The Toy Story Aliens: The Little Green Men, The Claw and the Pizza Planet Cult

The aliens appear in Toy Story, released on November 22, 1995, for a single scene that has outlasted most of the film. Buzz Lightyear, convinced he is a real space ranger, climbs into a rocket-shaped claw machine at the Pizza Planet restaurant and finds it full of small green three-eyed toys in blue jumpsuits who greet him as a visitor and explain their world: the claw above them is their master, it decides who leaves and who remains, and being chosen is an honour. Sid, the neighbour's destructive son, plays the machine and wins one, then, after Woody interferes, Buzz and Woody, and the alien's calm acceptance of its fate, the claw having chosen, is the last we see of it. Jeff Pidgeon, a Pixar story artist, voiced all of them in a soft, reverent chorus, and has voiced them since.

The design was a toy's idea of an alien. John Lasseter's team wanted something a child would recognise as alien without any reference to a particular film, and drew the pulp Martian as a plush: a rounded green body, a single antenna with a ball on the end, a smile, a Pizza Planet logo, and three eyes, the third added because two looked like a frog. The toys are squeaky, as the film demonstrates when Sid squeezes one, and they are dispensable, which is the point of a claw machine and the point of the scene.

The aliens are the series' only theologians. Their belief that the claw is a benevolent power that selects the worthy is a complete faith, with a scripture of one sentence and a sacrament of being lifted, and the films play it straight: the aliens are never wrong, never disillusioned and never afraid, because whatever happens has been chosen. Pixar's writers have said the idea came from watching claw machines at pizza restaurants, where the toys sit in a heap looking up at the crane, and from asking what the toys would make of it; the answer was a cargo cult, and a serene one.

The faith has consequences. In Toy Story 2 (1999) three of the aliens are found in the claw machine of a Pizza Planet delivery truck, Mr. Potato Head saves them from falling out of the window, and they declare their eternal gratitude and attach themselves to him as adopted sons, to the dismay of Mrs. Potato Head, who is delighted. In Toy Story 3 (2010) their devotion pays the debt: at the dump, as the toys join hands in the incinerator's slide, the aliens, who had vanished toward a crane on the far side of the pit, lift the entire group out with the claw of a construction crane and announce the claw's choice. It is the moment the series treats its running joke as grace.

The Little Green Men, as Pixar's merchandise calls them, became a Disney icon out of proportion to their screen time. They are the symbol of the Toy Story franchise on hats, ears, plush and the queues of the Toy Story Midway Mania rides, where the claw-machine scene is reproduced as a room; in the Disney parks the alien with the three eyes is the character most photographed after Buzz, and the alien-shaped snacks sold there are among the parks' best-known. They appear in all four films and the shorts, in Lightyear (2022) as toys, and in Toy Story 5, announced for 2026, and their three-word theology has been quoted at claw machines in every language the films have been dubbed into.

Their appeal is the one every alien lodger in this hub shares, the visitor who takes us on faith. Buzz in the machine is a delusion in a spacesuit and the aliens welcome him without a question; Sid is a monster and they go with him without a complaint. They are the friendliest extraterrestrials in the field guide because they are the least suspicious, and the films reward that trust at the dump, which is as close as a children's franchise comes to an argument about faith.

The phrase Pixar named them for is older than the flying saucer. "Little green men" appears in newspapers for Martians as early as the 1900s, was a pulp cliché by the 1930s and became the American shorthand for any alien after August 1955, when a Kentucky farm family reported a night-long siege by small, silvery, big-eared beings and the wire services, having never heard the witnesses say green, headlined the story as an attack by little green men. The Kelly–Hopkinsville encounter fixed the phrase, and every green alien toy since, including Pixar's, is its descendant; the beings the witnesses actually described were closer to the Greys.

The three eyes have a shorter pedigree. Fiction's aliens have mostly had two, and the third is a cartoonist's addition that makes the design unmistakable, the way antennae did for the 1950s and black almond eyes did for the 1980s. The Toy Story alien belongs to the child's-eye tradition of E.T. and Stitch, the extraterrestrial as a creature to be looked after, and its claw cult is a small parody of the Space Brothers of the contactee books, who also chose the worthy and lifted them into the light.