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When Toy Story was released in 1995, it made movie history and forever changed how most animated movies were made. In the early 1990s, animated films were as hot as ever, thanks to huge Disney hits like The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The Lion King. Their style of hand-drawn animation was a beauty to behold. Then came a little known company named Pixar and their fully computer-animated film about a child’s toys who come to life when no one is looking.
Computer animation had been attempted on a smaller scale before, but it usually looked clunky and unrealistic. Toy Story’s animation was jaw dropping in its realism that made these toys look so lifelike. To go with it, the film also had a fun and emotional story about friendship, with Hollywood’s biggest names like Tom Hanks and Tim Allen voicing the adventure.
‘Toy Story’s Computer Animation Changed How Movies Were Made
Toy Story was a huge success, becoming the third biggest movie of the year at the box office. After that, computer animation was all the rage and sadly hand-drawn animation quickly became a thing of the past. Four years later came a sequel, with Toy Story 2 being just as good and successful as the first film. We’d have to wait until 2010 for Toy Story 3. It was the perfect ending to a trilogy, with a simultaneously heartwarming and heartbreaking last act that had grownups weeping in their theater seats. Woody and Buzz and their friends were so loved that the film had the highest box office of any feature released that year (not including Avatar, which was released the previous December.
Many will agree that the franchise should have stopped there. There was no topping the way the story had been wrapped up. Still, money talks, and in 2019, Toy Story 4 arrived in cinemas. It was another box office bonanza, and while fans turned out and reviews were exceptional, it also felt unnecessary. There was no need to bring the gang back, but with Disney long ago in control of Pixar, we’ve come to accept that the sequels are going to keep coming, so it came as no surprise when Toy Story 5 was recently announced.
The fifth film is sure to be another that families flock to see on the big screen, and while the franchise will mean so much to millions, no matter how long it goes on, it almost didn’t happen. A freak mistake nearly deleted what would become Toy Story 2 from Pixar’s servers in late 1998, with much of the film already completed.
‘Toy Story 2’ Was Almost Deleted From Its Servers
The co-founder of Pixar, Ed Catmull, wrote about what happened in his book Creativity, Inc. According to him, some poor, thankfully unnamed, soul at Pixar was in the internal file servers doing some standard file clearance, when they mistakenly put in a deletion command on the root folder for the film. All the character models and assets began erasing.
Oren Jacob, who eventually became the Chief Technical Officer for Pixar, worked as an associate technical director for Toy Story 2. In 2012, he talked to The Next Web about what happened. “That’s when we first noticed it, with Woody. [Larry Cutler] was in that directory and happened to be talking about installing a fix to Woody or Woody’s hat. He looked at the directory, and it had 40 files, and looked again, and it had four files. Then we saw sequences start to vanish as well, and we were like, ‘Oh my god.’ I grabbed the phone… ‘unplug the machine.’”
Jacob continued. “He had an error, I forget the exact [one]. It was like, ‘Directory no longer valid,’ because he’s in a place that had just been deleted. Then he thought to walk up [a directory] and he walked back up, and then we saw Hamm, Potato Head, and Rex. Then we looked at it again and there was just Hamm and then nothing.
“The master machine goes down. Some people are animating a shot and they can work for like a minute or five minutes, but eventually you’ll have to pull data from the master machine for some reason or another, which your machine will freeze.
“Eventually every animator and, every TD, everyone working on the show goes, “Oh, all machines down. Let’s go to lunch. Ha, ha.”
A New Mom Who Usually Worked From Home Saved ‘Toy Story 2’
The servers were abruptly shut down, but the damage was done. 90% of Toy Story 2 was gone. There was a backup system, but to make matters worse, it hadn’t been working correctly for weeks.
It looked as if the movie was gone, along with millions of dollars of work that had been put into it, but after the worst luck imaginable, the crew had it followed up with the best of luck when Toy Story 2 was, in a way, saved by a baby. Galyn Susman was the film’s supervising technical director, but she didn’t normally work in the office with everyone else. Half a year earlier she had given birth and now worked from home. She had developed a way to copy the database for the film to her computer at home. Along with Jacob, she rushed to her home, wrapped her computer up in a blanket, as if it was a rare and fragile treasure (it actually was), then rushed it back to Pixar’s offices, where much of the film was fortunately recovered.
“[Susman] and I just stood up and walked out, back to her Volvo, drove across the bridge, got the machine, got some blankets, I hugged it with seatbelts, across the backseat,” Jacob said.
If not for Susman having a child, which gave her a reason to work from home, Toy Story 2 would have been gone, so it is her now grown child who should maybe be thanked for Toy Story 2’s existence. Obviously Pixar would have started over again from scratch, but it would have been a frustrating and painstaking task that probably would have delayed the film for another year or two and altered the history of the franchise. Would the plot have been redone? How would that have changed the sequels that came after? Would the butterfly effect, which would have resulted in other Pixar films coming out at a different time, have affected how they performed or changed how other now different films performed against them?
Today, it’s normal for so many of us to work from home. That didn’t happen so much in the 1990s. Here, that then-uncommon practice happened to save an entire film. If a new mom ever needs to give her boss another reason for why she should work remotely, then this is the story to tell.
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