The first Toy Story movie came out in 1995, the year Internet Explorer was introduced and Amazon was still in its infancy. Tamagotchi, the tiny, pixelated video game that had hundreds of millions scrambling to keep their digital creatures alive, didn’t reach the U.S. for another two years. That year, Pixar’s ultimate villain was an 11-year-old boy who got a little too creative with rearranging the heads and arms of his secretly anthropomorphic toys.
Thirty years later, Toy Story’s new antagonist is nothing so anachronistic as a child who plays with plastic cars and action figures. The villain of Toy Story 5, as suggested by the teaser trailer released last week, is a digital tablet. “The age of toys,” title cards read, “is over?”
The age of toys may not be over, but Pixar is right: It has been overshadowed by the iPad age. Interviewees at NPR balked at the idea of 6- to 12-year-olds requesting iPads for Christmas in the salad days of 2010. Today, children are getting them while they’re still in diapers.
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