Lightyear, however, doesn’t have that same "luxury", because these are *not* the same characters. "Why is Buzz not a toy in this one?", "Is he still animated or is this 'real' CGI?", "Why does he not have the same voice?", "Is it a prequel?", "Where's Woody…?" are just a few of the things I’ve seen floating around being asked.
And then the explanation is not just "it’s an origin story", or a simple takeaway that people can grasp easily, it turns to be a convoluted "remember Andy got a Buzz in the first Toy Story well that Buzz was an action figure based on a movie that Andy saw so this is the movie that Andy saw and 'inspired' him to as for a Buzz Lightyear for his birthday". Phew.
None of which really makes sense, because original toy Buzz's design is clearly a caricature of a spaceman in a 70s-style Elvis jumpsuit, and an action figure from 1985 (as has also been confirmed is the rough date the film was "made'; Andy didn’t see it until years later on VHS, which also doesn’t make sense and only adds to the confusion) would have resembled something more like the toys of that decade: basically an astronaut GI Joe or Action Man figure.
Buzz worked perfectly in 1995 and onwards as a generic "spaceman" toy in those films. We totally got it. Here they have over thought things and made it all too complicated for it to cut through to an audience with a myriad of other distractions. Remember the rule: if you have to actually start picking apart your movie and provide explanations for its very *description*, you haven’t done a very good job of setting things up well, or the marketing is as confused as the idea was.
They should have come right out at the start with a tease that had Andy getting all excited because the movie was on VHS, putting a that tape in the machine, and pressing play. Instantly simple, sets things up, and gets us excited to see what the movie that Andy saw was. Instead, they just gave audiences the actual movie…and then left us to work out what the heck it was supposed to be, by which point half of the confused audience had checked out, probably to go watch Penguins again. On VHS.
