Tim Allen’s voice took him from Detroit to infinity and beyond

Tim Allen’s voice precedes him. The Metro Detroit-raised actor and comedian says he’s recognised for his voice so often that when he goes to football games — either at Ford Field to watch the Lions, or in his wife Jane’s hometown to watch her beloved Pittsburgh Steelers — he has to be reminded to keep his voice down so he doesn’t startle those around him. “We get into the stands and my wife goes, ‘You have to shut up,’” says Allen, on a Zoom call earlier this month from the Pixar studios in California. “Because if I start talking, everyone either goes, ‘it’s Santa!’ or ‘it’s Buzz Lightyear!’” Allen played Santa Claus in Disney’s “The Santa Clause” films, and he’s been Buzz Lightyear, the heroic Space Ranger action figure in Pixar’s “Toy Story” franchise, since 1995. The latest “Toy Story” adventure, “Toy Story 5,” opened in theatres on Friday.

He’s also been the voice of the Pure Michigan ad campaign, his “calm, melodic delivery” providing the campaign with “considerable emotional weight,” says Pure Michigan vice president Kelly Wolgamott. Allen says that voice role, for his home state’s long-running tourism campaign (he voiced the Pure Michigan spots from 2006-2020, and again in 2022) had a profound effect on him.

“It changed my life,” says the actor, who turned 73 last week.

Allen plans to take in a little Pure Michigan this summer when he travels Up North with his family, he says. “I’m heading up to Traverse City in a couple weeks. I’ve had a spot up there for years, so I’m going to be up there for three, four weeks,” he says. “My parents went up there, my mom has friends up there, I spent my childhood up there — I love it up there.” He’d stay longer, he says, but he’s got work to tend to: “Shifting Gears,” his current ABC sitcom, starts production on its third season in late July. By that time, “Toy Story 5” will likely have put its stamp on the summer box office. And it will have proven once again that voicing an action figure in the first fully computer-animated feature film was one of the savviest and most lucrative career moves Allen could have ever made.

Allen was in the dining room of his Beverly Hills home — that’s the Metro Detroit Beverly Hills, not the 90210 one — when he was first pitched the original “Toy Story.” He was filming the second season of “Home Improvement” at the time, the smash ABC sitcom about an accident-prone TV repair show host that launched in 1991 and made Tim Allen a household name. He would film “Home Improvement” in Los Angeles and then fly back home to Metro Detroit as his schedule allowed.

At the time, “I was knee deep into becoming a thing,” says Allen, who was born in Denver and lived the first 13 years of his life there before moving to Birmingham with his mother and his five siblings.

After graduating from Seaholm High School and studying at Western and Central Michigan Universities, his stand-up career began to take off in the 1980s.

By the 90s, offers were rolling in, and one of them was “Toy Story.” It was to be the first computer-animated feature film, and the animation style was revolutionary at the time, evolving from traditional hand-drawn, flat animation to computer-rendered 3D landscapes, a wholesale reinvention of the art form. Allen had seen early works from Pixar’s John Lasseter and he was excited by the possibilities of the new form of storytelling.

“It was the first digital animation, and I was all in,” says Allen, who was 40 at the time. “Instead of being startled by it, I was intrigued. So when I saw the ‘Toy Story’ thing, I said, ‘Yeah.’” Allen had studied at Ron Rose Productions in Southfield, where he was schooled by “the famous” Mike Carroll, he says, in the art of voice-over work. Buzz Lightyear, as pitched to him, had more of a radio announcer-style voice, talking in a typical advertisement pitchman cadence. Allen had notes.

Tribune News Service