Pixar has had a history of not quite knowing how good the movies it makes. “Toy Story 2” for example was originally made for the home video market until someone realized it made a good feature movie too.
Now they’ve made a “Toy Story” TV special that’s as smart and funny and well paced as the feature movies, and may be the best thing on network TV this season. Ostensibly made as a Halloween special (after realizing one cannot live by Great Pumpkin alone) “Toy Story of Terror!” (ABC, 8 p.m.) isn’t that much scarier than the feature films — there’s peril and tension as they rise above it — but it does start by watching an old Dracula film, Pixar style.
The toys are on a road trip with toddler Bonnie and her mom and get a blowout, necessitating them to spend the night at a motel. One by one the toys disappear, only to end up in the motel owner’s scene to sell toys online. This is the peril, as Mr. Pricklepants, the boorish film critic, will gladly tell you.
Pricklepants is voiced by Timothy Dalton and part of a voice cast that’s hard to beat on any size screen, especially with Tom Hanks and Tim Allen at the top of the bill as Woody and Buzz. Woody’s cowgirl sidekick Jesse (Joan Cusack) is the center of the action here, rising above her fears of confinement to save the team though it is Carl Weathers, with another great comic TV role, as Combat Carl, to advise her.
That’s not all: Kristen Schaal’s voice as a rhino named Trixie is just as funny as Wallace Shawn’s returning voice as Rex, the dinosaur. Don Rickles, at 87, returns as Mr. Potato Head and there’s a Pez with a cat head voiced by Kate McKinnon of “Saturday Night Live.”
Well paced, and full of funny lines and more of that remarkable Pixar design and movement, and you’ve got yourself an animated TV classic that will likely not only accompany “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” upon its Halloween return, it’s likely to succeed it.