Hello, my name is Angus MacLane,
writer/director of Small Fry, the second Toy Story Toon.
I love toys, I really enjoy fast food toys.
I also grew up in a family of psychologists,
my sister and my mom are both psychologists,
so out of that, Small Fry was born.
For this film, I went out and I went to 15 fast food restaurants
in my hometown of Portland, Oregon, in a day,
just to see a snapshot of what toys are being made now.
And that's how we based the assortment
for the Star Command display in the beginning.
Buzz Lightyear is the coolest toy,
and the coolest toy in the display is always sold out.
And the belt buckle is the toy you don't want that you always get.
When I was in college, I worked at a ball pit.
I had a whistle and I made sure that the kids played nice.
As a kid, the ball pit is a dream come true.
I don't know why, but as a kid, you just want to live in a ball pit.
As a teen and an adult, you realize that the ball pit is a nightmare.
It was not a sanitary place.
Working with the original voice talent
from the Toy Story films was a real treat
because they know the characters really, really well.
The characters in the support group are so weird
that to have, as kind of the anchor,
the original voice talent that reminds the audience it's a Toy Story short
allows for the kind of weirdness in the other parts.
Each of these characters in the support group represents, to me,
a different genre of the types of things
that were going around the popular culture
in the early '805 when I was growing up.
They're kind of cheaply made. Each has like one function.
And the limitations that are within those toys
are something I find incredibly appealing.
The concept is taking two ridiculous ideas and mashing them together.
Super Pirate, or Ninja Clown, it's very clear
it's two things that don't go together, and you get a laugh from that.
Tae-Kwon Doe is one of the more shameless puns.
And that really came from this idea of a character whose hand was up,
but that was just part of their function.
It kind of looks a little bit like Bambi's mom,
so maybe Bambi's mom didn't die.
Maybe she joined an international mixed martial arts fighting circuit.
I talked at length with my mom and my sister
about what types of personalities you would have in a support group.
And they were talking about just different stages people might be at.
Naturally, the big Buzz Lightyear, he's in the denial stage
as far as Neptuna sees,
because he hasn't been able to accept that he has an issue.
Recycle Ben is at acceptance.
He's meant to be this kind of PSA character
that gets kids excited about recycling.
Franklin is kind of at anger, Franklin, the eagle.
He's from a fictitious CGI film called Constitutional Condors
that tells the story of the Revolutionary War
kind of re-imagined in a United States populated by anthropomorphized birds.
Probably my favorite character is T-Bone.
I just like the idea of something really kind of disgusting,
like a T-Bone steak transforming into a robot.
It's such a wrong, crazy idea.
In the TV show, the Steak Force fears
the healthy-life-extending agenda of the evil Vegetinarians,
so then the government establishes the Steak Force,
a commando squad of heroic robots
dedicated to mandating a meat option for every meal.
And the whole show would be sponsored in part by the Meat Council.
Which I think we made up,
I don't think there's an American Meat Council.
There's separate councils for different types of meat.
John wanted me to make sure that I had backstories
for all of the characters in the group.
What toy line they came from, was it from a TV show,
was it from a movie, and so I wrote them all out.
I also wrote out what were the other toys in that assortment,
say for the Steak Force promotion, for T-Bone,
or the Rappin' Robin in the Hood promotion for Funky Monk.
And John would kind of quiz me.
We'd be in a review, and he'd be like,
"What's the Beef Stewardess, what's the story?"
"She's from the airline Dairy Air. It's about a barnyard airline."
I think, in general, that's what we try to do
is put things into the film that made us laugh.
But have it not be so personal to us that it didn't read to the audience.
You write these jokes, and then you record it,
and you just take what's funny,
and along the way what's funny changes,
depending on what stage of production you're in.
And you try your best to listen to it with fresh ears each time you see it.
Gary Grappling Hook is really just a narrative device,
as like a funny way to get Buzz out of the scene.
Gary is one of the few toys that actually gets used and has his moment,
there's a complete arc for Gary.
Plus, I think grappling hooks are the coolest piece of paraphernalia
that you can have.
I wanted Neptuna to be a strong female warrior,
who's this mythological combination of a mermaid
and this kind of Roman gladiator,
with the kind of typical sea denizen ax to grind
with humankind's destruction of the planet.
I just think it would be a really cool toy.
A lot of these ones, yeah, they're cheap toys,
but I really like the toy itself.
I wanted to make cool toys in the movie
because I think if you start with a toy that looks cool and feels real,
even though it's not real,
like there is no one toy that Neptuna's based on,
but there are ideas behind each of the visuals,
really specific things.
As with all of the toys, they're a lot smaller,
you get to see a lot more detail of the manufacturing defects.
It actually takes a lot more time to make something imperfect
and crummy-looking,
so when you see all these characters and you see all their imperfections,
that's just a bunch of work.
The end credit menu items
were the most disgusting menu items we could think of.
I think they all end in 99 cents,
except for the sandwich "the two-buck cluck," which is $2.
As you can see from the credits here,
a ton of people worked on this film, and they worked really, really hard.
The production of this film was done at Pixar Canada,
which had never done a Toy Story film before,
and this is only their second film after Air Mater,
and I think it looks like just a continuation
of Toy Story 3', technically.
I think it's a real achievement, and I thank everyone who worked on it.
It was either going to be Chicken Chopper,
Tae-Kwon Doe or Tai Cheetah.
Tae-Kwon Doe won out.