the one that put him in there. It’s the same Dark Fate had plenty of guns and he was an active producer in that movie. I mean, maybe not the same thing, but in like an ET Where Spielberg is removing the guns and putting one. But he put them back. Yeah, well, you, you didn’t necessarily need the guns there.

But also that was what implied that there was danger here. Not just a bunch of neutered like, UK cops running around with no guns. Like, this is America. Cops have guns. No, Spielberg has. He has always regretted his changes and changed him back, apparently, unlike George Lucas, who will change him and then, like, make sure no one can see the original as hard as possible. But you got the hide, Lucas, because even as old, it’s not just Star wars thx, whatever the number is. I think it’s pretty difficult to find the theatrical version of that. You.

You were going to come across the 2001 restoration, where he adds, you know, computer stuff. Maybe it’s 2004. Might have been. Whatever. Okay. I just. I just like to see if I can, you know, come up with correct, obscure facts. Well, in the near future, hopefully before we die, we’ll. We’ll be able to make a James Cameron slash Spielberg slash Lucas Toy Story movie and just stream it, you know, on chat GPT or whatever. That would be a monstrosity, wouldn’t it? I mean, I feel like we kind of seen glimpses of that through some of these Disney movies that exchanged hands for, like, Emperor’s New Groove.

Right? That. That’s kind of an example of something you want, but you could have a happy accident. Okay. What you described, though, is like going to 31 ice cream, you know, and ordering all 31 flavors and putting them together. Which ironically, also is called the suicide. That’s a soda fountain. Right. Which I. But that was. See, that was only five, right? Which. And it still was a bad idea at five. Well, yeah, because if you do more than five, you’re guaranteed to die, I think, like the chemicals or something. But how cool did you think you were when you were 11 years old and you drank the whole thing? I guess.

Have a look at your notes if you. We’re an hour ADA now, so you can get really dark if you want. At this point, my only remaining. No, I think we. We bent through most of them is really that In Toy Story 2, it was a story of a Saturnian death cult that Andy was going away to or something, Right at his, like, at his camp. But in the whole first three movies, it’s about this, like, service to child thing. It’s like, how can we serve our God? How? Like, hey, God, are you out there? Do you know about us? How can I help you? And then in this movie is the first time that we see by the very end that the toys are starting to detach themselves from God.

A. You’ve got these new young creations that don’t even care about God. You got forkies that are just like, who the hell is Bonnie? Who the hell is Andy? I don’t even care. I just want to go back to Source and all the way at the end where Woody and Bo are just going to be on their own. They’ve just been in an entire location with a bunch of different toys that were like, yeah, we’ve been here since the 50s and I haven’t had a kid. Like, my kid’s dead, right? My kid grew up and aged out and I’m still here.

I’ve still got consciousness. Woody and Gabby. Gabby are sitting there like, oh, we’re both toys from late 50s. So very good chance the original owners are. Well, Gabby. Gabby didn’t have one, did she? So where did she get the consciousness from? She’s never had an owner. What? And I. Well, didn’t she? Because didn’t she have her name written on her as well? Well, she was defective, wasn’t she? Well, she meant, she mentioned the toys that have names written on them or more special than others. So she at least had. Was aware of this dynamic. She’s gotten the explanation.

And that. That’s also interesting. They do a hard cut, so we just get a minute or two. But it’s clear that Woody spends hours describing the rules of their universe to Forky as they’re walking down the road. Well, the other thing I can think of is that if a child writing its name on your feet is what makes you, you know, higher level in cast or at least is one of the requirements to becoming alive. But most of these toys, especially name brand toys, they all get stamped right at the factory. And if that stamp has the Disney logo on it, then technically that’s a name.

Disney is a name. Right. So does that mean that the stamping process is all that really needs to be done in order to like create these artificial life forms. Japan is obsessed with putting child’s names on the things. When they have kids open up like a box of crayons, every crayon has had like a little paper tag with their name added to it. Every piece of clothing, it’s like been sewn into the clothing and stuff. Like just everything has a name. Parents are doing it, not the kids. Okay, well in that theory, if a kid wrote his own name on a crayon, I guess you would use a crayon to write your name on another crayon or is that, is that too meta? That’s.

It’s the crayons too big to be able to do that. They’re, they’re like printing little stickers or you know, sometimes handwriting on the little sticker. But you put the little sticker on the crayon. Well, Anyway, does that give the crayon sentience? Is that. Is that crayon now alive? Yes. So if you’re using. Let’s say. Let’s just say that, you know that. That Bonnie glued a plastic googly eye onto a crayon and somehow wrote her name on it. Somehow. Now it’s sentient. But as she uses this crayon, is she just, like, slowly torturing this thing to death until she rubs it into a bloody nub? And being that low a, you know, creature as.

As far as, like, movement or whatever, you know, it doesn’t have a mouth to tell you it’s thinking, kill me like Forky does. I don’t. I mean, yeah, I guess so. Although Forky’s mouth is just a little piece of, like, clay that’s been rolled up and then it moves around. So it would go to say that if there was a little notch or if there was like a little print on the crayon, it could potentially turn into the mouth. Right. Unless the human making it has to model it in a certain way to have a mouth.

Like, there’s a children’s book about sentient crayons, by the way, that came out in the past 20 years. And so, I mean, it’s. It’s interesting because if you’re talking about an inanimate object that is now conscious, but it’s also a consumable object, meaning that it, like, intend. It’s by design. It will no longer exist after you use it enough. Right. A crayon’s a kind of a morbid toy to turn into. Yeah. When it gets to the page with red. Red’s real short because the kid in the book likes red. And he’s like. Like, maybe you could color things blue sometimes.

I know you like red, but the crayon that’s had. That’s the paper taken off. It’s just like, I’m naked. You know, it’s a good children’s book. I could see that as a. It’s Toy Story adjacent. It could exist in, like, the same universe. I know. Yeah. The book is written at. Oh, and this is the other thing. That particular book, which I’m forgetting the name of, it’s written as if the crayons are talking to their. Their owner, their God. So that does make it kind of, you know. Yeah. Toy Story. Jason. It works. I. I think that Toy Story, that they leave it nuanced enough that a kid is learning about religion through watching these movies without realizing it, even without the parents necessarily realizing that their kid Just went through Gnosticism, Old Testament, New Testament, and now New Age.

Okay, I got the title here. It’s actually. There might be a few of these. Oh, this is popular. There’s, like. There’s, like, multiple ones, so we might get a movie at some point. The Crayons Book of Colors. The Day the Crayons Quit. So, yeah. Oh, sorry. Blue is the short one. So blue is angry. Red is. Is not. Yeah, the. The likes. Blue. The Day the Crayons Were Left in the Hot Car. That. Yeah, that’s. You know what that sounds like? That would fit perfectly in with these titles. The Crayons Quit. That seems. That must be the one I read where they’re, like, you know, telling the.

I’m just imagining a crayon version of the movie society where all of the people get together and, like, merge into, like, a single organism. Spoiler alert. That would be. The crayon movie would be, like, any exec would just be. That’s Toy Story. No. Well, I guess you want to make a movie like toys or. Because you’re illumination or something, right? Well, well, no, that’s not Toy story. That is ATU503 Helpful Elves archetype, which is way older than Toy Story. Yes. I guess that means that is the circle complete. That’s where we started this. So I don’t know, do we finish there with the.

I think so, yeah. And also the traditional name for these elves, they go by depending on the region, but it was Vishtman, which looks like it’s spelled white men, but it’s Vishtmen, which were basically these little prototypical. It meant thing or creature. So ultimately, these little elves and these elves in the workshop for the Shoemaker, it’s when a person is in some sort of a dire situation. At least in the Elves and the Shoemaker version of this, the ATU 503 version, it’s that God, the actual God, sees that you’re struggling, so he’s going to figure out a way to help you.

And one of those ways they help you is by turning these little elves into sentient creatures in order to make you money or whatever else needs to be done. So. So in the ATU version, God is the one that’s giving them this power. But in the Toy Story variant of this, it does seem that they’re becoming sentient through humans, and it’s not coming directly from God. I feel like. I feel like that is still an unanswered question I’ve got in the Toy Story universe. Like, is, Does God have anything to do with this? Or is God long gone? Well, that’s why I like the brave theory that a witch put a curse on objects or whatever she did, and they’re continuing to do that.

She, she started the ball rolling, you know, in the 13th century. So she’s, she’s God. I guess in the greater scheme of things. I do have to shout out. Another iteration of this, of course, is the underwear gnomes from south park, if you remember those, where they steal your underwear. Step one, steal underwear. Step two, question mark, question mark, question mark. Step three, make money. It’s something like that, yeah. Well, I guess we will wind this one down today. How’s, how’s 2026 starting for you? I got so many projects lined up, I guess I’ll just, I’ll jump through a few of them.

But I’ve got three or four of the little chick track style pamphlets. A Bigfoot, a Titanic one on the Satanic Panic, one of the Golden Bow. I’ve got issue two of Chaos Twins with Sam Tripoli that is ready to go. I just need to promote it and get it out there and launch Kickstarter campaign. And I’ve also got a video game on Steam that you can look up right now and add to your wish list. It’s called Lucifer Lives in Lower Manhattan. And it’s basically a whole bunch of research I did in the 1930s and 40s satanic cult from Manhattan, you know, downtown New York City and the, the origins of the American Satanic Panic actually came out of that.

A lot of people think about it in like the 60s or 70s and rock music. It goes way deeper than that, goes way farther. And it was so much research, I couldn’t even fit it in a comic book. So I had to put it into a interactive video game. So that’s going to also. I mean technically it’s out now. I can send you a copy. I’ve got a few private early release Steam keys. But later this year I’m going to do a proper Kickstarter for it. That one’s @satanic panic game.com you can already sign up to get notified when it drops.

And then everything else just go to paranoidamerican.com follow me on all the socials. I’ll be releasing all kinds of new stuff this year. I’ve been working on so many different projects for the last 10 years and they’re all like coming to a head at the same time. So it’ll be a whirlwind for me. All right, you can Continue down my podcasting rabbit hole@podcastio podcastius.org But I’m starting this year off. Musically. I make a lot of music. That’s at rovingsagemedia.bandcamp.com I made. I put out as the midnight January 1 release the seventh edition of my binaural collections, where I let you.

Where I will try and reprogram your brain. This one is called the Depths of Fieldation, and the title of that is me at work. And the manager at the main school, he’s kind of a mystic sort of guy. And I was like, give me a title real quick. And he told me that, and now it’s the title. You have to sign a waiver to listen to these albums. You do. I do suggest somebody was like, I was driving through fog to your binaurals music. I was like, I don’t know if that’s a good idea, man. I like to live on the edge, man.

I listen to Matt’s binaural beats in the fog. What are you driving? Yeah. And then in about a month, I’ll have kind of a psychedelic rock album also popping up on the site, But I don’t know what that’s called yet because I haven’t named it yet. So dig that. There’s also, like, 50 albums I’ve done in the past 20 years, so there’s something to listen to. Okay, let’s go play with some toys. Play with toys Break the crayon Just buy something Just buy something from paranoia Just buy something Just buy something from paranoia mirror get some merch buy some art Click that link add to car say it back need that print Nod your head give consent Buy a comic three or four Think this thought I want more Buy a sticker from the start Think, think this thought I want more Just buy something Just buy something from paranoid American Just buy something Just buy something from paranoid American Paranoid.

Yeah I scribbled my life away Driven the right to page Will it enlight your brain Give you the flight my plane paper the highs ablaze somewhat of an amazing feel when it’s real to real you will engage it your favorite, of course the lord of an arrangement I gave you the proper results to hit the pavement if they get a mother emotional hate maybe your language a game how they playing it well without Lakers Evade them whatever the cause they are to shapeshift snakes get decapitated met is the apex execution of flame you out Nuclear bomb distributed at war rather gruesome for eyes to see Max them out that I like my trees blow it off in the face.

You’re despising me for what? Though calculated and rather cutthroat, paranoid American. Must be all the blood smoke for real? Lord, give me your day your way, vacate, they wait around to hate? Whatever they say, man, it’s not in the least bit? We get heavy rotate when a beat hits a thing? Cause you’re welcome for real, you’re welcome? They ain’t never had a deal? You’re welcome? Man, they lacking a pill? You’re welcome? Yet they doing it still you’re welcome?
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