'Josh was a kid growing up in the '80s, while Jonas Rivera and I, the producers, grew up in the '70s, so the toys that we've latched onto were the ones along those lines,' Nielsen explains to SYFY WIRE. According to producer Mark Nielsen, new toys were also often conceived of as members of the new creative team waxed poetic, with new generations of writers and artists contributing new ideas. Toy Story 4 is a road trip movie, with Woody meeting new toys in a number of different settings as he ultimately seeks to reunite with Bo Peep, an old, antique flame. But for the fourth film in the Toy Story franchise, directed by Josh Cooley and released this summer, changes at Pixar and the inevitable turnover of talent at the studio led to an evolution in the roster of sentient toys. The next two sequels, released in 19, added new toys to the gang, but they were either repeats (Jesse is a pull-string cowboy like Woody) or other very old, common toys (Barbie, Ken, and Lotso, a stuffed purple bear).

Potato Head and green dinosaur dolls were not obsolete, Andy's toy chest tended to be more timeless than timely. Beyond a remote control race car, no other toy required batteries, and though toys such as Mr. Sure, Buzz Lightyear was a space ranger action figure that represented the best the mid-'90s had to offer, but he was the shiny new distraction for the more classic toys to compete against - and lacked a grip on reality. The groundbreaking animated film focused on a young boy's treasured toy collection, an assortment dominated by classic dolls that recalled the childhoods of the movie's creative team. When the original Toy Story hit theaters in 1995, it was the product of a team made up almost entirely of men who grew up in the 1960s and early '70s. The Toy Story franchise, a series about gracefully accepting the inevitability of age and onset of irrelevance, is now nearly 25 years old - and quietly working to keep up with the times.

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