There's a bit in the film about Woody's rivalry with Buzz. You know—like, the whole movie. But if you look beyond the characters themselves, there's a deeper story behind the tension that between a cowboy and a spaceman butting heads.

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The easy way to look at it is as an older toy being replaced by a new one. Woody seems to come from an older generation, with floppy limbs and a pull string that makes him talk. Buzz, on the other hand, is all sleek plastic and "batteries not included." He reflects the Star Wars generation of toys more than the Lone Ranger era. So it was pretty logical to make the old toy a product of the past (cowboys) and the new one a product of the future (spacemen).

And yet the two aren't nearly as different as they think. Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, and the Star Wars gang owe a lot to those gunslingers from the Old West. Take away their jet packs and their ray guns, and the stories are very similar. Think about the creature cantina in Star Wars, for example. It kind of resembles those old-time saloons in the Wild West, right?

Similarly, Buzz and Woody eventually realize that they have more in common than they think—and while they may come from wildly different genres, those differences are plastic-deep at best.