On December 10, 2020, Disney announced the casting of liberal actor Chris Evans as the character Buzz Lightyear in the 2022 animated film Lightyear, replacing the longtime voice actor and rare Hollywood Conservative Tim Allen in the role he originated in 1995’s Toy Story.
National Zero reported this change and speculated over the reasons with “We have the MAGA kids constantly complaining about some conspiracy in Hollywood against them and this sure as hell won’t do anything to calm them down. So let’s just operate under assumption that this casting change had something to do with politics and have a good laugh about it” though the original announcement didn’t cause the kind of blowback we had anticipated back then (though Trump fanboys had some other, more pressing matters on their hands at the time).
Now the first trailer drops and MAGA Nation can devote more time, energy and attention to bullshit culture war issues they’re reacting as poorly as we had anticipated.
Tim Allen reportedly replaced in Buzz Lightyear movie recast and fans smell politics https://t.co/K52ss0v2jY pic.twitter.com/fMhW49zpPb
— BPR (@BIZPACReview) October 28, 2021
Tim Allen is the only person capable of being Buzz Lightyear.
Did Disney cancel him for being a Republican?
— Brigitte Gabriel (@ACTBrigitte) October 27, 2021
“If Disney wants to alienate conservatives, we can definitely spend our money other places. I just hope they realize that we make up the majority of the working class in America and it helps to have a job to spend thousands on an overpriced vacation” – Comment on Fox News, with 1,422 likes.
“Of course he is being ignored because he doesn’t bow to the ‘loud and proud’ leftists. He has morale [sic] values, family values, and is conservative so he must be banned” says the top comment on the Newsmax article written by some asshole who confused moral and morale.
“Tim Allen will not knuckle under to the PC/WOKE thought police in Hollywood. This IS political bull-you-know-what….” – Top comment on the BizPacReview.com article.
As we had explained back in December and more or less how Chris Evans and the director are explaining it now is that “the film is not a sequel to Toy Story, but a universe-within-a-universe from which the Buzz Lightyear toy’s design was based off of. Buzz Lightyear is actually a spaceman and not an action figure that thinks he’s a spaceman in this new film” which is kind of a bullshit public excuse to cast a new actor. Plus Buzz Lightyear the spaceman has been voiced by Tim Allen in a direct-to-video spinoff movie called Buzz Lightyear of Star Command back in 2000 before Patrick Warburton (aka “Puddy” from Seinfeld) took over the role in a Saturday morning cartoon series with the same cast and crew as the direct-to-video movie.
It doesn’t mean the casting decision was about politics, it just means that Disney wanted someone else to voice the character in a different iteration – and maybe politics had something to do with it, maybe not. But the bottom line is until Tim Allen comes back in a Toy Story 5, this recasting is just going to be one more insult to their delicate feelings.