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If you've seen any of the toy story movies, you know about Buzz Lightyear, the heroic space

ranger immortalized in a line of action figures. Now the character is getting a Pixar prequel,

an origin story starring Chris Evans as the original Buzz Lightyear who started it all.

I'm Stephen Thompson and today we are talking about Lightyear on Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR.

Joining me today is Ronald Young Jr. He's the host of the film and television review podcast

leaving the theater. Hello, Ronald. Hello, Stephen. It is a pleasure to have you here.

Also joining us is writer and film critic Laura Syracul. Welcome back Laura. Thank you for having

me. I'm so excited to be here. So for more than 25 years, we've known Buzz Lightyear as an action

figure voiced by Tim Allen, Buzz is the toy who had to learn that he was a toy and not in fact

an actual space ranger locked in conflict with the evil emperor Zurg. That version of Buzz has

appeared in all four of the toy story movies, which established early on that the Buzz toy was

based on a character in a science fiction movie. The new prequel Lightyear opens with a crawl that

informs us that the movie we're watching is in fact that movie that inspired the Buzz Lightyear toy.

This time around Chris Evans provides the voice of Buzz, a hotshot space ranger who maroons his

crew on a forbidding and far away planet and must perform a series of hyper speed test runs to

determine whether their makeshift fuel source will help everyone escape. The problem is that each

test run skips him forward four years, which means his friends get older and life on the planet

keeps evolving without him. His best friend Alicia Hawthorne played by Uzoa Dubba is the one we see

do most of the aging and she provides the film's emotional center, but eventually Lightyear gets

...