Most importantly, to Toy Story fans he was the voice and spiritual embodiment of the franchise’s best character, Buzz Lightyear.īut Buzz Lightyear has now left the building.

And a rare Hollywood conservative who – for a while it seemed – booked gigs while espousing views for which others might have been cancelled. He was a jail bird who took flight as a movie star. Allen, though, would go on to defy the odds over and over. “The next thing I observed,” Allen would tell Detroit Free Press, “was a gun in my face.” As soon as Allen dropped off the drugs, the police pounced. In reality there was no cash and the buyer was actually an undercover detective named Michael Pifer. He’d arranged to deposit the package in a locker from which he would then collect that $42,000. On October 2 he drove to Kalamazoo – equidistant between Detroit and Chicago – with a brown Adidas gym bag. Yet Allen had finally flown too close to the sun. If you lived in the Detroit suburbs and wanted to travel to infinity and beyond, he was the guy you went to see. The money added up to $42,000, in unmarked notes, placed in a locker at Michigan’s Kalamazoo/Battle Creek International Airport. This was in 1978, when the future Toy Story star was a washed-up 25-year-old, with a history of substance abuse and a burgeoning career as a narcotics trafficker. Tim Allen’s story began with a bag of cash, a stash of cocaine and a gun in his face.

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