Plot
Kenneth Zevo, owner of Zevo Toys in Moscow, Idaho, is dying. He surprises his assistant, Owen Owens, by announcing that instead of his son Leslie succeeding him, his younger brother, U.S. Army Lieutenant General Leland Zevo, will do so. Even Leland, whose relationship with Kenneth is strained, is surprised, noting that Leslie has been apprenticed at the toy factory most of his life. Kenneth agrees that Leslie loves toys and his work, but that his childlike demeanor would jeopardize the company. Kenneth had even hired Gwen Tyler to work in the factory, hoping that she and Leslie would start a relationship to help Leslie mature.
Leland reluctantly takes control after Kenneth's death, and because Leslie and his sister, Alsatia, know about toymaking, he decides to effectively give them control of the factory. However, Leland's interest is piqued on hearing about corporate secrets potentially being leaked, and he hires his son, Patrick, a soldier with covert military expertise, to manage security. From Patrick, Leland is inspired to build war toys, although Leslie explains that Zevo Toys has never made war toys due to Kenneth's overall dislike of war, which caused the strained relationship with his brother. Meanwhile, Leslie finally notices Gwen, and they start dating.
One night, Leland and Patrick go into town, where they peruse a video arcade, watching children play intently at the flickering game consoles. At a local toy store, Leland is amazed at what other companies have produced regarding war toys. As they drive back to the countryside, Leland and Patrick stop at a small pond, and Leland soon realizes that if military aircraft and hardware could be shrunken and operated by remote control, military spending could become less cumbersome.
Leland offers to drop the idea of Zevo Toys making war toys, but asks Leslie if he can partition a small amount of the factory to develop toys of his own. He asks Leslie to avoid the area, fearing that his toys may not be good enough. Unknown to Leslie, however, Leland is using the space to develop miniature remotely controlled war machines, aspiring to sell these to the military. However, military leaders refuse to buy into his plan, and Leland, becoming unhinged by their refusal, moves ahead with his plan independently. He increasingly takes over the factory's space and increases security, shrinking other departments and shutting down Alsatia's, effectively laying off numerous workers.
When Leslie sees children being led into a restricted area, he, with Alsatia's help, sneaks in and discovers Leland training children to operate the miniature war machines with arcade-like interfaces. Leslie barely escapes the "Sea Swine" amphibious drone guarding an exit, and flees to Gwen's house to reveal his findings. Unbeknownst to him, Leland, aware of Leslie's discovery, prepares to defend his parts of the factory, promoting himself to general of his own army. Patrick learns that Leland lied about his mother's death, and quits to warn Leslie.
Leslie, Alsatia, Patrick, Gwen and Owen infiltrate the factory and disperse to locate the main control center. Leland takes the opportunity to unleash some cute-yet-deadly toys, before setting his military-style "Tommy Tanks" and "Hurly-Burly Helicopters" on them. Leslie, Alsatia, Gwen and Owen find their way into a storage warehouse in which he had the older Zevo Toys stored. Devising a plan, Leslie winds up the old toys and puts them to battle against Leland's war machines.
He manages to get to Leland, and during a fight, Leland's helicopter attempts to hit Leslie with a missile, but misses and hits Leland's control panel, which shuts down all the military toys. As Leslie and Patrick confront Leland, the Sea Swine attacks Alsatia, who is revealed to be the most advanced toy of them all: A robot built by Kenneth as a companion for Leslie after the untimely demise of his mother. As Leslie and Patrick attend to Alsatia, Leland tries to escape, but the Sea Swine attacks him.
As Leland is hospitalized, Leslie takes over the factory and continues his relationship with Gwen, and Alsatia is fully repaired. Owen continues to work at Zevo, and Patrick prepares to depart for other missions, but remains with the others long enough to attend a brief memorial for Kenneth.
Production
Barry Levinson wrote Toys with his then-wife, Valerie Curtin, in 1979, intending it to be his directorial debut. He came up with the story after reading a newspaper article about the Soviet Navy Intelligence Department finding information about United States Navy nuclear submarines from toy models. 20th Century Fox got the rights and originally planned to start principal photography in April 1980. However, the executives who had approved Levinson's script were replaced by a new management team led by Shirley Lansing which, unsure about the project's potential, put it in turnaround. [6]
Levinson tried to revive the project at other studios in the 1980s. In 1982, CBS Theatrical Films agreed to make Toys as one of its first thirty-nine films, but the studio was closed. Columbia Pictures tried to make the film in 1987 during David Puttnam's year as president, but Fox President Leonard Goldberg denied them the rights. In 1988, interest in the project increased after Robin Williams agreed to star in the film and Levinson's film Rain Man became highly successful. In 1990, Fox president Joe Roth finally greenlit the film, assigning a $38 million budget. However, issues during pre-production and scheduling conflicts with Levinson's next film Bugsy (1991) delayed the film for another several years. [6] Producer Mark Johnson noted that the development hell was partly because their intentions were never understood, because "we kept using the word 'whimsy'", while the studios "kept reading it as a black comedy".
Principal photography began on February 25, 1992, at the Fox lot in Los Angeles and concluded in June 1992. Location filming also took place at the Palouse River Valley in Washington. The film nearly went over budget, but Levinson, Williams, and producer Mark Johnson reduced costs to just $30 million after they agreed to defer their salaries. [6]
Levinson, who said that the movie had an ironic title regarding how "big toys, little toys–it's all a game, watching that missile go down the chimney blowing up that factory in Iraq could have been in a video arcade", considered that Toys was produced at a favorable time, as post-Cold War military expenditures were cut, and "investing in a force of tiny, remote-controlled $5,000 planes instead of a $450-million one is one way of beating the cutbacks". [7]
Italian designer, Ferdinando Scarfiotti, spent more than a year designing the sets, which took over every sound stage at Fox Studios in Los Angeles. The influence of René Magritte's art is obvious in the set design and in some of the costume design. The poster distributed to movie theaters featuring Williams in a red bowler hat against a blue, cloud-lined background evokes The Son of Man . Golconda is featured during a sequence in which Williams and Cusack perform in a music video sequence rife with surreal imagery, much of it Magritte-inspired. The film's design was also influenced by Dadaism, Modernism and Italian Futurism — notably the work of Fortunato Depero.
The film has often been noted for many of its outdoor scenes, which feature the Palouse region. All of the outdoor scenes, including the trailer, were filmed on location in southeastern Washington near Rosalia and north-central Idaho.
Release
The film was publicized with a trailer that features Williams walking through a large undulating field of green grass, breaking the fourth wall and talking to the audience. This trailer [8] was parodied on the TV show, The Simpsons , in the episode, "Burns' Heir", substituting Mr. Burns for Williams.
Box office
Toys was released in 1,272 venues, earning $4,810,027 and ranking sixth in its opening weekend, second among new releases, behind Forever Young . [9] The film would ultimately gross $23,278,931 in North America, [3] making it a commercial failure based on a $50 million budget. [2]
Critical response
The film has an approval rating of 29% on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 28 reviews, and an average score of 4.5/10. The website's consensus reads: "Like a colorfully overengineered gewgaw on the shelf, Toys might look like fun, but its seemingly limitless possibilities lead mainly to confusion and disappointment." [10] Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "C+" on a scale of A+ to F. [11]
Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times stated that what made the film "that much sadder a failure is that everyone involved must have sincerely felt they were doing the Lord's work, care and concern going hand in hand with an almost total miscalculation of mood. Even Robin Williams, so lively a voice in Aladdin , is on beatific automatic pilot here, preferring to be warm and cuddly when a little of his energy (paradoxically on splendid display in the film's teaser trailer) is desperately called for. The Grinch Who Stole Christmas seems to have stripped the life from this film as well, leaving a pretty shell, expensive but hollow, in its place." [12]
Peter Travers wrote in Rolling Stone , "To cut Toys a minor break, it is ambitious. It is also a gimmicky, obvious and pious bore, not to mention overproduced and overlong." [13]
