Review: Buzz Lightyear of Star Command

The last time I wrote a Toy Story review was back in April, and the reason it's taken me so long to do another is that I decided to watch all the franchise's related material. Which meant that instead of skipping straight to Toy Story 3, I hunkered down with all sixty-two episodes of Buzz Lightyear of Star Command. Yup, the whole thing.

It's prescient that in Toy Story 2 the Prospector bitterly states that Woody's Roundup was cancelled due to Sputnik and the ensuing demand for space toys - for sure enough, when the time came to branch out the Toy Story franchise, it was Buzz who got the spin-off cartoon. (I wonder if there was any serious discussion at Disney Studios as to whether they could produce a black-and-white marionette show starring the Roundup Gang. Probably not).

The idea behind this cartoon is extremely meta, for it is technically a story within a story; a defictionalized take on the television show that Andy and his friends watched that was such a huge hit that it led to Buzz Lightyear becoming the highest selling and most in-demand toy in the world.

Heck, this is the show that makes the entire Toy Story trilogy possible! It's the reason for (our) Buzz's existence and all the adventures that follow when his action-figure counterpart is introduced to Andy's bedroom.

So with all that in mind, it's interesting to sit down with the knowledge that this is the show which dominated pop-culture in Andy's world. Comprised of an introductory film and sixty-two episodes, it even involves a framing device, animated in the more familiar CGI style, of the toys in Andy's room gathering in front of the portable television to watch Buzz's on-screen adventures on VCR. Yeah, it was definitely still the nineties.

For the television show, this opening is shortened to a very brief clip of Buzz and the other toys gathering around the screen, with a few variations on the theme depending on the episode, àla the opening to The Simpsons. In some version Buzz knocks everyone down with his wings, in others he's attacked by Zurg, and so on. (And Woody's refusal to be impressed at Buzz's acrobatics is a split-second moment of perfect characterization).

In the wider world of the Toy Story franchise, this series has fallen to the wayside. Airing between 2000 and 2001 it never made an impact on the cultural zeitgeist, and name-dropping the likes of Mira Nova or Booster to kids these days will only result in blank looks. According to rumour, John Lasseter was never a fan of the show, and so none of its original characters ever made the leap to the big screen, not even in the capacity of a cameo (which is odd when you think about it, as there certainly should have been action figures of Mira, Booster and XR visible in the Buzz Lightyear aisle of Al's Toy Barn).

Yet it was also a good idea at the time, as Buzz Lightyear was clearly Disney/Pixar's most popular character in terms of merchandise - at least until Cars came along - and I'm sure this was milked for all it was worth back in the day.

Or so I assume, because I'd never seen a single episode, and was only vaguely aware of its existence. Watching it in its entirety, I have to admit that it's a little hard to understand how it could become such a huge hit in Andy's world. There is no overarching story, just a series of unrelated adventures, and no real arcs or development for its characters.

It's definitely comedic in tone, with Emperor Zurg in particular being about as threatening as his toy counterpart that appeared in Toy Story 2, and with not much in the way of moral ambiguity or complex characterization (unless you count Warp Darkmatter, but we'll get to him). That it was such a supposed phenomenon is rather hard to swallow, as it's definitely a Doylistic spin-off of a popular movie series, as opposed to something that could hypothetically take the world by storm on its own terms.

The gist of the show is laid out in the Toy Story films, in the words of (pre-self aware) Buzz himself: "I'm Buzz Lightyear, Space Ranger, Universe Protection Unit... I'm stationed up in the Gamma Quadrant of Sector Four. As a member of the elite Universe Protection Unit of the Space Ranger Corps, I protect the galaxy from the threat of invasion from the evil Emperor Zurg, sworn enemy of the Galactic Alliance."

That's what the showrunners had to work with: a Space Ranger, one of many, who is basically a space-cop, protecting and serving the galaxy from an evil Emperor and various other cosmic criminals. In the film trilogy, it's obvious that a lot of the inspiration for Buzz's fictional backstory was cribbed directly from Star Wars, though the concept of the Space Rangers probably owes more to the Green Lantern Corps, with a dash of Star Trek's Federation as well.

In the one-hour, ten-minute movie that introduces the series, Buzz is characterized as a lantern-jawed, straight-shooting, by-the-books Boy Scout, partnered with the more renegade fellow ranger Warp Darkmatter, both on a rescue mission to find and recover three missing Little Green Men.

Yeah, remember those green, three-eyed alien toys that glomped onto Mr Potato Head? There was no indication in the film trilogy that they were in any way connected to Buzz Lightyear, but it turns out they were always part of his fictional universe. It's a little odd to see the same characters in a completely different context, and they're presented here as creatures of a "uni-mind" that links them telepathetically to each other, as well as to their home planet.

And what form does this "uni-mind" take? A giant claw of course.

The rescue mission goes south, and Warp is presumably killed when Zurg self-destructs his moonbase. If this sounds surprisingly dark, allow me to add that there are also shots of an alien being tortured, and a sentient robot exploding.

The Commander of the Universe Protection Unit is your typical Drill Sergeant type (complete with humungous moustache) called Nebula, who urges Buzz to take on a new partner despite him adopting the familiar: "it hurts to care; I work alone from now on" mentality.

This doesn't stick, as not only does it transpire that Warp survived the explosion and was working for Zurg all along, but Buzz eventually picks up three new recruits that are eager to join Star Command. They are Mira Nova, a princess from the planet Tangea with the power to "ghost" (that is, phase) through solid objects, Booster Munchapper, a super-annoying janitor that provides wide-eyed hero worship of Buzz and an array of fat jokes, and XR, a robot designed by the Little Green Men who eventually gets reprogrammed with your typical wise-ass personality.

The three rookies provide your standard motley crew of misfits, and by the end of their maiden adventure, all are designated Space Rangers - mostly as a reward for how they helped with the mission than as a result of actual training and competency.

***

The movie was straight-to-video release, though there are two versions out there, one in which Tim Allen provides the voice for Buzz, and another in which it's Patrick Warburton, who plays Buzz throughout the series (it's definitely not Tom Hanks in either opening though).

The most interesting - or amusing - aspect of the show is how the writers take the tiny scraps of Buzz's backstory strewn throughout the films and either expand them into workable concepts or simply name-drop them into the scripts. As such, the Rangers' gear is identical to that of their toy counterparts, complete with pop-out wings and helmets (as Woody once put it, they do that "whoosh thing") as well as lasers and communicators on their wrists.

There is also mention of things like the Zelta Quadrant, uncharted moons, trillion carbonic alloys, Alpha Centauri, and even Pizza Planet. There are lines such as: "not today," "I come in peace," "lucky for you, I'm a Space Ranger," and naturally: "to infinity and beyond." There's even a scene in which Booster attends a little girl's tea party in which he wears the same apron and hat as the toy Buzz did during his breakdown in the first movie.

But all this is just the trappings.

The writers have an entire universe to build around the vague hints and gestures that the films provided, and to be honest - it's not exactly mind-blowing. As mentioned, a lot of what they have to work with is a template of Star Wars, what with the "Evil Empire" and the "Galactic Alliance", though Emperor Zurg is never scary, but rather a comedic buffoon, which sets the tone for the whole show.

There are plenty more Star Wars elements woven in, what with an emphasis on droids, bounty hunters and even a non-lethal Death Star, and the introductory film actually ends with a medal-giving ceremony. With all this in mind, I was curious about how they would handle the Toy Story 2 gag in which the Zurg toy reveals to fake!Buzz that he's his father. I mean, was that canon?

Turns out they end up doing a father/son reveal, but it's ultimately a psyche-out. Which is probably for the best.

But it's not made clear what Zurg is Emperor of, and the Space Rangers seem to live a fairly peaceful day-to-day existence, operating more like law officials than rebel warriors. For the most part the show deals with staple sci-fi conventions: our heroes end up in an alien zoo, they have to protect a high-ranking senator, they fight against their evil selves from a parallel universe (complete with goatees) or clones of their younger selves, and they regularly hunt down a variety of space criminals.

Yet some of the stories could get pretty creative: in one Buzz flies through a wormhole and wakes up several hundred years in the future, where he's encouraged to share his exploits to school children in lieu of anything better to do, since the Space Rangers long ago cleaned up the entire galaxy. Turns out it's just an elaborate deception crafted by Zurg after picking up Buzz's unconscious body in the wormhole, designed to trick him into spilling valuable intel on Star Command. What a tweest!

I was also partial to the one where Booster ends up on a Roswell-inspired planet (whose inhabitants have the familiar X-Files alien design, though they otherwise act like normal people) in which he is the terrifying alien threat.

There were several recurring villains, such as Torque (an alien terrorist that can clone himself), Gravitina (a seductress with a massive head that can manipulate gravitational forces), XL (a robot of the same prototype as XR, only bigger) and NOS-4-A2 (say it out loud), another robot that sucks the energy from any system driven by electrical power.

***

Among the supporting characters, Mira Nova is the standout. At first she runs the risk of being one of those annoyingly perfect female characters that were so prevalent in the late nineties/early noughts who were hyper-competent at everything without effort and whose defining trait was rolling their eyes at men in lieu of any actual characterization (she's even a princess at that!) But it's quickly established that she's actually very young, dorky and insecure.

I'm sure a lot of this has to do with her voice actress (Nicole Sullivan) who infuses her lines with over-eagerness and a stutter, which does wonders in making Mira a genuinely likeable character. Mercifully, there's never any attempt to pair her off with Buzz, though before you tell yourself that Disney would have never have tried this, what with her being a young cadet and him being her superior officer, there is in fact some weirdly dated stuff that just managed to sneak into the early noughts before the "woke" movement took off.

For instance, at one point a character is bribed with the unlisted phone number of a supermodel called Vicki Vortex (who appears later in the episode), with no consideration given to the fact that she almost certainly doesn't WANT complete strangers ringing her up.

In another episode Booster gets a crush on a teenage girl mere seconds after meeting her, and after she tells him she's already got a boyfriend and "let's be friends" (a line Buzz cringes at), Booster lets out a giant: "noooo" and demands: "what about ME?" That's his actual line. Let me point out that at this stage he's only known her a couple of hours, and she's shown absolutely zero interest in him.

There's also a running gag about XR having a crush on Mira, which leads to plenty of inappropriate comments and gets pretty tedious after a while.  

It's difficult to imagine any of this material getting past the first draft these days. And I'm not going to say too much about Booster or XR because they're both pretty awful. Booster is an Ascended Fanboy whose shtick is food and fart jokes, while XR is an irritating smart-ass, and each cause more problems than they solve.

***

Honestly, it's a little hard to believe that this show took Andy's world by storm to such an extent that an action figure of its main character would become the biggest-selling toy of all time. It's not bad, but the world of Toy Story had already established it as a cultural phenomenon, and I can't see this as a show that would have driven kids wild in the nineties. There are some other problems too, from the messy animation, rushed dialogue, and the frantic and jerky movements of the characters. At one point the money-shot of all the Rangers hovering in mid-air, surrounding the villain in a Big Damn Heroes moment, is cut short right in the middle of the pan-out.

And yet it's not bad persay. Most of the jokes land, two out of four protagonists are likeable, and I had fun watching it. I just couldn't help but feel that it could have been something much more epic; something darker and more operatic maybe, not this level of low-stakes fun. Perhaps then we could have understood why Andy and his friends were so ga-ga about it.

Miscellaneous Observations:

Despite the somewhat weak world-building overall, Emperor Zurg had a surprisingly good infrastructure in place for his evil Empire, from a military (robots called hornets on account of their colours), to a science division (literal brains with eyes and cyber-bodies) to grunt-workers (grubs, which are exactly what they sound like).

I mentioned Warp Darkmatter in the body of the review, and he's probably the show's most interesting character: a Space Ranger who defects to the Dark Side not for any ideological reason, but because he's a complete mercenary who just wants more money in his back pocket - and yet he's not beyond helping out Buzz when his former friend really needs it. It's a pity the show never had any proper resolution to this running thread.

The introductory movie has some real fun with its subtitles, with gems such as: “Under attack – obviously.” “Space. Duh.” and “Zurg Tower: But you knew that.”

Buzz actually gets a love interest in this series, a Jane Goodall-esque animal research scientist called Dr. Ozma Furbanna - which led me to wonder if things got awkward between the toy Buzz and Jessie when they watched this show. More than anything it was Ozma's presence that reminded me that this Buzz is not our Buzz, and how strange it would be for toys based on cartoon characters to see themselves on television.

I mean, would they see themselves as the children of these characters, or extensions of them, or maybe even clones? Do toys automatically have the same personalities as their "source material", or is everyone a blank slate the moment they come off the production line? Would the cartoons be a source of entertainment or just trigger identity crises? These are the questions that keep me up at night.

One episode made me laugh once I realized who had written it: the story involves our team getting their DNA stolen by robotic mosquitoes, leading to clones being made from their genetic material, who take the names of their original counterparts... only they spell those names backwards.

The writer is Greg Weisman, who used both of these plot-points in separate episodes of Gargoyles.

The President of the Galactic Alliance is a female alien that's only ever referred to as Madame President, and speaks with two mouths that she alternates between. I'm mentioning her only because at one point she's given a protection unit that's made up entirely of female Space Rangers, and even though it's only on-screen for a few seconds, it was really cool and I just wanted you to know that.