Buzz Lightyear
Toy Story (Pixar, 1995). Originally named “Lunar Larry” before the filmmakers landed on Buzz Lightyear, after Buzz Aldrin, the second human to walk on the moon.
The film uses the mythology of spaceflight not as backdrop but as structure. Woody represents the old American mythology of the cowboy — the Wild West, the frontier, dominance through presence. Buzz arrives from a place so technologically advanced that individuals can take to the skies themselves. He has a jetpack with wings. He believes he can fly.
That’s not flying — it’s falling with style. — Woody, Toy Story (1995)
The line is devastating in both directions. Woody is right — Buzz cannot actually fly. But “falling with style” is also an accurate description of hang gliding, base jumping, and much of what early aviation actually was. The distinction between controlled falling and flight is thinner than we pretend.
Connection to Barthes’ Jet-Man
Barthes wrote in 1957 of the pilot as a new mythological figure, emptied of humanity by speed, turned into pure function. Buzz Lightyear, like others, is a toy version of that myth: a plastic idol of the belief that technology confers transcendence. Both figures distill the cultural weight of the Western dream of flight into a single body.