Dumping Them Out: Is Toy Story Bad?

Welcome back to another episode of Dumping Them Out. Before I get to the Toy Story thing, I went to a Knicks game for the first time last night. I would go way more often if it wasn't nearly $200 just to get in the door. I understand the concept of supply & demand, but on principal I feel like going to a regular season basketball game shouldn't have to amount to a $500 date. You could take a person to the nicest restaurant in New York City for the price of watching the Knicks beat the Kings by 23 points from the nosebleeds. It's just not sustainable for a regular ass guy to go to more than a couple games per year. Fun times tho. MSG is a great place to watch a basketball game.

I was presented with a good movie take the other day that I would like to spend this entire blog on. I feel like lots of people may have heard this one already. I'm clearly not the first person on the internet to bring it up. But this is the first I've considered it, and the more I've thought about it, the more I've come to like it. It regards the Disney Pixar classic, Toy Story. The way Toy Story portrays the "bad guy" Sid, is tremendously unfair, and the movie as a whole sends a negative message to children everywhere. 

Toy Story paints Sid as a villain. By the skull on his t-shirt, you can tell from the jump that everything he does in the movie will be bad. He tortures toys and is mean to his sister. The movie specifically refers to Sid a psycho, whereas Andy, who plays with his toys as designed, is a good, wholesome, all-American kid. But kids like Andy are a dime-a-dozen. The Sid's of the world are the kids who deserve to be celebrated. 

Sid is a child who is dripping with creativity. When he's presented with a toy, he sees beyond what mundane purpose the simple-minded toy manufacturer had in mind for their overall uninteresting product. Sid looks at a toy and wonders what it could become. With a combination of imagination, and technical skills that for exceed 99% of children Sid's age, he creates things in his bedroom that toy manufactures would never dream of. 

Consider PEZ. PEZ makes their cheap plastic candy dispensers that kids play with for 10 minutes until their small sleeve of underrated candy is finished. Best case scenario, the PEZ dispenser is displayed on a shelf for the next few years. More likely, it's put in a box and stuffed in the back of a closet until one day the child moves out and his parents throw the whole box in the trash.  But Sid gives his PEZ dispensers a greater purpose. Very few 11-year olds would think to combine the head of a PEZ, the torso of a strong man, and the spring of a pop-up toy to create Ducky, a completely unique, one-of-a-kind children's toy.

Sid is vilified for his treatment of his little sister Hannah. I'll admit, it's uncouth for Sid to steal her toys and use them for his sophisticated toy engineering projects. But name me one 11-year old boy who isn't occasionally mean to his younger sister. That's exceedingly normal behavior. I would be more concerned to learn of an 11-year old who never quarrels with his annoying younger sibling. He's also an exceptional owner to his dog Scud. Toy Story shows Sid feeding toys to Scud, and wants us to think, "Oh the humanity! What a monster!". When In reality, Sid sharing his toys with Scud is an incredibly unselfish act of kindness towards his most loyal companion. 

And have we even considered what Sid's home life must be like? His parents are hardly present in the movie. We're led to believe he spends a significant amount of time on his own. Which for one, is sad. Sid is likely acting out due to a lack of friend. For two, if Sid is spending that much time alone, it's very possible he's being molested. We only see a very small portion of Sid's life, and children as troubled as Sid are almost certainly dealing with things that we have no idea about.

Sid is a misunderstood genius who Disney shames for being different. They hold Sid to the impossible standard of understanding that his inanimate object toys turn into sentient beings when he's not around. The scene at the end of Toy Story where the toys finally do come to life in front of Sid, and prevent him from launching Buzz Lightyear into space via rocket (which is literally what Buzz Lightyear should be doing).

That scene sends an extremely fucked up message. It tells children that they should put their heads down, stick to the status quo, and play with their commercially acclaimed toys the way Big Toy wants them to. If you dare use your imagination and create something different, your toys will NOT be happy. They will come to life and try to kill you. Which will cause a mental breakdown that you will never recover from.

There's a 0% chance Sid's life was not drastically affected by the harrowing occurrence of a gang of toys coming to life in his own backyard and attacking him. Sid was almost certainly on track to have an incredible career in the field engineering. He could have been a man of science. He probably would have ended up working for NASA. But in Toy Story 3, we see that Sid has grown up to be a lowly garbage man. You're crazy if you don't think the "toys coming to life" incident in his backyard didn't permanently stifle Sid's innovation, and discourage him from thinking creatively for the rest of life. (sorry for the ricochet shot garbage man I needed to round out my point)

The entire movie is Disney propaganda for big toy manufactures who don't want children thinking outside-the-box. They can't afford for kids to find ways to entertain themselves on their own. They need children to get bored with their shiny, one-dimensional toys, so their parents will buy them their latest, greatest version a few months later. It's all very obvious when you think about. It's been a while since we've canceled a Disney movie. They probably think they're in the clear since they quit making their cats Chinese. They'll never see this one coming.