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Credit: Disney/PixarIf you thought Pixar would stay the course with the Toy Story franchise forever, you had better think again. Although the Tom Hanks and Tim Allen franchise seems to be still limping along, its latest trailer shows that the Disney-owned company is finally starting to build a shared universe that has nothing to do with Pizza Planet.
Pixar Animation Studios has been a beloved fixture of entertainment since Toy Story (1995), the first fully CGI-animated feature film and a franchise starter for the ages. The first movie introduced us to beloved animated toys like Sheriff Woody (Tom Hanks), Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen), and Rex (Wallace Shawn), but more importantly, it gave us the debut of the most significant Pixar creation of all: the Pizza Planet truck.
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Over the years and 27 feature films, the Pizza Planet truck has popped up again and again as an Easter Egg. But animation fans being what they are, the re-appearance of the Pizza Planet truck was eventually taken to mean that all of the movies exist in some kind of shared universe. Eventually, this evolved into the Pixar Theory, which seeks, with scientific rigor, to unify the various continuities of Monsters, Inc. (2001), Ratatouille (2007), and Brave (2012) into a single timeline.
While there are many clues that Pixar Theory truthers use to claim that all movies exist in a single shared universe, the Pizza Planet truck is by far the most common Easter Egg that links them all. However, it seems that the Toy Story icon may be supplanted with a new signifier of a shared universe: a boy band.
Turning Red (2022) first introduced 4*Town, the boy band that protagonist Mei (Rosalie Chiang) is desperate to see perform despite the wishes of her overprotective mother, Ming (Sandra Oh). While boy bands are not particularly known for their longevity, it appears that 4*Town still exists a number of years later, because it just popped up in the trailer for the upcoming Inside Out 2.
In one brief moment of the Inside Out 2 trailer, we can see Riley (Kensington Tallman) in her bedroom and sharp-eyed Pixar Theory enthusiasts have noted that she appears to have a poster for the band up on her wall.
Zoom…and enhance!
And enhance again:
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This is notable, as it shows that the newest generation of films, like Turning Red and Inside Out, are beginning to demonstrate their own shared universe links rather than relying on the fumes of Toy Story. Pixar chief Pete Docter has openly acknowledged that the usual gimmicks have not been drawing in audiences like they used to, so it’s not a surprise that the studio is starting to pull away from leaning on Woody and Buzz so much and starting to let the new movies stand on their own.
Inside Out 2 will hit theaters on June 14 and will feature the voices of Amy Poehler, Phyllis Smith, Lewis Black, Diane Lane, Kyle MacLachlan, Tony Hale, Liza Lapira, Maya Hawke, Ayo Edebiri, Adèle Exarchopoulos, Paul Walter Hauser, and Kensington Tallman. The film is directed by Kelsey Mann and is described by Pixar as:
Inside Out 2 returns to the mind of newly minted teenager Riley just as headquarters is undergoing a sudden demolition to make room for something entirely unexpected: new Emotions! Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust, who’ve long been running a successful operation by all accounts, aren’t sure how to feel when Anxiety shows up. And it looks like she’s not alone.
Do you believe in the Pixar Theory? Let’s hear your thoughts in the comments below!