This article is, or was, a featured Super Villain article.
Lots-o'-Huggin' Bear, more commonly known as Lotso, is the main antagonist of Toy Story 3. He is the (former) leader of Sunnyside Daycare and Ken,Big Baby, and the other guards' former boss.
He was voiced by Ned Beatty.
Biography[]
Beginnings[]
According to Chuckles, Lotso was originally a teddy bear owned by a girl named Daisy. Of all her toys, Lotso was considered special to her. However, one day when she took Chuckles, Lotso, and Big Babyon a picnic, she fell asleep and her parents took her home while leaving her toys behind by accident.
Chuckles, Lotso, and Big Baby found their way back to Daisy's home, but Lotso then finds that he was replaced by another copy of him. Ignoring the fact that Daisy did not know that toys were alive and her replacing him with another Lotso toy demonstrated how much she loved him, he decided to abandon his owner.
Big Baby tried to return back to Daisy's house, but an infuriated Lotso refused to let him, claiming that she had replaced them all and has never really loved them. He ripped off a heart-shaped pendant that he had hanging from his neck with Daisy's name on it, which Chuckles recovered and hid.
After that they climbed up on a Pizza Planet deliver truck and fell off, finding Sunnyside Daycare. There, Lotso had gathered minions to follow his code of making other toys suffer to share his pain with them. He turned Sunnyside into a pyramid where he'd be the head, and would rule in tyranny the daycare center, threatening the toys with spending the night in the box (the sand box), and being harmed by his minions or by the kids in the caterpillar room who were too young to know how to play properly with them.
Chuckles ran lucky when he got broken: Bonnie found him, took him home, and repaired him. Lotso and Big Baby weren't so lucky as Chuckles was however, as Chuckles told Woody.
Toy Story 3[]
When Andy is all grown up, Woody, Buzz, and their best friends are all shipped to Sunnyside by mistake after Andy's mother mistakes them for trash. Lotso at first acts nice to Andy's toys, and humbly gives them a tour of Sunnyside. Woody doesn't believe that he should stay at daycare and leaves Sunnyside to go look for Andy, but Woody is found by a girl named Bonnie Anderson and he is taken home to Bonnie's house.
Afterwards, Lotso reveals his true evil personality when Buzz requests that he and his toys to not be in the Caterpillar Room anymore. Lotso refuses, saying that the younger children, who don't play nice with the toys as much as Andy did, really need toys. Lotso orders his henchmen toys to switch Buzz Lightyear's play mode to demo mode after Lotso finds the Buzz Lightyear instruction manual, which makes Buzz think that his friends are henchmen of Emperor Zurg, turning Buzz into a hypnotized henchman of Lotso.
During that time, Woody meets with Bonnie's toys. When Woody told them that he escaped from Lotso's prison, Sunnyside Daycare Center, all of Bonnie's toys are shocked that Woody actually escaped out of Sunnyside. Chuckles the clown explains to Woody about Lotso's past.
Meanwhile, the hypnotized Buzz Lightyear locks up Woody's friends so they could suffer like all the other toys. Woody returns to Sunnyside to rescue his friends by going into Bonnie's backpack, but then a Chatter Telephone toy tells Woody that he shouldn't have come back because escape is virtually impossible. The Chatter Telephone reveals all of Lotso's security systems, revealing that a cymbal-banging monkey toy watches all the security cameras and that the outside is always guarded by truck toys. Woody reunites with his friends, who try to reset Buzz and then escape while Lotso was asleep in a chair.
After reaching the dumpster, Lotso and his minions stop the escapees after torturing Chatter Telephone until he talked. However, Woody talks to him about Daisy, revealing that he lied to Big Baby, trying to explain that she had loved him, exposing Big Baby's pendant that Lotso ripped off. All of Lotso's henchmen and other toys realize this, but Lotso didn't care and turned on his henchmen. When Big Baby sniffles about Daisy while looking at the heart-shaped pendant, Lotso snatches it from him and destroys it with his cane. He pokes Big Baby very hard in the chest with his cane and yells at everyone, telling them that toys are just trash waiting to be thrown away, causing even his henchmen to cringe. Big Baby out of anger grabs Lotso and throws him into the dumpster. When Woody's friends try to escape, Lotso pulls Woody into the dumpster.
Soon, Woody, his friends, and Lotso are taken by a garbage truck and are trapped inside a landfill's trash disposal system. Lotso begs for them to help him, sending Woody and Buzz to save him from a giant shredder. After they rescued him, Lotso seemingly reformed. Lotso noticed the emergency stop button that would stop the conveyor belt and save the toys from the incinerator. Woody and his friends relied on him to climb and push the button. However, Lotso didn't change; he had in fact faked gratitude after Woody and Buzz had saved him, and shouted out to Woody, "Where's your kid now, Sheriff?!", running off and leaving the toys to die rather than press the button. Just when all seemed lost for Woody and his friends, they were rescued from the incinerator by a giant claw handled by the three little green alien toys.
Meanwhile, Lotso was found by an old garbage truck driver who reminisced about having a Lots-O-Huggin Bear toy as a kid. He tied Lotso to the front of his garbage truck with numerous dead flies. Along for the ride were other tied up toys who were filthy and worn out from the weather, bugs, and mud. One of the toys tell him that he might want to keep his mouth shut.
It is currently unknown what happens to Lotso after the film. He most likely spends the rest of his life tied to the truck, eventually being thrown away after being worn out by the elements.
Personality[]
| “ | The guy may seem plush and huggable on the outside, but inside, he's a monster | „ |
| ~ Buttercup about Lotso. |
At first, Lotso seemed grandfatherly and kind-hearted, welcoming all toys to the Sunnyside Daycare, but it quickly became apparent that this was only a facade to hide his true nature. He was really a tyrannical dictator that ruled Sunnyside like a toy prison, and had no trace of sympathy or comedy in him. He lied to Big Baby and later to the toys at the Sunnyside Daycare, telling them that their owners did not love them and that all toys were trash awaiting disposal. He is constantly seen using violence to threaten others (including forcing them to spend a night in the sandbox if they disobey, as he did with Mr. Potato Head), and shows absolutely no mercy for his victims and hostages. Anger, malice, hypocrisy and sadism are the most definitive features in Lotso.
Quotes[]
| “ | She don't love you no more! Now come on! | „ |
| ~ Lotso lying to Big Baby |
| “ | I didn't throw you away, your kid did! Ain't one kid ever loved a toy really? Chew on that when you're in the dump! | „ |
| ~ Lotso before being reminded about Daisy |
| “ | What, you want your mommy back? She never loved you! Don't be such a baby! | „ |
| ~ Lotso moments before smashing Big Baby's pendant. |
| “ | Where's your kid now, Sheriff? | „ |
| ~ Lotso's final quote |
Trivia[]
- Unlike other Toy Story villains, most of which had appeared were tragic or amoral, Lotso is the only Toy Story villain to be considered purely evil. He tortures, imprisons, subjects new toys to being broken by toddlers, and crosses the Moral Event Horizon: betraying Andy's toys and leaving them to burn in an incinerator after they risked their lives to save him. While he too has a genuinely tragic backstory his actions far surpass it.
- In a test screening, the audience considered Lotso to be sympathetic due to his tragic backstory and wished that he redeemed himself. The directors' response was to make small changes to increase his cruelty (such as him persuading Big Baby that his owner did not love him) to show that his backstory did not excuse his actions and that he deserved his ultimate fate.
- Lotso, along with Sir Miles Axelord, Professor Zundapp, and Syndrome, are the only Pixar villains considered to be Complete Monsters by the Villains Wiki.
- Lotso was based on Russian Communist dictator, Joseph Stalin who like Lotso postured as a benevolent friend of the people whilst actually being a cruel, oppressive tyrant. Conversely, Lotso lacks Stalin's egocentricity, describing all toys, including himself as "trash". He most likely has similarities to these historical villains: The Ugandan dictator Idi Amin because he hides his evil persona beneath an act of a welcoming presence and, just as Amin turned Uganda into a disease and poverty-ridden wasteland, Lotso did the same with Sunnyside via a false promise that he'll bring hope to his subjects. Lotso also has similarities to Mao Zedong because he turned his people against each other and put down those he believed to be rebels.
- Lotso is the only Pixar villain to suffer a fate worse than death.
- Lotso shares similarities with Napoleon, the main antagonist of George Orwell's Animal Farm. Napoleon was also based on Stalin so this is probably intentional.
- Lotso made a cameo appearance in Up, seen in a girl's bedroom beside her bed as Carl's house filled with balloons flew up past her window.
- Lotso's backstory is similar to Jessie's as they were once loved by their owners and soon abandoned. The difference was that Jessie was donated after her owner grew too old for her (thus she was "thrown away"), while Lotso, Big Baby, and Chuckles were accidentally lost. He is also very similar to Stinky Pete, both of whom pretend to be warm and caring but in fact are bitter child-hating misanthropes who do not believe that toys really exist to make kids happy. Also, his comeuppance is similar to Stinky Pete's, as both Toy Story villains are unexpectedly found and left in an unwanted predicament.
- Lotso was originally conceived as a part of the Care Bears toyline in the 1980's. This idea was dropped after the storyboard for Toy Story 3 was completed.
- He is the only Toy Story villain to be considered to be a Complete Monster.
- He is the only pure evil Pixar Villain to never kill anyone or even directly try kill someone. He also has the strongest excuse out of them as well.
- He was originally meant to appear in the first Toy Story film as a possible antagonist. He was saved for the third film, as the technology needed to create his fur did not exist back then.
- Ted, a teddy bear character in the first movie is believed by many to be his first attempted incarnation.
- Before Toy Story 3 came out, Pixar created two commercials for Lotso as if he were a real toy, complete with an aged video filter, and uploaded them to YouTube as part of a viral marketing campaign. To increase the effect, the channel featured a few actual old toy commercials as well, leading many to mistakenly believe that Lotso really was an actual toy that had existed before the movie.
- He seems to be Nihilistic, as he implies that toys have no salvation other than being destroyed.
- During the dumpster scene, he is thrown into the garbage disposal bin by Big Baby. This mirrors one of the final scenes in Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi; Darth Vader had thrown Emperor Palpatine off a balcony once Vader saw a chance at redemption, much like Big Baby.
- Lotso's tactics to betray the toys were very similar to how Chester V lied to Flint, except Chester Vbecame deceptive out of pride rather than pain.
- Lotso makes a brief cameo in the Toy Story 3 video game. He only stands there and watches the player. You can, however, interact and attack him. In addition, Lotso can also be used in "Toy-Box Mode" and is shown to be completely friendly and harmless unless otherwise made hostile. This however, is likely then not the same Lotso but rather another one, much like the Lotso that caused the one from Toy Story 3 to become evil in the first place.