10 Best Times Star Wars Appeared In Other Movies

7. Toy Story

Ryan Reynolds Free Guy lightsaber
Disney

Going all the way back to the first Toy Story movie, it's been something of a trend for Pixar to include Star Wars nods in its movies.

Some of the best of these include the Dash forest chase in The Incredibles harking back to Return of the Jedi's speeder bike chase, or the fighter pilot dogs in Up referring to themselves as Gray Leader, Gray Two, and Gray Three, parodying the Red Squadron callsign scene in A New Hope. But it’s the Star Wars references in the Toy Story series that people will remember most fondly.

From dick-bag neighbour Sid interrogating Woody with “where’s the Rebel base”, to an Obi-Wan action figure in Toy Story 4 (below), to the fact that Emperor Zurg is a clear riff on Darth Vader (in the first film, Buzz even mentions that his nemesis has built a weapon with the destructive power "to annihilate an entire planet”), there’s a small piece of Star Wars in all four movies, some obvious, and some less so.

Toy Story 4 Obi-Wan Kenobi toy
Disney

Zurg telling Buzz “I am your father” and Buzz yelling “nooooooooooooooo” is one of the funniest easter eggs in movie history, inadvertently foreshadowing Vader's own pained scream in Revenge of the Sith six years later.

Pixar and Star Wars actually have a shared history, with George Lucas himself proving an instrumental player in the studio's formative years. This in mind, it's almost like these Star Wars nods are a neat way for Pixar to honour its own past.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for almost nine years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. He has been writing and video editing for 10+ years, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers and uploading them to YouTube (they're admittedly a bit rusty by today's standards). If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order or to tell you about the making of 1988's Remembrance of the Daleks, Danny is the person to ask.