A Toy Story Character Was Inspired By A Creepy Twilight Zone Episode

In Josh Cooley's "Toy Story 4," Woody (Tom Hanks) falls out of his family's RV on a road trip, and falls in with a group of lost toys. As audiences know from the previous "Toy Story" movies, toys are only happy when children play with them, and lost toys have found a way to travel throughout a neighborhood's multiple public parks, burying themselves in sandboxes right when certain preschools break for the day. Lost toys live in a strange state of chaotic bliss. 

Toys that don't get played with, meanwhile, become bitter and evil. This was true of the old prospector Stinky Pete (Kelsey Grammer) in 1999's "Toy Story 2," and it's certainly true of Gabby Gabby (Christina Hendricks) in "Toy Story 4." Gabby is a decades-old talking doll that has wound up in a small-town antique store. No one will buy Gabby, however, because her inner voice box broke many years ago. Gabby has become the ruler of the antique shop, and eagerly holds any toys inside prisoner. It won't be until Woody offers up his own inner pull-string voice box that she will release his friend, Forky (Tony Hale). 

Gabby Gabby, many might recognize, was just the latest in a long line of creepy talking dolls to have appeared in film or on TV. Scary dolls have popped up in films like "Deep Red," "Magic," "Barbarella," "Trilogy of Terror," "Poltergeist," "Dolls," "Demonic Toys," "Child's Play," "Saw," "Annabelle," "Dead Silence" and "M3GAN," just to name a few. Scary dolls have long been a part of the horror movie firmament, and "Toy Story 4" merely tapped into the deep-running current of natural fear audiences hold for terrifying, unmoving porcelain faces. 

In 2019, director Cooley admitted in an EW interview that Gabby was inspired by the ringleader of all creepy screen dolls, Talky Tina, the seemingly sentient toy from the "The Twilight Zone" episode "Living Doll."

In "Living Doll" (November 1, 1963), a young girl named Christie (Tracy Stratford) is given an expensive talking doll (voice of June Foray) by her mother Annabelle (Mary La Roche), much to the consternation of the girl's new stepfather Erich (Telly Savalas). The doll, named Talky Tina, only says warm phrases like "I love you very much." Erich hates the doll, but it's a clear outlet for his frustrations over his inability to have children with Annabelle himself; he is infertile. 

Erich spends time with Tina alone, and it starts to say that it doesn't like him. Then it begins responding directly to what he says. At first, Erich assumes that Annabelle or Christie is playing a prank on him, but by the end of the episode, Erich will become convinced that Tina is alive. Revenge is planned. Tina's final line of the episode is "My name is Talky Tina, and you'd better be nice to me." Chilling. 

Cooley said that Talky Tina served as a pretty direct inspiration for Gabby Gabby. He said that the world of "Toy Story" hadn't yet confronted the cinematic legacy of creepy doll toys, and Gabby was a great opportunity. He noted:

"I've always loved 'The Twilight Zone' and that Talky Tina-type of thing. We've never seen creepy, old dolls like that in 'Toy Story,' and this was an opportunity to do that. [...] Gabby has been in this antique store for 60-plus years. Gabby is a perfect toy except for the fact that she's got one thing broken about her that's been keeping her from being purchased and loved forever."

Sadly, because CBS owns "The Twilight Zone," it wouldn't have been legally very easy to make an actual Talky Tina the villain in "Toy Story 4." But then, if Talky Tina had been the villain, it would have opened a whole can of worms about all living dolls in horror movies, and how they might all live in the same universe as "Toy Story." And that would disturb too many kids.