I contacted Disney to see if I could get any additional details on the announced Toy Story shorts that will be playing in front of Cars 2 on June 24 and The Muppets on November 23, but they couldn’t give me any other than to say these will be the only two Pixar shorts this year and that more info and images are expected to be made available in March, but even that wasn’t a sure thing.
Nevertheless, it is interesting to know the Toy Story franchise will live on, much in the way the Cars franchise never died after the first film was released in 2006. After Cars, Pixar created a series of shorts surrounding Mater, the dim-witted tow truck voiced by Larry the Cable Guy, which started with Mater and the Ghostlight in 2006 and continued through 2010 with “Cars Toon: Mater’s Tall Tales”.
The difference here is Pixar is giving the Toy Story gang a theatrical treatment, but the downside means we aren’t getting any new non-Toy Story shorts this year, which really have become part of the highlight of any Pixar release.
