Love Does NOT Bring the Toys to Life (Stinky Pete Proves It)

The theory: Toy Story's toys are alive before love

Most of us grew up with the love answer. A kid loves a toy, and that's what makes it alive. Toy Story 5 even has a bedtime story that quotes The Velveteen Rabbit, the old book where a boy loves his toy rabbit until it becomes Real. It's a lovely idea, and I think the movies quietly prove it wrong.

Here's my theory. Toy Story's toys are alive before anyone loves them. They're alive because somebody made them for a kid, either on a factory line or with a kid's own hands, and every one of them wakes up already knowing what it was made for. Love comes second. And if love isn't what keeps them going, losing it can't stop them either. Follow that all the way down and every toy that ever went into a landfill is lying down there still awake.

Start with three toys. Woody, loved by the same boy right up until that boy packed for college. Forky, a spork a little girl turned into a toy and loved for a few minutes at a craft table. And a third one who was never loved at all, because nobody ever opened his box. All three of them are wide awake.

Exhibit A: Stinky Pete, mint in the box

The third toy is the problem for the love answer. In Toy Story 2, in Al's apartment, Jessie introduces Woody to the last member of the Roundup gang, Stinky Pete the Prospector.

"He's mint in the box. Never been opened."

And then Pete talks from inside the box: "Turn me around, Bullseye, so I can see." No kid ever named him or played with him. He wasn't asleep in there waiting for one either. Later in the film he tells Woody exactly what his life has been:

"Spending a lifetime on a dime-store shelf watching every other toy be sold."

If love wakes a toy up, Pete should have slept through his whole life on that shelf. He watched it instead. Whatever turned him on happened before the cellophane went on, and the only thing that happened to him before the cellophane is that a factory made him for a kid.

Exhibit B: the spork who knew his job

Forky is the toy everybody uses to argue for love, so I wanted to look at him really carefully. On the morning of kindergarten orientation, the spork was lying still in a classroom trash can. It only reached Bonnie's table because Woody, riding along in her backpack, dumped the bin out for her. It lay still until her hands turned it into Forky. She wrote her name on the bottom of his sticks, played with him, and then he woke up.

So did her love wake him up? Watch what she actually loved at that table. When her teacher comes over, Bonnie holds him up and gives him a happy little voice:

"Hello, I'm Forky. Nice to meet you!"

That's the Forky she played with. The one who actually woke up climbed out of her backpack asking for the trash and spent his first week insisting he was a spork. Then in the RV on the road trip, he wriggles out of a sleeping Bonnie's arms and tells Woody exactly what he is:

"I am not a toy! I'm a spork. I was made for soup, salad... maybe chili, and then the trash."

Look at that word "maybe." Nobody says maybe about something they remember. You say maybe about a job you've been told you might get. Bonnie's a kindergartner. She didn't teach him soup and chili. He woke up with it. If her love had built him, he'd have woken up as the cheerful little guy she was playing. Her love got his name right and not much else.

And then Woody walks him down a dark highway all night and sells him on Bonnie. Forky tells him trash is warm and cozy and safe, like somebody whispering in your ear that everything's going to be okay. Woody tells him that's how Bonnie feels about him, and Forky gets it. He's Bonnie's trash. He keeps everything he woke up with, and now it's for her. That's the line I keep coming back to: love doesn't make a toy alive. It makes a living thing a toy.

Karen Beverly: the same test without Woody

One spork could be a fluke, and Woody had his hands on that one from the bin to the big speech. The fair test is Bonnie doing it again with Woody nowhere near her, and that's exactly what happens over Toy Story 4's end credits. It's a year later, Bonnie starts first grade, and Jessie climbs out of the backpack with news: "She made a new friend in class." In Bonnie's room, "made" means made, with glue.

The new friend is Karen Beverly, a plastic utensil with yarn hair, a paper dress and googly eyes. Different school year, different classroom, different piece of plastic. Forky walks up and tells her his name, and her first word is "Trash?" Nobody in that room had said a word about garbage. She got it from the same place Forky got "maybe chili," which is what she's made of. They're both cutlery you use once and throw away, and they both wake up thinking about where throwaway things go. Then she asks the oldest question in the franchise, "How am I alive?", and Forky says "I don't know." I think we can answer it.

To be fair, a living toy rode in that backpack both times, Woody with Forky and Jessie with Karen. So for Bonnie's crafts I can't completely rule out a toy nearby being part of it. Nobody was in the box with Stinky Pete, though.

The factory toys wake up knowing the pitch

Bonnie's desk has made two of them. Factories make them by the million. Buzz lands on Andy's bed and sits up mid-mission, calling Star Command, and none of Andy's toys told him he was a Space Ranger. The pitch turns up later in a TV commercial for the Buzz Lightyear action figure, and under the cover on his wrist it says MADE IN TAIWAN. Tour Guide Barbie drives the gang through Al's Toy Barn reciting Hot Wheels trivia she came out of the box with. Gabby Gabby asks Woody when he was made, two toys comparing when they came off the line. And in Toy Story 5, Smarty Pants powers up and corrects everybody fast: "I am not a chair. I am a potty trainer." Same thing Forky said in the RV, just with a battery.

Even Woody's staff meeting in the first movie lands there. "It doesn't matter how much we're played with," he says. "That's what we're made for, right?" He waves off play in his first breath and lands on being made in his last.

The counter-arguments

The best one is the lawn gnome. In Toy Story 2, Hamm says the lawn gnome next door is helping look for Woody's hat, and a lawn gnome is a garden ornament grown-ups buy. That's a fair hit. But when Toy Story 5 finally puts a gnome on screen, he's sitting at Blaze's tea party, at a kid's play table, next to an action figure, an inflatable flamingo and a slice of pizza in sunglasses. Smarty Pants calls that whole table "outdoor toys." Even the potty trainer files him with the toys.

The one I genuinely can't close is the Roundup merch. In Al's apartment there's a whole wall of Woody stuff: a yo-yo with his face on it, a bank game with a tiny Woody and a tiny Prospector built in. All made for kids in the fifties, and none of it moves on its own. Meanwhile Hamm is a kid's piggy bank and he's been talking since 1995. I've got two half-answers. Maybe merch doesn't count because it's a copy of Woody with nobody of its own inside. Or maybe being made for a kid is only half the switch. Either way, Pete's box already ruled out love.

Exhibit C: the dump can't kill you

If love isn't the switch, losing it shouldn't turn a toy off, and the films keep showing exactly that. Jessie gets every bit of love the Velveteen Rabbit ever got from Emily, then gets left in a donation box, awake the whole time. Lotso gets left behind at a rest stop and replaced, and he and Chuckles and Big Baby go right on talking. When the love leaves, the toy stays awake.

So Toy Story 3 throws the whole cast into the Tri-County dump. A bulldozer, a giant magnet, a shredder that turns a golf bag into confetti, and every toy keeps talking. Then Lotso leaves them at the incinerator with one line: "Where's your kid now, Sheriff?" They slide into the pit, and for the only time in five films they stop fighting. They hold hands and close their eyes, because they know what it is. Then the Aliens bring the claw down out of that light, and honestly it's my favorite sequence in all five films.

Exactly one toy in the series gets destroyed for good on screen, Combat Carl, blown up by Sid. Sid's rocket, his magnifying glass and the incinerator all come down to fire. Lee Unkrich, who directed Toy Story 3, said it on Twitter in 2020: "They live as long as they exist. But if they were to be utterly destroyed? Say, in an incinerator? Game over."

And the movie shows us who's still down there. Lotso leaves the dump strapped to the grille of a garbage truck next to a muddy, sad-eyed frog, who tells him, "Hey, buddy. You might wanna keep your mouth shut." Somebody threw that frog out and he's wide awake. Every kids' meal toy, every carnival prize, every action figure that went out in a bin bag after a birthday was made for a kid, and every one of them is still down there, minus whatever reached the furnace. A while back I made a video saying Toy Story 3 proved Stinky Pete right about the landfill. I undersold it.

Verdict

Put it together and you get two rules. Every toy in Toy Story was made for a kid and woke up before anyone loved it, and nothing made that way dies until the fire. Forky knew what he was made for before he knew who loved him. Love gives them someone to be alive for.

That leaves one thing I can't stop thinking about. Toy Story 5's new toys run on batteries, and one of Blaze's old devices remembers being switched off as "darkness." So picture a Lilypad at the bottom of a landfill one day, screen black, in the same bag as an old spork. Is she asleep, or is she lying there awake? The full case, with every clip and the wedding scene that ends it, is in the video above.