 Marketing for the film included $ 20 million spent by Disney for advertising as well as advertisers such as Burger King , PepsiCo , Coca @-@ Cola , and Payless ShoeSource paying $ 125 million in tied promotions for the film . A marketing consultant reflected on the promotion : " This will be a killer deal . How can a kid , sitting through a one @-@ and @-@ a @-@ half @-@ hour movie with an army of recognizable toy characters , not want to own one ? " Despite this , Disney Consumer Products was slow to see the potential of Toy Story early on . When the Thanksgiving release date was announced in January 1995 , many toy companies were accustomed to having eighteen months to two years of runway time , and passed on the project . In February 1995 , Disney took the idea to Toy Fair , a toy industry trade show in New York . There , a Toronto @-@ based company with a factory based in China , Thinkway Toys , became interested . Although Thinkway was a small player in the industry , mainly producing toy banks in the form of film characters , it was able to scoop up the worldwide master license for Toy Story toys simply because no one else wanted it . Walt Disney Home Video put a trailer for the film on seven million copies of the VHS re @-@ release of Cinderella ; the Disney Channel ran a television special on the making of Toy Story ; Walt Disney World in Florida held a daily Toy Story parade at Disney @-@ MGM Studios . 
