Toy Story 5 is in theaters, and it is a quietly bittersweet thing to watch. So many of the voices that built this franchise belong to people who are no longer with us. Don Rickles, the voice of Mr. Potato Head since 1995, died in 2017. Estelle Harris, his Mrs. Potato Head, died in 2022. Carl Weathers, who played Combat Carl, died in 2024. The fifth film had to figure out how to carry those characters forward, and how it did says a lot about the strange art of replacing an irreplaceable voice.
For Mr. Potato Head, Pixar made a notable choice. Rather than stitch together old Rickles recordings the way Toy Story 4did, the studio recast the part outright, handing it to Jeff Bergman. If that name does not ring a bell, the voice will. Bergman is the current voice of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and a good chunk of the Looney Tunes roster. Director Andrew Stanton said on a Reddit AMA that they held auditions and found performers who sounded very close to the originals.
So how did he do? Pretty well. And still, the seams show. Here is why.
The gold standard nobody noticed
To understand why the Potato Head recast lands the way it does, you have to talk about Slinky Dog.
Slinky was originally voiced by Jim Varney, the Ernest comedian, who died in 2000. When Toy Story 3 arrived a decade later, Blake Clark stepped in. Clark knew Varney personally, and he slid into the role so smoothly that most people watching had no idea anything had changed. No press cycle, no controversy, no double take. Clark is still Slinky in Toy Story 5, and he remains the franchise’s cleanest act of voice succession. That is the bar.
The Potato Head recast does not clear it, and the reason is not Bergman’s fault.
Why this one is harder
The trouble is that Bergman has one of the most recognizable voices working in animation. He is, right now, Bugs Bunny. When the definitive Looney Tunes voice of his generation starts talking as Mr. Potato Head, a little part of your brain files it under “that’s the Bugs guy doing Potato Head.” It is a very good impression of Rickles, but an impression announces itself in a way a quiet handoff never does.
Rickles helped here and hurt here at the same time. His Potato Head was pure Rickles, a crotchety, needling, instantly identifiable cadence built over decades of stand-up. A voice that distinctive is almost impossible to step into invisibly, because the audience has the original memorized. Slinky’s voice was warm and a touch generic, the kind of friendly drawl that a skilled actor can disappear into. Potato Head’s was a signature. You can match a signature. You cannot vanish behind it.
Early fan reaction to the trailer caught this exactly. Plenty of people thought Bergman sounded close, while others compared the effect to the slow voice drift you hear on modern Simpsons episodes, where a familiar character sounds almost right and the gap is just wide enough to notice. Now that the full film is out, that holds. The performance is good. It is also, unmistakably, a recast.
The right call anyway
None of this means Pixar blew it. Just the opposite. Recasting was the correct decision.
Toy Story 4 kept Rickles around through archival audio, and the cost was a Mr. Potato Head who barely got a minute of dialogue, boxed in by whatever lines already existed. A real actor in the booth gives the character a real role again, fresh jokes, fresh reactions, a genuine presence in the ensemble. A noticeable-but-good Potato Head with actual scenes beats a perfect-sounding ghost with two recycled lines. Pixar chose the version that lets the character live, and that is the humane choice.
So credit where it is due. Bergman is doing tribute work, not impersonation for its own sake, and he carries it with obvious respect. The recast is solid. It simply is not invisible, and that is okay. Blake Clark set a standard with Slinky that almost no one could match, on a part that happened to be perfectly suited to disappearing. Mr. Potato Head was never going to be that easy. Some voices you replace. A few you can only ever honor.
