![]() According to family lore, he was known since childhood as Bud because an older sibling called him “budder,” mispronouncing “brother.” His mother was a schoolteacher, his father a commercial printer. William Everett Luckey was born in Billings, Mont., on July 28, 1934. But when you see the results, it just blows your mind.” ![]() “When I started working with a computer,” Luckey later told CBS, “to me it was kind of like animating with a backhoe. Luckey and his Pixar colleagues - many of them half his age - then set to work turning the sketch into a computer-generated character. Luckey said he “did 200 Woodies,” sketching different possibilities with a pencil and pen, before Lasseter selected the rosy-cheeked version that appeared in the movie. “As soon as he said that, I knew it was just perfect,” Lasseter recalled in Karen Paik’s book “To Infinity and Beyond!: The Story of Pixar Animation Studios.” “The whole idea of a buddy picture is to pair up two characters who are as opposite as possible, and you can’t get more opposite than a spaceman and a cowboy.” Luckey suggested a change: Turn Woody (Tom Hanks) into a cowboy. The movie’s characters - toys that come to life whenever they are separated from their owner, who shared the same name as Luckey’s son, Andy - included an astronaut named Buzz Lightyear (voiced by Tim Allen) and, initially, a decidedly creepy-looking ventriloquist’s dummy. Still, he remained best known for his work on “Toy Story,” which set a benchmark for computer-generated animation and made more than $370 million worldwide. Both characters were voiced by Luckey, who also directed and wrote the short and composed its banjo-driven score. Inspired by Luckey’s western upbringing, the five-minute movie featured a tap-dancing sheep who is shorn of his wool and his confidence but is encouraged to keep “bounding” by a friendly jackalope. Although animation is almost always a collaborative process, Luckey was granted near-total control of “Boundin’, “ a 2003 Pixar short that was shown in theaters before “The Incredibles” and received an Academy Award nomination for best animated short film.
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