Twitter users who follow Lee Unkrich got a surprise today when he revealed that the name of Pixar’s flagship piece of cinema was actually just the working title.
The string of abandoned titles all started with Lee Unkrich (editor of Toy Story, co-director of Toy Story 2 and director of Toy Story 3) making a joke on Twitter about how Pixar’s recently announced feature film about dinosaurs may keep the title it was announced with at D23.
‘Toy Story’ was always just a working title that we never intended to use. Maybe this one will stick, too.
He had more than 200 alternative titles to Toy Story, but he picked seventeen of them and published them with #RejectedToyStoryTitles as the tag. We’ve got them listed for you below.
The New Toy
Made in Taiwan
Moving Buddies
To Infinity and Beyond
Wind-Up Heroes
The Cowboy & The Spaceman
Spurs & Rockets
Each Sold Separately
Wings & Pullstrings
The Favorite
Bring Me The Arm of Buzz Lightyear
Wind the Frog
Rex’s First Movie
For the Love of Peep
Toyz in the Hood
Some Assembly Required
The titles range from fairly good to absurd (Rex’s First Movie? Toyz in the Hood?!), but it makes sense since according to Unkrich, they went through hundreds of names before finally reaching out and asking everyone they could find.
These are randomly picked from a list of HUNDREDS of brainstormed titles. We had an open call to studio employees, out of desperation.
He also mentions that Pixar briefly flirted with the idea of calling A Bugs Life by a different name (Bug Story) after the success of Toy Story. They eventually realized that it might be a poor choice since they would get stuck using the same naming scheme.
As a Twitter user noted, that means that in some bizarro universe where Pixar made the decision to stick to the “Story” naming scheme, we would now have such cinematic masterpieces as Monster Story, Fish Story, Rat Story, Robot Story and Old Man and the Korean Kid Story.
We don’t blame them. After all as we’ve mentioned before, titles are hard.