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Marketing

Marketing for Toy Story included $20 million spent by Disney for advertising as well as advertisers such as Burger King, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, and Payless ShoeSource paying $125 million in promotions for the film. Marketing consultant Al Ries reflected on the promotion: "This will be a killer deal. How can a kid, sitting through a one-and-a-half-hour movie with an army of recognizable toy characters, not want to own one?" Despite this, Disney Consumer Products was slow to see the potential of Toy Story. When the Thanksgiving release date was announced in January 1995, many toy companies were accustomed to having eighteen months to two years of lead time and passed on the project. Disney shopped the film at the Toy Fair trade show in February 1995, where only the small Canadian company Thinkway Toys, was interested in licensing the toy rights for the Toy Story characters. Disney promoted the film by inserting its trailer into the home-video re-release of Cinderella, showing a behind-the-scenes documentary on the Disney Channel, and incorporating the characters into a parade at the Disney-MGM Studios theme park in Florida.

It was screenwriter Joss Whedon's idea to incorporate Barbie as a character who could rescue Woody and Buzz in Toy Story ' s final act. The idea was dropped after Mattel objected and refused to license the toy. Producer Ralph Guggenheim claimed that Mattel did not allow the use of the toy as "They philosophically felt girls who play with Barbie dolls are projecting their personalities onto the doll. If you give the doll a voice and animate it, you're creating a persona for it that might not be every little girl's dream and desire." Hasbro likewise refused to license G.I. Joe (mainly because Sid was going to blow one up, prompting the filmmakers to instead use a fictional toy, Combat Carl), but they did license Mr. Potato Head. The only real-life toy in the film that was not in production was Slinky Dog, which had been discontinued since the 1970s. When designs for Slinky were sent to Betty James (Slinky inventor Richard James 's wife) she said that Pixar had improved the toy and that it was "cuter" than the original.