Yahoo Movies Tim Allen breaks silence on Pixar's Lightyear , wishes 'there was a better connection' to his Buzz
Tim Allen has weighed into the muck that is the discourse surrounding Pixar's Lightyear.
During an interview with Extra for the new History Channel show More Power, Allen offered his two cents on Chris Evans taking over the voice role of Buzz Lightyear in the new animated movie. There's a reason he hasn't spoken about this publicly before.
"The short answer is I've stayed out of this 'cause it has nothing to do [with my character]," Allen said. Allen voiced Buzz Lightyear, the toy, in Pixar's Toy Story franchise, most recently in 2019's Toy Story 4. In Lightyear, Evans instead voices Buzz, the fictional movie character that inspired the Buzz toy.
FOX Image Collection via Getty Images; Disney/Pixar Tim Allen breaks his silence on Pixar's 'Lightyear' and Chris Evans taking over the Buzz role.
"This is a whole new team that really had nothing to do with the first movies," Allen said. (Angus MacLane, an animator on Toy Story 2 and 3, directed Lightyear.)
The actor remembered talking years earlier with Pixar about what the movie that inspired Buzz might look like. He also said he thought the studio was making a live-action Lightyear movie instead of an animated one.
"It's a wonderful story," Allen said of Lightyear. "It just doesn't seem to have any connection to the toy, and it's a little… I don't know. It just has no relationship to Buzz. It's just no connection. I wish there was a better connection to this."
Everybody Loves Raymond actress Patricia Heaton, a friend of Allen's, made headlines when she tweeted that Pixar had "made a HUGE mistake in not casting my pal Tim Allen in the role that he originated, the role that he owns."
"Tim IS Buzz!" she wrote in mid June. "Why would they completely castrate this iconic, beloved character?"
Heaton, admittedly, had only see trailers at the time and not the actual movie. She later tweeted about learning Lightyear was more of "an origin story," but maintained "the reason the character became so beloved is because of what [Allen] created. Why remove the one element that makes us want to see it? #stupidHollywooddecisions."
Evans had nothing but respect for Allen's performance as Buzz in Toy Story. "I feel like I only had reservations [about taking on the role]," the actor previously told EW. "Obviously I was thrilled to be working for Pixar. I've been a die-hard Pixar fan forever. But, yeah, obviously it was intimidating and daunting."
"I love what Tim Allen did, and I love what Toy Story meant to me," he added. "You have to understand there will be a lot of people who have an idea in their heads, but this is like when I signed on to Captain America. You know there is a baked-in-the-cake fanbase, but that fanbase is there because they have an understanding in their mind of what the character already is. So you have to honor that when you're making your choices."
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