What he says: im fine
What he means: in Toy Story 2 Woody is treated as the rarest of the toys from Woodyâs Roundup when heâs the main character of the show. That would mean he would have had a higher production number than any of his costars, and in fact probably would have been made for the longest and earliest of the toy line. Stinky Pete, by being the fan unfavorite, must have had a smaller run, and less of his toys would have survived in the 50s as kids would have needlessly damaged or destroyed him making him the rarest of the group and Woody the most common. If anything, the plot of Toy Story 2 should have revolved around Al stealing Woodyâs hat as it would have been the item most sought after by collectors as itâs easily lost and not attached to an otherwise common doll. Fundamentally, Alâs apartment should have been littered with Woody dolls in various states of damage, all missing hats and maybe a handful of decent condition Woody dolls needing a hat while Stinky Pete is the rarest and most expensive as a collectors item.
@everyone saying Woody was a limited run or some shit likeâŚ.. yâall telling me the character that got onto the cover of time magazine and had all this fucking merch didnât saturate the market with Woody dolls? In the 50s at the height of capitalism and the baby boom???
real life be like:
Your error is in assuming that Woody is rare because few Woody dolls were made. Not the case: Many Woody dolls were made- and because of their popularity they were sold and played-with until they were wrecked and - this being the 50s - thrown out. That plastic Woody youâve got there will outlast most civilizations: but our Woody? With his cloth body and its aging 1950s fabric? By the 80s most of those would be a wreck: cloth-body stuffed toys have a very short shelf-life once theyâre out in the world. Store a Woody in the attic for ten years and the mice get him, or the mold, or the simple weight of time loosens the bindings and makes his limbs unravel. And the voice box? With an in-tact, still functional draw strings? Do oyou know how often those things jam? Woody is unique because he seems to have belonged to a family that takes unusually good care of their toys, going so far as to fix them. Toy from the 50s are not in any way shape or form equivalent to modern full-plastic toys or even BEanie Babies, which were sold primarily with a view to the long-term collectors market. There is absolutely nothing weird or strange in a Woody doll surviving in such good quality to 1999 being notable: his popularity and high production rate has zero impact on the toyâs long-term survivability. (Indeed, that high production rate could have even introduced a lot more manufacturing defects into shipped Woody dolls, creating an overall decline in quality.) Just because it saturated the market is no indication of longevity. Yes, Al sure has a lot of Woody stuff - and most of that is very rare. For a good comparison point hop over to ebay and start looking for vintage, no-package Howdy Doody dolls from the 1950s - not the 70s re-releases with 70s materials but the 50s ones. Start judging the quality: the faded fabrics, the dirt, the smudges, the dinginess, and youâll begin to see why Al freaked out so much: he didnât just just find a Woody with a hat, he found a Woody who was clean - with no chipping on the hand-painted face, whose hand-stitched hat hadnât lost its stitching, whose arm break could be repaired by a master who knew what they were doing. A hundred thousand Woodys might have been made in the 50s - but the number that survived to the present day, out-of-box, out of the hands of collectors, in good enough shape to be polished-up into museum-quality condition?I Al found the treasure of a lifetime.
[Fun fact: according to the wiki, Woodyâs full name is Woody Pride.]
^ me dropping everything to learn more about the intricacies of the Toy Story universe
