A Morbid ‘Toy Story’ Question Gets A Dark Answer From Director

Toward the end of “Toy Story 3,” viewers everywhere were traumatized when their favorite lovable toys slid toward an incinerator and were nearly destroyed. The toys were saved at the last minute, but what would’ve happened if they hadn’t been? Would they have died? Would their spirits have gone to the great (infinity and) beyond? 

Well, that very “childhood-ruining debate” (as Uproxx called it) went viral over the weekend, with a Twitter user wondering if the toys in “Toy Story” could die.

Twitter users tackled the topic from all angles. One person argued that toys are “immortal” but not “invincible,” another said that toys can’t die a “total death,” and yet another suggested that if you “chopped off woody’s head … and put it far far away from his body where no one could put it back on… he must be dead.”

So what’s the truth? Lee Unkrich, who directed “Toy Story 3,” came across the debate and offered his own definitive answer.

Unkrich said that toys “live as long as they exist.” However, if they were to be “utterly destroyed,” it’d be “game over.”

Dang, Woody. Remember when all you had to worry about was a snake in your boot?

Although Woody, Buzz and the gang avoid the ultimate fate in “Toy Story 3,” at least one edit of the movie didn’t end that way. Previously, Unkrich and “Coco” writer and director Adrian Molina, who was a storyboard artist on “Toy Story 3,” told us about a version of the film where the toys didn’t escape the incinerator. 

Thankfully, that edit was made as a joke, and it wasn’t — as Unkrich might say (perhaps in the voice of Jigsaw from the “Saw” movies) — “game over.”