"Toy Story" director and writer John Lasseter said that he came up with Buzz Lightyear as the toy he would have wanted most when he was a kid.

"I grew up in the 1960s when all the amazing NASA space missions were going on ... and I thought they were the coolest guys in the world," he said in a DVD featurette included with "Toy Story 3." "The name Buzz Lightyear comes from Buzz Aldrin, which I think is an awesome name."

Aldrin thinks Buzz is a pretty awesome name, too, which is why he chose it. According to his website, he was born Edwin E. Aldrin Jr. Buzz was his nickname, drawn from his little sister Fay Ann's pronunciation of the word "brother" as "buzzer." He became so attached to the nickname that he changed his name to it legally in the 1980s.

Aldrin is, of course, the second man to walk on the moon, the pilot of the Apollo 11 mission that took him and fellow NASA astronaut Neil Armstrong into space and into history.

He is by all accounts in on the Lightyear joke. In fact, a Buzz Lightyear action figure was actually sent into space in a 2008 mission as part of NASA's 50th-anniversary celebrations, and a video was released showing Aldrin giving the action figure a series of lessons and fitness tests in advance of the trip.

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