Disney is (kind of) building Pizza Planet from ‘Toy Story’ (again)
Pizza Planet from “Toy Story” will exist in real life onboard the new Disney Adventure cruise ship, sans the arcade games.
The Disney Adventure cruise ship will set sail in December 2025 from Singapore. On Oct. 16, 2024, Disney revealed a ton of details about the upcoming ship, including something that may have been overlooked among the fanfare of a Marvel roller coaster and such: Pizza Planet, the arcade restaurant from “Toy Story,” will exist on the Disney Adventure as a real dining location.
Granted, in the Pixar film, Pizza Planet is a full-scale restaurant with dozens of arcade games (including, infamously, “the claw”). The dining location onboard the Disney Adventure will be a bit more subdued.
Inspired by the interstellar pizzeria from the “Toy Story” films, Pizza Planet will be a quick-service, outdoor eatery serving out-of-this-world food and snacks with intergalactic flair, featuring a walk-up window and a small dining area.
Disney Cruise Line
It will be located in the Toy Story Place section of the ship, which will also include slides, water play areas, and Wheezy’s Freezies, an ice cream shop named after Wheezy the penguin from “Toy Story 2.” Disney did not reveal any concept art specifically of Pizza Planet; just of the pool areas of Toy Story Place.
Why won’t Disney build the ‘real’ Pizza Planet?
Though a handful of restaurants in Disney theme parks around the world have bared the name “Pizza Planet,” Disney has never truly built the eclectic hangout spot as it appears onscreen in “Toy Story.”
At Disney-MGM Studios (now Disney’s Hollywood Studios), Toy Story Pizza Planet Arcade opened less than a month after its namesake film debuted in theaters in 1995. Though the quick-service restaurant did house a few arcade games, the establishment was shoehorned into an existing space not purpose-built for this concept, and didn’t resemble the restaurant of the film.
Toy Story Pizza Planet Arcade closed in 2016, after which its space was transformed into PizzeRizzo (same food, but now with a Muppets theme).
Photo by bioreconstruct
Similar venues — technically containing the words “Pizza Planet” in their names, but existing on a much smaller scale than the place Andy visits in “Toy Story” — are (or were) found in other Disney parks. Buzz Lightyear’s Pizza Planet Restaurant opened in 1996 at Disneyland Paris, curiously containing elements of Andy’s room, not just Pizza Planet itself. It closed by 2016.
Over at the original Disneyland Park in Anaheim, Calif., Redd Rockett’s Pizza Port became known as Alien Pizza Planet with the launch of 2018’s Pixar Fest, and never changed back. Like the other locations, its theming is minimal.
Pizza Planet as it appears in “Toy Story” is far from fine dining, but does commit to its theming; even the soda machines are intergalactic. No such thematic flourishes have existed in the real-life versions of the restaurant.
The lack of a full-fledged Pizza Planet is at odds with the multiple versions of Toy Story Land that exist at four separate Disney parks globally. The reasoning for its exclusion in these areas could be a matter of scale; in Toy Story Land, guests are “shrunk” to the size of a toy. In contrast, Pizza Planet is a place frequented by humans. Instead of the eatery in Florida’s Toy Story Land, for instance, guests can visit the Woody’s Lunch Box quick-service location or the Roundup Rodeo BBQ table-service restaurant, maintaining their toy scale all the while.
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