WHAT WENT WRONG - Toy Story

Episode Date: November 17, 2025

There’s no 'Toy Story' without Pixar, and there’s no Pixar without… Steve Jobs. To celebrate the 30th anniversary of the first computer animated feature film ever, Chris and Lizzie dive into the story behind 1995’s absolutely miraculous 'Toy Story'. Find out why an early version of Woody made Disney almost pull the plug, how Tim Allen changed Buzz Lightyear, and why George Lucas let Pixar slip through his fingers for only $10M. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

And action. Hello, dear listeners, and welcome back to another episode of What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast, Full Stop, that just so happens to be about movies, and how it's nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone a breakthrough film pioneering a brand new form of technology, and telling a timeless story that I find as effective now as an adult as I did as a child. As always, I am Chris Winterbauer, joined by my country. co-host, Lizzie Bassett, Lizzie, how you doing this afternoon?

I'm doing great. I really, really love this movie. I'm so excited to talk about it. And, of course, we are covering Toy Story because of the 30th anniversary of this movie. And Chris, I'm curious, what was your, what's your relationship with Toy Story and what was it like watching it again as a 36-year-old man? Saw it when I was a six-year-old man for the first time. And I loved it as a child, and it was revolutionary in so many ways, obviously, that I'm sure we'll talk about. But it was revolutionary as a kid in that we were in the midst of the Disney Renaissance, kind of entering the back nine of the Disney Renaissance.

We didn't know it at the time. And here comes Toy Story. And not only was it technologically unlike anything I'd seen before, it also tipped to tat to somewhat more adult humor. in certain moments that I definitely appreciate now more, but I could feel that my parents really liked it as well, which as a kid is always exciting. Oh, this isn't just a movie for kids. It's a movie for grownups, too.

And that made it an even more enjoyable experience. It was then the first, we owned a lot of Disney films. I know this is not technically a Disney film. We'll I'm sure get into the distribution and stuff, but... Oh, it's a Disney film. Distributed by Disney. And so we owned all of these Disney VHSs, right? They would unvault them from time to time.

And then Toy Store's... was the first film we ever owned on DVD. Whoa. Yeah, it was, I believe it was one of the relatively early DVDs. I'm not 100% sure on that. And it looked amazing because everything looked so sharp and so crisp. Re-watching it. I've watched it a few times since Nora was born.

I mean, I've watched, I've seen all the toy stories in theaters, I believe. They're all great. They're all great. And it is probably, I've watched it. again for the podcast. Obviously, I've watched it with Nora, and I enjoy it every time. It's got a wonderful screwball buddy comedy energy. It's so inventive with its humor and the little, you know, flourishes and grace notes. One of my favorite lines is when Rex says, I wasn't made by Mattel. It was a, uh, yes. It's like a leveraged buyout of a smaller company. Just a little offhand.

The xenomorph references at the, uh, Pizza Planet. for example, Sid masking up before he does his surgeries. Like, it's COVID 25 years in advance. Sid's carpet. Did you recognize the carpet in his house? The shining carpet in Sid. Yeah, exactly, in Sid's house. There are so many fun things.

I forgot how good the voice cast is. It's amazing. Obviously, Tom Hanks and Tim Allen, but so many people, Lori Metcalf, Wallace Sean, John, John Ratsenberger. Jim Varney. Jim Varney, yeah, who we lost, unfortunately. of the earnest films. So, amazing movie.

It is probably my second favorite Pixar film overall behind Monsters Incorporated, which just will always hold a place in my heart. And I was doing our list, Lizzie, and I think this is in my top five favorite films we've covered so far. Actually, I would even say, I would argue top five best films we've covered so far.

I think that's very fair. And you know what? Tim Allen is in two of my top five films we've covered so far because Galaxy Quest and this. Tim Allen plays a very important role in this. Not just as Buzz Lightyear, but as we're going to learn, he was instrumental to changing that character. So yet again, we all have to accept Tim Allen as a hero.

I'm curious, I know a tiny bit about how Woody was originally written. That's kind of all I know about the creative journey of the film, and I'm really excited to learn more. How about you? Yeah, we're definitely going to talk about that. Yeah, I love this movie. I saw this in theaters. Again, we were six years old when this came out. It's as enjoyable now as an adult as it was as a child for different reasons and also for the same reasons. It's just a great movie. It's a great story. It's so moving. It's about toys and yet it is one of the most human movies I think that Disney and Pixar have ever released. There's just, there's nothing bad about this movie. And I think, what's remarkable about it is that at its core, the most important thing and the most memorable

thing about this movie, I think, is the story and the characters. And the reason that that is so impressive is because you hinted at this, Chris, but this movie is an enormous technological leap forward. And even though that was the case, they did not forego the importance of the story. The story is still, first and foremost, the most important thing about this movie. And that is really unusual. I'm looking at you, James Cameron Avatar. That doesn't happen that often. So I'm very excited to talk about this because the story of Toy Story is also really the story of Pixar because you do not have Pixar without Toy Story. But Chris, in order to tell this, we do have to talk quite a bit about a guy named John Lasseter, since he's the director of Toy Story

and he also, as we will learn, is an enormous reason why it exists, period. And I'm telling you this up front because in 2018, Lassiter left his position as chief creative officer of both Pixar and Walt Disney animation following a deluge of anonymous employee comments about his inappropriate behavior towards women. At best, this behavior involved invading personal space quite a bit. At worst, it did involve inappropriately touching, you know, his subordinates and his colleagues. And again, these were allegations. There were no formal investigations as far as I know, nor were there any lawsuits or settlements. All right. So, as always, the details. Toy Story was released November 22nd, 1995. It was directed by John Lassiter, executive produced by Ed Catmull, and Steve Jobs.

Original story by John Lassiter, Andrew Stanton, Pete Doctor, and Joe Ramft, screenplay by Andrew Stanton, Joel Cohen, not that one, Alex Sokolov, and do you know the last one, Chris? Joss Whedon. That's right, Joss Whedon. Known feminist, Joss Whedon. He says so. That's right. The cast includes Tom Hanks as Woody, Tim Allen as Buzz Lightyear,

Don Rickles as Mr. Potato Head, John Ratsenberger as Ham, Jim Varney, RIPP, as Slinky Dog, Wallace Sean as Rex, Annie Potts as Bo Peep, John Morris as Andy, Eric von Detton as Sid. I didn't know that. Brink, Soul Skater. That's right. That's right. That's right. The man of my Disney youth.

You got a look before you lose. All right, the IMDB logline is, a cowboy doll is profoundly jealous when a new spaceman action figure supplants him as the top toy in a boy's bedroom. When circumstances separate them from their owner, the duo have to put aside their differences to return to him.

That's right. Great. So, the story of Toy Story kind of begins with John Lasseter, so let's talk about him. In ninth grade, Lassiter had his sliding doors moment, as we often recognize. He found a book called The Art of Animation in the School Library, and it contained a behind-the-scenes look at the making of 1959's Sleeping Beauty. And this changed his life. From this point forward, he was obsessed with all things animation and especially all things Disney. Now, in 1975, he graduated from high school and was accepted into the California Institute of the Arts first character animation program. If you don't know this, Cal Arts was founded in 1961 by Walt Disney and his brother Roy. It was to foster creativity between the different departments and also basically to feed Disney

all of the artistic talent that was required for their years ahead. We talked a little bit more about this in the Beetlejuice episode because Tim Burton was another student there. Now, John Lasseter was one of the first students accepted into this program. It was an extremely tough program. And he loved Disney so much that, Chris, he actually spent his summer working as a jungle cruise captain at Disneyland. I was just at Disneyland this Tuesday. Really?

But for Nora's birthday. Did you go on Jungle Cruise? We did not go on Jungle Cruise. We were focused on all the princesses. She met all the princesses. It was very exciting. Oh, that's amazing. Yeah, they were very sweet.

All right. When he graduated in 1979, he applied for an animation apprenticeship at Disney, and out of over 10,000 portfolios submitted, he and about 149 other people were accepted. But upon arriving at Disney, his dream job, he noticed that something was off because the Disney he walked into was not like the Disney that he had grown up dreaming about working for. And that's because after Walt Disney's death in 1966,

Disney entered what is considered the studio's dark age, which lasted throughout the 70s and early 80s. Chris, do you have any idea why this was the case? I don't know, other than Disney being a very strong guiding force on the types of stories that they were going to tell from a top-down perspective. And I know it took a while for Katzenberg and Eisner to come in and kind of strong-arm things back into position. But that's about all the detail I have. That's about right. It sounds like executives were chasing more reliably profitable adventures like

theme parks. They were less focused on the movies. And also, it's theorized that they were more focused on the art in the movies than they were on the actual stories. So... Which is interesting because Sleeping Beauty was a departure artistically from the Disney movies that had come before it. The backgrounds in Sleeping Beauty are among the greatest ever made, I think, in any animated film ever. And the artist responsible for those backgrounds, these just amazingly gorgeous, detailed pastel-like backgrounds, his name's Avan Earl. And my understanding was this was the last Disney movie that he ended up doing. And what's interesting is that Sleeping Beauty, I believe, was a bit of a box-off.

off as bomb. And in part because, again, the story was criticized, even though the animation was praised. Oh, we should cover that. Yeah. Oh, it's on my list of movies to cover. Okay, great. I won't take it from you. So animation at this point kind of felt like a dying art form. Disney had released movies like The Fox and the Hound in 1981 and the partially animated Pete's Dragon in 1977, which I loved, but I guess did not do well. And especially when you consider what they're up against for the same age group during this bracket, which is what, Chris? Oh, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. Yes, exactly.

Yeah, it's like Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Dark. Right. So Lasseter, as we said, had finally landed his dream job, but the magic was gone. But everything changed when he was invited to an early screening of a film featuring state-of-the-art computer-generated imagery. Chris, they just rebooted it. Absolutely nobody saw it. What was it? It's the multi-time, big-time flopper.

Tron. Tron is flopping every time. Well, that's not true. Tron Legacy didn't flop. It just didn't do gangbusters. That's true. You're right. We have to be fair.

Tron is not a big-time flopper, the first one, and even Legacy. But they were disappointments. Neither of them made nearly what they thought they should make. Neither were big box office hits. I'm fairly certain that Tron Legacy lost money at the box office, although I'm sure it made money in the long run when you add in, you know, Blu-ray DVD streaming, etc. But not the performance that you would think

would lead to multiple reboots, you know, every 15 or 20 years. And they keep rebooting it with Jared Leto. Why did you do that? I honestly don't know. Anyway, we could have an entire Tron episode covering every variation on Tron. But... Visually, very cool. That's right.

And the first Tron, 1982, which, by the way, is a very... fun movie, incorporated the then unprecedented 15 to 20 minutes worth of computer-generated imagery. And this was, of course, during the light cycle sequence. It's pretty cool. I know it looks like, you know, hokey and fokey today, but I still think it's very fun. It is cool. So Lasseter saw it and he was like, this is the future. Because up until this point, all of the animation Disney had done was by hand.

And Chris, you've covered a couple of animated movies for us before. Are you able to explain a little bit of what it means to animate by hand and just sort of like how long that would take? Yeah, I mean, so basically your frames are separated into at a very simplistic level, the static portions of the frame and then the moving portions of the frame. So you might have a background and then you'd have the characters that are moving in front of the background. And then obviously Disney pioneered or was part of the group of companies that was pioneering things like multi-prone. play in animation where you would have stacked backgrounds so you could push the camera through the backgrounds and get effects like parallax, et cetera. But the point is, with moving characters, you had to animate every single frame that they were moving. And a lot of early animation was done at a lower

frame rate, right, than 24 frames per second in order to facilitate less drawing time, you know, downtime. And to be super clear, 24 frames per second means that you have to draw 24 hand-drawing frames for every second of film. Yeah, I mean, there was a Miyazaki film. I think it might be the boy in the heron. I can't remember recently that has a crowd scene. It's only a few seconds of all these people. It's an overhead shot moving through a crowd. And that one shot took an animator or a group of animators, you know, a year to animate. It's just incredible. The amount of detail is amazing. That's right. And Disney infamously, I think during the Dark Ages, had reused some animations in different movies.

For example, like the bear... It's taking that long. The Bear Necessities Dance in the Jungle Book is also used in, I believe, Robin Hood as like they're dancing. It's like the same animation. They just swap out the animals. Nice. Good for them.

You've got to find your shortcuts. Yes. All right. Well, another huge problem in addition to it taking a really long time is that it's very difficult to add dimension to hand-drawn animation. You referenced this Chris, they're trying different things, they're trying layering backgrounds, but you cannot get it to look three-dimensional. And John Lasseter saw Tron, and he was like, that is how you get it to look three-dimensional. And he's like, well, this is amazing. For the first time in decades at this point,

Disney is doing something that's ahead of the curve and different and really interesting. But he was concerned because when they made Tron, they had hired four different external companies to handle the CGI. So nobody really held all of the knowledge in one place. He's like... And he's probably inconsistently applied. You know what I mean? Across each of them. They were each covering a couple of minutes tops, I think, and they were doing different things. And that's normal for big budget films now. Yeah. You'll see multiple visual effects vendors, right, when you're trying to finish a film. But if you're, if every shot is VFX and every shot needs to match, that can become a really big problem. Yeah, definitely. So he figured he needed to be the person inside Disney advocating for this

technology. Now, completely unbeknownst to Lasseter, on the other side of the country, a small group of computer researchers was starting to develop computer-assisted cell animation technology at the New York Institute of Technology, with the goal of one day being able to create a computer-generated feature film. They had no clue who would even be able to make this feature film, though, because it would require a massive amount of computational power that literally did not exist at this point. But, Chris, are you familiar with Moore's law? Yeah, the number of transistors that you can fit onto a silicon ship doubles every 18 months. Wow, whatever. Yes, that's exactly right. I'm so annoyed.

I worked for Intel. I know. I know. I'm still annoyed. You're too smart. Yes, at a very basic level, it states that computing power will roughly double about every 18 months. Sometimes it says two years. And again, Chris is irritatingly correct. It has to do with the processing power, specifically due to the number of transistors on microchips. So these researchers are plowing ahead because they figured that theoretically the processing power required to animated a computer-generated feature film should catch up sometime in the 80s. Meanwhile, Lasseter back at Disney is like, Tron was fun, but it kind of felt like a flash tech demo, he really wanted to use

CGI to make images that looked real. So he collaborates with fellow Disney animator Glenn Keene on a hybrid short film that would combine hand-drawn animation with a CGI background. They got the blessing of Tom Wilhite. Interestingly, the head of Disney's live action feature division, not the animation department,

that's important. And they started creating a test based on Moray Sendax where the wild things are. You can actually see this test on YouTube. It's pretty cool. But, as you may imagine, Chris, how do you feel like the animation department might have felt about John Lasseter's ambitions? Just wildly territorial and contentious. And I don't think he was the head of the animation department at this time, but I know when I was covering the Emperor's New Groove, Pete Schneider takes over at some point, who was, I think, notoriously contentious and did not want these guys anywhere near the animation. Department and was going head-to-head against Katzenberg. And so again, and Disney War gets into this,

the little fiefdoms inside the Magic Kingdom, pretty gnarly. Well, and I think it goes beyond that, too, because I would say understandably, there was a real fear at this point that computers would make hand-drawn animators obsolete. And artists were worried about, you know, CGI taking their jobs away, much like many people in the film industry right now are very concerned about AI. Yeah, and I don't want a sidebar us too much, but I think one thing that's really interesting comparing AI with this advent of three-dimensional animation is that one of the issues that Lasseter is running into is that he can't get his bosses to buy in because there's not a significant cost savings, right? Because 3D animation is going to be time-consuming. You're going to have to pay for just as much labor, more or less,

as a traditionally animated film, plus you have compute, et cetera. And so they're thinking, why are we going to change everything? Why are we going to reinvent the wheel? And I think what's particularly insidious with AI, aside from any ethical considerations about whose work you're actually using to create these images, is that it's not actually priced at like a real market rate. It's entirely subsidized by these enormous investments by Silicon Valley. In a lot of ways, this all reminds me of rotoscoping as an issue that a lot of artists were pushing, or a technology a lot of artists were pushing back on back when we discussed snow. white back in 1937.

And rotoscoping is drawing an actual human figure as their movie, is tracing it, right? Basically tracing, yeah, exactly. But Chris John Lasseter would not drop it. He wanted to create another short, based on the Brave Little Toaster, but he needed to go-ahead by his actual bosses. I love the Brave Little Toaster. It's so good. You and John Lasseter.

He's so brave. So he pitched this idea to Ron Miller, who was then president of Walt Disney Productions and Walt Disney's son-in-law. And after hearing the pitch, Miller's like, okay, and how much would this all cost? And Lasseter is like, oh, it's great. It's not going to cost any more than a regular hand-drawn animated film. And Miller's like, so it's not cheaper and it's not faster? Goodbye, John.

Yeah. Disney films were expensive. They remained expensive. Yeah. Well, and also, why are you going to change your entire tech and your entire team if it's going to cost the same and take the same amount of time? I understand why he did this. They immediately terminated John Lasseter's contract, and he was let go from Disney. He's got all the time in the world, and he filled it, as any of us would, with computer graphics conferences, Chris.

And it's at one of these conferences that he came across a guy named Ed Catmull. Ed Catmull was not an artist. His background was in physics and computer science, and it was extremely impressive. As part of his PhD thesis from the University of Utah in 1974, he had developed early methods for creating 3D computer graphics, including a way to wrap flat 2D images like textures onto 3D models. But do you know what his real breakthrough was? It was in 1972 when he was still in college. And it's actually a famous short film. From 1972?

Yeah, it's really early. It's pretty crazy. No, I don't know. It's called a computer animated hand. And it is a short in which he digitized a plaster model of his left hand. It's really cool. You should go watch it. It's one of the earliest examples ever of computer animation. I'll check it out. It's kind of crazy that it's from like when you watch it. I know it looks nothing like what we have now, but it's 1972. Yeah, I assumed it was all just woodworking and there was no such thing as a computer in 1970. Yeah. So after college, he went to work at the New York Institute of Technology, heading up their

computer graphics program. And in 1979, Catmull's work caught the eye of a newly minted blockbuster director who would become very reliant on CGI, Chris? George Lucas? Yeah. Who was famously courted very heavily by Disney in the mid-80s. They wanted him to come in and be there, like, because he had done Captain Eo. He had helped on Captain Eo with them, another theme park, like, tech demo ride. So, and he was very much in high demand. Little did they know, he'd used all of his ideas.

Just kidding. They were all done. I love George Lucas. No, he's great. So fresh off the first Star Wars, Lucas hires Ed, as VP of Lucas film's new computer graphics division. Because he wanted to push filmmaking into new technological frontiers, and that's exactly what they were doing.

So Catmull moved to California. He brought many of the researchers. he'd been working with at NYIT, including Alvi Ray Smith, David DeFranchesco, and later Ralph Guggenheim, basically everybody who ends up working on Toy Story. The computer division worked on computerizing editing, sound design, but they also continued to develop the software that would eventually be needed to create what they called the movie, a 3D CGI feature length film. They got to work on a short film that would hopefully show off the computer graphics and animation and also test an early prototype of their first physical product, which was the Pixar image computer.

The goal was to create a computer with enough processing power to produce higher quality images. And Ed Catmull knew about Lasseter's talent as an animator, and he met him at these conferences, so he brought him on in December of 1983 to help with this short. The short was called The Adventures of Andre and Wally B. It was directed by Alvi Ray Smith. It was shown at Sig Graph. I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right. It's a computer graphics conference that I will never attend.

And it broke ground for its very complex at the time, 3D backgrounds, and it also featured the first use of motion blur. So in October of 84, Lasseter joined Lucasfilm as a full-time employee. And at this point, what happens is pretty cool. He's absorbing all of the information that he can from the computer graphics division about the software that's available. And they are also learning from him about how you actually make a movie, the animation, the art, the storytelling. But, Chris, George Lucas' personal life is going up in flames because what was happening? He's getting a divorce. That's right. He's getting divorced from Marsha. Marsha Lucas. And thanks to California's community property laws, this means he was basically losing half of his money.

Yeah, wasn't it at least $50 million in this divorce? It's a lot. Really what he lost was he lost his closest creative collaborator. Right. I mean, she had been instrumental. in so many of his films editing American graffiti and the trench run, you know, the Battle of Yavin at the end of Star Wars. And she had been, you know, one of the ones, I think he listened to a lot of his close collaborators, but she was one of the people who could like kind of speak truth to power and say, George, I don't think this idea works. He had a ton of great ideas.

And then he also had some bad ones from a story perspective. And so he lost that. And I know Empire Strikes Back was really hard to make and we're going to cover that next year. And, you know, he'd put his fortune at risk for that. that movie. So stressful time for George Lucas. Very stressful. Financially, personally, everything. Go back and listen to Star Wars, which Chris covered, did a wonderful job, and some of this is covered in the Phantom Menace as well. That's right. But bottom line, he needed money real bad. So he put the computer division of Lucasfilm on the chopping block. And one by one, the departments

are broken up. Layoffs dismantled the teams. But Ed Catmull and Alvey Ray Smith, they're They're like, we're not going to let the work that we've been doing completely disappear, which is what will happen if they lay off this entire team and everybody scatters to the wind. So they decided to form their own company with the full computer graphics team and see if they could find venture capital funding outside of Lucasfilm. A lot of times you'll see, oh, Lucas just sold off the computer graphics division. That's not entirely true and doesn't give these guys enough credit for what they actually did. So they figured that selling people on the idea of a 3D movie probably not going to do the trick at this point. So they focused on the capabilities of their hardware, not their software,

and that, of course, was the Pixar Image Computer. They almost had a deal with GM that Lucasfilm was happy with, but it fell through. GM? Yeah. Weird. It is weird. Well, because the Pixar Image computer, yes, in theory, it's being built for computer animation to be able to create these more high-definition images,

but there were a lot of uses for it, including like medical uses, whether it's... Yeah, like AutoCAD, like design, 3D rendering software. Yeah, I guess that makes sense. Yeah, there's a lot also military uses. And then Halliburton said, yes, please. And Pixar is a very different company. Toy Story, brought to you by Halliburter. Could have been.

Honestly, could have been. But they pulled a Hail Mary and they called on someone that they had approached early on, which is Steve Jobs. That's right. Jobs had just been ousted by Apple, and he was looking for his next business ventures. Pun intended? What? Because of next? Yeah. Yeah, that didn't go well. That one bombed. This one didn't. So he actually wanted to own Pixar outright, but Catmull and Smith said no. They said that they would accept him as an investor, and Jobs, I think, kind of surprisingly said yes. I was going to say, that is shocking based on every story I've heard about Steve Jobs in negotiation. I know. I know. But he

did get it for an absolute steal of $10 million. He got a 70% stake in the Lucasfilm Computer Graphics Division, and he renamed it, Pixar. So Catmull turned the first check they ever received for $5 million over to Lucasfilm to purchase the rights to the Pixar Image Computer and everything they had been working on. This was a mistake. This was a financial mistake for George Lucas. Yeah. So Ed Catmull would serve as Pixar's president, with John Lasseter serving as the chief creative officer and just a brief detour. on Ed Catmull. Everybody says that he is

one of the best people you could ever work for. He's like one of the smartest people on the planet. There is a mathematical function named after him. But one of the coolest things I came across is that

a lot of people who worked with him said that he just had zero ego. And he was always intent on hiring people who he felt were smarter than he was. And just seems like a really, really cool guy. So Jobs was looking at Pixar as a way to continue his vision of, you know, fusing art and technology.

He's like Silicon Valley doesn't respect Hollywood. Hollywood doesn't respect tech people. This is the place where those two are going to meet. But even with that mentality, early Pixar was first and foremost, still a hardware company. You know, the art side, not expected to generate major revenue. As far as jobs is concerned, the animators are basically just a demo team to kind of show off what the Pixar image computer can do. And by the way, it's sold for 135,000.

thousand dollars. So it's not really going to be in every home. No. But Lassiter kept producing shorts to show off what the computer could do. And while the Pixar Image computer was not really taking off, the shorts were. In late 1986, a short called Luxo Jr., featuring Lassiter's Luxo Deslamp debuted at the Sigrath Conference. It was the first fully animated 3D short nominated for an Oscar. And Chris, I would like to show you this short. All right. Tell me what you see in that short in terms of what we get later. Well, it's amazing. The lighting's incredible because the light is being generated by the two lamps and there's like a very soft spotlight. They can show off a few different lighting styles. The way the chord moves, like the sine wave as the cord follows the smaller lamp. I mean, in some ways, I think it's not that it looks better than Toy Story, but what's remarkable is that this is nine years before Toy Story.

Because it looks like it should have been a year before a toy story, not nearly a decade before a toy story. It looks amazing. It looks amazing. And I also, again, I think it's really interesting that there's a very clear story here. It is not just showing off the animation. The lamps have desires and those are expressed without words and they have personalities, even though they don't have faces. Yes, it's very good visual storytelling. It's really creative.

And of course, that lamp, you can go watch this short, that lamp is the lamp that you see. stomping out the eye and the Pixar logo. Yes, which also led to, sorry, one of the greatest IKEA commercials of all time, which is they take a version almost of that lamp. They make you fall in love with it. The owner puts it out on the street because he's replacing it with a new lamp.

And then a Swedish man walks into frame and goes, why do you feel bad for it? It's just a lamp. The new one's much better. And it just says IKEA at the end. It's a great commercial. That's amazing. Well, so Lasseter's shorts were making waves.

But Pixar was financially struggling. Right. In 1988, they had released Render Man, which is a rendering program designed to create photorealistic imagery that should be indistinguishable from live action imagery. I don't totally understand this, but I believe also to kind of create a shared language across all rendering programs so that you wouldn't have to know like a program-specific language. You would be able to just use this on anything.

Pixar figured this could become a Hollywood standard. software, which, by the way, it did. But Steve Jobs is like, no, no, no, I want Render Man in every home. So he's like running around trying to explain to people. Steve, it's not I movie. What are we doing? No, he's like, here's how your mom could use Render Man. And this is where George Lucas was so brilliant. Lucas did pioneer so many, like non-linear editing, digital sound, digital sound editing. Like, these were things that Lucas was pioneering for Hollywood because he was focused on Hollywood. Right. And meanwhile, Steve Jobs is like, imagine making a 3D film in your living room.

Yes, and everyone's like, ah. I don't know how to turn on my camcorder, Steve. Yeah. Yeah, and it's because of things like this that Jobs was losing something like $1 million a year on Pixar, at least. It may be a lot more than that. However, by the spring of 88, cash and morale were running very low. And according to Alvey Ray Smith, quote, at every failure, presumably because Steve couldn't sustain the embarrassment, that his next enterprise after the Apple ouster would be a failure,

he would berate those of us in management. But he kept pouring money into Pixar. So he called a company-wide meeting to announce huge budget cuts. Major layoffs are coming. Not a great time for someone to pipe up and ask for even more money. But that is what John Lasseter did. He asked for $300,000 straight out of Steve Jobs' own pocket to fund an idea that Lasseter had about toys called Tint Toy.

Lasseter pitched it as a way to show off Render Man. At the end of the pitch, Jobs said, All I ask of you, John, is to make it great. And he did. It won the 1988 Oscar for Best Animated Short, and what it did actually do was show Render Man's capabilities, giving Pixar a bit of the financial boost that it needed. Worth noting, Jobs had probably poured something like $50 million into Pixar at this point.

In 1980s money! Yep. And Tin Toys great, and you can see it online. It's a fun short film. So Disney looks over at this finally and is like, hey, isn't that the guy that we fired for being too passionate about computer animation? That nerd? He's going to take our jobs. Yep. Disney's CEO, Michael Eisner, and chairman, Jeffrey Katzenberg, were on a mission to Koch's Lasseter back. But he famously told Ed Catmull, I could go to Disney and be a director, or I can stay here and make history. So Disney's like, fine. If we can't have you, we still want to work with you. And at the same time, Chris, Moore's Law caught up, and Pixar was like, well, your timing's good because we can finally make the feature-length CGI film.

And Disney's like, Fantastic, oh, we'll pay for it. And Pixar says, no. They were mad. They were mad that they've been trying to poach John Lasseter for quite a while at this point. So Pixar shopped the movie around, except absolutely nobody wanted this, and Disney is still sitting in the corner with Jeffrey Katzenberg and Michael Eisner rubbing their paws together saying, we'll take it! So Pixar caved, and Jobs negotiated a three-picture deal to stop the financial bleeding. But his guard was clearly down because the price Pixar paid for this deal was enormous. I believe he'd also just poured more of his money into this because I think he'd also just poured more of his money into this because I think.

think right before this in 1991. He had actually bought Pixar outright from the employees. Now, according to the deal, Disney would front all the costs involved with making the first animated feature film, but they would retain all merchandising rights and take pretty much all of the profits. So it had to be an enormous smash hit for Pixar to gain anything financially. Pixar also would not be allowed to submit any new film idea that they pitched to Disney to any other studio, even if Disney had rejected the idea. So they could potentially be locked in this deal for like upwards of a decade. And if the movie failed, Pixar was all but guaranteed to go under. To add to this pressure, of course, nobody had ever made a feature length film that was

entirely computer generated. As Ed Catmull put it, the entire company was bet on us figuring this out. But Disney's like, go ahead. Here's 30 million dollars. And Pixar quickly assembled the creative team. So John Lasseter as director, Andrew Stanton, storywriter and artist, Pete Doctor, also storywriter and artist, and Joe ramped as head of story. And from the very beginning, the DNA of Toy Story was there. It's toys, desperately wanting children to play with them. This desire is driving their hopes, fears, and actions, but the details were different. So Tinney, a naive one-man band teamed up with his sidekick, a ventriloquist dummy, and they embark on a sprawling Odyssey that takes them from the back of a truck to an auction, a garbage truck, a yard sale,

a couple's house, and then a kindergarten playground. Which is interesting because elements there do appear in later installments of Toy Story. That's the thing. I had heard that, oh, you know, Toy Story was totally different and it was this crazy thing. That's not really true. We will get into what the differences were, but the DNA is there from the beginning. So in mid-1991, John Lassett, and his crew presented the treatment to Disney, who liked it just enough to finalize the deal. But Jeffrey Katzenberg is like,

it's a yes, and also I hate everything about it. So he and his team were like, Tinny's too sentimental, the ventriloquist dummy is creepy and weird. And this was especially bad news because as part of the deal, Katzenberg also had final say over all of the creative decisions.

So he could just replace the writers if he didn't like them. And Katzenberg's like, listen, I know, what this children's movie about toys needs. More sarcasm, darkness, and edge. And you know what? A little bit true?

Well, a little bit true. A little bit. He was right about the ventriloquistrummy. It was creepy. That's true. Which made it a great villain later on. So Disney hired Joel Cohen, again, not that one, and his writing partner, Alex Sokolov to develop the script and make it, again, more cynical and more adult.

Because that's what kids like, Chris. Yeah. They want to know that. It's probably not going to be okay. Yeah. That's right. According to Alec, quote, Katzenberg really wanted it to have an edge.

One of the things he kept saying to me and my writing partner, Joel Cohen, was he wanted us to write an R-rated script. Yeah. That was something lost in the narrative from Pixar about Toy Story. That first draft had characters breaking the fourth wall, cursing, and trying to kill themselves. It was a very dark script. So it's Deadpool.

Yeah. It's Toy Story as Deadpool. Because Katzenberg's like, guys, we all know childhood, darkest time of your life, right? You all hated it? We all hated it? Everyone's like, Jeffrey, no. Well, Katzenberg did also correctly point out that there was no tension between the two main characters, so it should be an odd couple buddy movie. He's 100% right about that.

Yep. So the core Pixar team started watching every odd couple movie they could find, and they're also aware that their screenwriting experience was limited, so John Lasseter and Pete Doctor attended a three-day story seminar by Robert McKee. Yes. And Chris, tell me about Robert McKee. Why the fuck are you wasting my time? My precious two hours with your movie.

That is, Brian Cox says Robert McKee in adaptation. Robert McKee, like the most famous screenwriting guru, arguably of all time, right? As parodied and not parody or played in Spike Jones and Charlie Kaufman's adaptation by Brian Cox. What did McKee, the book he wrote was, was a screenplay? Story. Story by Robert McKee. Screenplay was the William Goldman one. I can't remember. What did he written? That's the funny thing is, you know, like a lot of these, and I don't mean to take them down, but you know, Blake Snyder. Save the Cat, yeah. Save the Cat. Like, you know, he wrote Blank Check, I think, was his most famous one. And so I don't think it's that McKee had a terrible number of credits, but he became

known as the story guru in the industry. Many people would say that the criticism of Robert McKee's format is that it's a format. It's very formulaic. There are rules that you're supposed to follow. And some people have argued that that sort of set people back in terms of storytelling. I think it's more like you need to understand these rules in order to break them effectively. That would be my suggestion. Yes.

And also, they really provided the North Star that the Pixar team needed in order to understand how to break this story. And you can see, like, there are, it's interesting. The first toy story has enough momentum. It does not matter. But its story beats are a little odd in terms of how they time out if you, like, actually sit down from a classic story perspective. So at this point, the script shifts to a story about a loyal stuffed cowboy, Woody,

who prides himself on being Andy's favorite toy. And they swapped out tinny. They start thinking about what kind of toy would make a little boy stop playing with everything else. And of course, this is where we get Buzz Lightyear, who initially was a G.I. Joe sort of military action figure, and then they figured what's cooler than an astronaut, nothing. He was originally named Lunar Larry, then Tempice, and then Buzz Lightyear after who? Buzz Aldrin? Buzz Aldrin, that's right.

I was like, Jim Lightyear? Jimothy Lightyear. So throughout 1992, Pixar and the Disney assigned writers, Pixar, and the Disney assigned writers, Joel Cohen and Alex Sokolov, turned out draft after draft. And finally, in January of 1993, Katsenberg approved the script for production, which allowed them to move forward with voice casting. So early on, the producers had two very specific people in mind for Woody and Buzz, neither of whom would end up in the final franchise. Woody would have been a very well-respected, iconic actor who would represent old Hollywood. And Buzz was going to be a fast-talking comedian who would represent new Hollywood. Any guesses as to what this truly odd couple pairing

would have been? Jeff Bridges is old Hollywood? No, but that would have been great. He actually wasn't old enough. He wasn't old enough. You know, Billy Crystal is the fast talking new Hollywood. Interesting. No, Billy Crystal will come up, but... I don't know. 93, this was before Jim Carrey had broken out. Was it Jim Carrey? Jim Carrey, yes. Oh, interesting. Oh, wow. That would have been really interesting. Okay, and then Old Hollywood. Jack, Jack Lemon? No, it's really weird. Paul Newman. Can you imagine Paul Newman

opposite Jim Carrey? Not as much to Jim Carrey, but I could see Paul Newman as Woody. To me, like, I think there is a warmth and elasticity to Tom Hanks' voice that is perfect for this role, but I think Newman's Newman feels like a better fit to me than Jim Carrey a little bit in a way in this is like Jim Carrey fits the way that Buzz was initially written. There we go.

So that's what I was going to say. I don't know how they had conceived of him because he doesn't seem to match the Tim Allen version that we get in the final version of the film. That's right. Very good. So the way that Buzz was initially written, he was an asshole. He was like very full of himself, very not what you get in the final product. The reason that we don't get this pairing, they could not afford these two. Oh, yeah.

Wasn't Carrie getting like $10 million a movie or something in the 90s? So this is the thing. It's a little contradictory. It's rumored that it was either his high salary that he didn't get this or that he wasn't big enough that they didn't approve it. That sounds like a contradiction. It actually kind of makes sense when you think about chronologically when this would have hit in his career. Because to your point, this is like late 19. he would have likely filmed Ace Ventura, the mask, and Dumb and Dumber, but none of them had come out.

They're all 94. That was his big year. Oh, okay. Yeah, that was the year of Kerry. Exactly. But they hadn't come out yet. So in my mind, he's probably quite expensive, but also a bit of a wild card still. And besides, it didn't matter because John Lasseter always had one person in mind for Woody, and that was Tom Hanks.

And to win Tom Hanks over, they animated a clip of him as Woody. yelling at a dog from Turner and Hooch. Tom Hanks saw it and he was like, this is amazing. I'm in right away. Now, Billy Crystal was offered the role of Buzz Lightyear, but he turned it down after his agent warned him against it, and Billy Crystal deeply regretted that. I know that's why he did Monsters Inc eventually. It is, yeah, yeah. Yeah. He's so good in that. He is. I love that one. As we discussed, Buzz Lightyear, initially written very arrogant, very self-aggrandizing. But then Tim Allen comes in,

and instead of playing him as an over-the-top macho superhero, he voiced Buzz Lightyear as an earnest, straight-talking, regular guy space cop who was just entirely delusional. Which makes, that's what's so brilliant about it is that it brings out something so negative in Woody in such a fun way. It's the thing that Woody finds the most insufferable, is like you cannot admit what you are,

but Woody also can't admit what he is, right? Which is he can only be magnanimous when he's on top. Yes. So, I mean, this is a pretty huge contribution to this movie and to this character to the point where they actually rewrote all of his dialogue. Yeah, you'd have to. And it works so well.

And then at the end, when he says falling with style and you get that payoff, it's so good. It's so effective. It makes me cry when Buzz tries to fly and can't get out the window. And his arm falls off. It's terrible. What a, just what a beautiful fall from grace that mirrors Woody's, right?

He went, Buzz, Woody's belief, Woody's deep belief is in his value to Andy. Buzz's deep belief is in his value to the universe, right? And then both of them lose that in the film. Well, we may have someone else to think for that. So we'll get there. But they've got their Woody and Buzz. Tom Hanks and Tim Allen recorded early voice tests to help devise. the story reels, and Pixar really encouraged them to improvise, you know, be sarcastic, push the banter.

So there's probably a decent amount in this movie that was not as scripted. And to give you an idea of the process that they were undergoing as they were writing this, here is Joe Ramped, who was the head of story explaining. Here's like the first year on the film was like, we would board a sequence, and then Tom Schumacher and Peter Schneider would fly up, and they would give us tons of notes on the boards, changes to make ways to improve it to make it, to make it. better. And then we would crank, turn around those notes, and then we'd fly down to Disney, pin up our boards, and they'd give us more notes. And we'd even make changes that night. And then, like, at 6 a.m. or 7 a.m. the next morning, very early mornings, we would pitch it

to Jeffrey Katzenberg. And then he would rip them all apart. And the room where they would screen it at Disney was known as the sweatbox, which we learned in Emperor's New Groove. And Katzenberg's just crushing Diet Coke. So he's giving them notes. after note. It sounds so hard, but it also sounds so fun. It does. It does. But it just takes such a long time that this would really be exhausting at a certain point. But that's how the best stories are crafted, I think. It's through the erosion, right? The pearl is formed just through friction over and every pass, you know, makes it a little bit better. And this is why I probably couldn't do this job, because I'd be like, you know what, Jeff? And I would be immediately fired. Um,

By the way, that clip and the additional clips that you're going to hear in this episode are from a really fun short documentary about something called the Black Friday Reel, which we're getting to, which is part of the Toy Story Story Story, Blu-Rey. So you can watch it. By November of 1993, it was time to show Disney what they had. Pixar had the first half of the movie on Story Reels paired with the voice performances, but Lasseter and his buddies were not feeling great about it. Because on the storyboards, it was exactly what Jeffrey Katzenberg had asked for. It was a very edgy, buddy cop style movie that was not at all the movie they had set out to make. So on Friday, November 19th, Pixar's creative team walked into the meeting with a pit in their stomach. And Chris, they were right to worry because the day has now come to be known as

Black Friday because Disney absolutely lost their shit when they saw it. these reels. They forced Pixar to shut down production and pulled the plug on Toy Story with immediate effect. Why? They took Katzenberg's notes a little too well. The story reels featured a really cruel

just mean, horrible Woody, throwing buzz out of the second story window intentionally. You can see some of these on YouTube. You can see them. He is verbally abusive. Like, he's horrible. And he's even the size difference is

and more exaggerated. He's like enormous and Buzz is tiny. He's like he's snarling, he's mean. There is nothing likable about him. Honestly, it's hard to recognize Tom Hanks as the voice, even though it is Tom Hanks in this reel doing this. And again, yeah, you can watch this on YouTube. It's not good. Like I definitely understand why they were like, yeah, we're not putting any more money into this. So here is Thomas Schumacher explaining what happened next. said, well, why is this so terrible to me in the hallway? I said, well, because it's not their movie anymore. It's completely not the movie that John set out to make. Everything kind of fell apart at that point, you know. Credit to Schumacher, who was on the Disney side of it,

you know, being able to understand, like, this is why. So John Lasseter begged for another chance. And surprisingly, Disney was like, okay, but you get two weeks to turn this around. So Pixar team starts working day and night, and Disney drafted in a young writer to help them out. Who was it, Chris? Josh. Joss Whedon? Josh Whedon. Yes, Josh Whedon. And according to Weeden, quote, they sent me the script, and it was a shambles.

But the story that Lasser had come up with was, you know, the toys are alive and they conflict. The concept was gold. Now, according to Weedon's biographer Amy Pascal, one of his biggest contributions was making Buzz unaware of the fact that he is a toy. Brilliant idea. It's like the whole movie. That's great. Well, that's where all the conflict, because then the conflict stems not from it is still a place of cruelty and Woody wants to reveal that to him, but you also kind of understand. It's frustration. Yeah. You understand the frustration. His frustration is why won't you accept what you are, but to your point, it also adds the internal conflict that he also can't really accept it.

You get dramatic irony, comedic irony. It's great. Yeah. It motors so much of this movie. It breaks the whole story, basically. So two weeks later, right on time, Pixar brought new story reels to Disney. The cynicism was gone. Woody was likable.

Buzz was oblivious and endearing. And what's so great about this is when you see Woody making the decisions that he's making, you don't feel like he's just an asshole. it's more that you're sad to see him making those decisions because you know he's better than that kind of. And now that they've been allowed to do what they were trying to do the whole time, Katsenberg loved it. So thanks, Jeff. They were back in.

At this point, they expanded the crew from a 24-person team to over 110 members. By the way, that's actually still pretty small. For comparison, more than 600 people worked on the Lion King. And Joss Whedon, who'd been brought in for what was supposed to be a three-week job, ended up staying for six months before leaving to pursue other projects. And they weren't even done by the time that he left. Pixar just had to keep moving on without him. By March of 94, the cast returned and they recorded the updated script. But in April, tragedy struck. Chris, what happened? Frank Wells passed away. Katzenberg assumed he was going to be able to move into the number two

position under Eisner. That's right. Eisner. I don't know if he delayed the decision and that's what pissed off Katzenberger just generally overlooked him, but Katzenberg did not get the position. He felt he was promised. Yeah, I think Eisner completely edged Katzenberg out and basically showed him the door. It was a sudden death also. It was a helicopter crash. So it's something that nobody had expected to happen. A lot of people think that Eisner basically believed, well, Wells isn't going anywhere.

So I'll just say, sure, you can, you know, take over. And then Wells dies in a helicopter crash. And all of a sudden, Katzenberg's, like, I mean, I thought it was like the same day as the crash basically. Katzenberg's like, okay, what's the succession plan? You know, he was not. I believe it, yeah. Yeah, it was a bit uncouth the way that he went about it. And then, of course, yes, he was overlooked. And there's stuff with Michael Ovitz in this time. They tried to deny Katzenberg his bonus, his big $100 million severance bonus successfully sued them. So it got pretty gnarly. And then we get DreamWorks. That's right. So Katzenberg, out of Toy Story at this point. But Toy Story keeps pressing forward. They hired Ralph Eggleston as the art director. He had just finished working on Ferngull. and he really had like a painter's eye for color and light.

He hired visual artist Bill Cohn to help shape the film's aesthetic. And like I didn't think about this, you know, obviously as a child watching this or even as an adult, but the characters have to be lit correctly. So they had a lighting crew basically as part of the animation team to make sure that every scene was designed with the light sources you would use if you were shooting it as live action. You've got to simulate the sun. That's right. In the same way that if you're lighting a sound stage, you have to simulate the sun, you know, coming in through the window. Right.

And on the technical side, Pixar's computer scientists had developed a program called MENV, short for modeling environment. It's now called Presto, better name, to make Toy Story possible. Now, the reason they needed this is because before, in 2D cell animation, if an animator wanted to slow down an arm movement by, say, 15%. They had to go back, erase everything in the section, and redraw it. But with MENV, animators could isolate specific frames and leave it to the computer to interpolate the motion between them instead of redrawing every single cell. And this was like morph cut technology. Yeah. Did you ever see Lizzie that very famous music video, the Michael Jackson song, Tyra Banks, is in it.

And as the head moves, it switches to a new actor. No. It's a really cool music video. It kind of showed the potential. of the morph cut technology. Cool. It holds up today, in my opinion. It looks amazing.

What's the song? It's black or white, which brings up a point that I was going to raise. I could have sworn that Sid, Eric von Denton, also voiced the little boy in the intro to the album version of black or white where he's, the dad says,

turn it down and he says, it's like, no, I'm listening to this. No, it was McCauley Culkin. But guess who directed black or white? I don't know. It's a director we've covered whose onset decisions were arguably the cause

of a horrible accident that resulted in the death of three actors. John Landis, that's right. I forgot about that. Because he'd done thriller back in 83. That's right. Damn. All right.

So this technology allowed for much faster manipulation of characters' expressions as well. And that was done using articulated variables or avars, which animators could control almost like strings on a marionette. So in 1995, Woody had 596 avars that the animators could manipulate. By 2019 in Toy Story 4, can you guess how many Woody had? On the one hand, I want to say a lot more, but on the other hand, I'm thinking, like, is 590 sufficient?

But I'll just say a lot more. I'll say 2,000. I don't know. 7,000. Wow. Yeah. Also, let's talk about the toys that they chose for this. First of all, it's kind of amazing that they got to use the actual toy brands, and I think this had to be a lot of the power of Disney behind it.

Absolutely. Now, the toys they chose were a function of nostalgia. Obviously, these were toys that, you know, Lassiter and the team had grown up playing with, but they were also toys that worked within the limitations of the software they were using. Organic materials were very hard. Exactly. It's all plastic. And there's not a lot of matte surfaces or textures in this movie, which I think is one of the reasons that the one thing that does still look a little odd now, to me, the human characters. The humans and the dog. And the dog don't hold up quite as well, but the toys do. The toys look great. But, Chris, there were two classic toys that Pixar could not obtain the rights to for the first toy story. Do you know what they were? Do they show up in...

One of them does show up in later Toy Stories. A teddy bear? No. Okay. That I love the teddy bear in Toy Story 3. I know. Toy Story 3. Yeah. So good. I don't know. Viewmaster?

No. It is Barbie, who of course would later show up. Oh, that's Barbie. Yeah. Also Toy Story 3 and 2. Yes. And G.I. Joe. Okay. An early version of the script apparently envisioned Barbie wearing a party dress, pulling up in her pink corvette with something like the personality of Linda Hamilton from Terminator 2. That sounds amazing. I know.

But Mattel was like, no way. Get in the car if you want to live. Yeah. So, first of all, they were afraid this movie was going to bomb. And second of all, they did not want little girls to think that that's what Barbie would be like if she came alive, to which I say, why not? But the company's philosophy was that each child should be able to imagine Barbie's personality as they play. I do understand that. And this, I believe, is how we wound up with Bo Peep.

But, of course, Mattel reversed course for the sequels when they saw what a hit Toy Story was and Barbie is now a part of the toy story franchise. But G.I. Joe, I don't think is. So the script called for the toy soldier to be blown up, which you do see in the final. But Hasbro, the makers of that toy, were like, no way, are you blowing up one of our G.I. Joe's. And that is why Woody refers to him as, it's a combat carl. But you know what's funny? So I had those little green plastic soldiers as a kid. Oh, no, it's the one that Sid straps to a rocket. No, I know later. I know. But I'm saying, like, To me, I don't know why, but I think, well, I do know why. The little green plastic soldier was the evolution of the tin soldier, right, from earlier.

So it feels like more of a classic toy than a G.I. Joe. And one of the things that I think works so well in this movie is that, yes, they use the real toy names, but they're all classic toys. There's nothing too modern. And so as a result, Buzz Lightyear does feel like this shiny new object. My fear would be like, if there was a G.I. Joe, you know what I mean? Or a really modern-looking Barbie, would they draw a 10? away from Buzz and the impact that he would have on the story as he's introduced. That's a really good point.

And it holds up in a nice way for, I think, our generation, nostalgically as well, because these were all toys that we played with, even if many of them were older toys. I mean, the real toys that are missing in terms of the zeitgeist, this was the heyday of Star Wars. Well, Beanie Babies would be, I think, a hair after this, but Star Wars merchandising, right? That's true.

There were more Star Wars toys on the planet than, you know, anything else at this point. time. That's true. So Chris, you mentioned this, but part of the reason there aren't that many people in Toy Stories is because of the software limitations. That's also the reason Andy doesn't have a dad. Yeah. They just didn't want to animate a dad, so he's not there. Also, all of Andy's friends at the birthday party are Andy. Like, if you watch that scene and you look at the overhead shot, you're like, I think they changed the hair, but those are all just Andy, like copy-pasted. Over and over again.

That's also why all of the clothes had to be very tight fitting and why hair was either short or tied back very tight, like Andy's mom. It works so well for Sid because, come on, we all knew that kid. With that aggressive buzz cut and that energy, we all knew him. Yeah. throws the basketball too hard. Yeah, we don't love it. Even with tools like MENV and Renderman at their disposal,

animating Toy Story was a serious grind. Some fun facts about animating Toy Story. For the difficult or organic characters, like the dog, Pixar made a clay or mixed material sculpture, which was then digitized, a throwback to Ed Catmull's computer animated hand. A maquette, I believe they're called. Oh. They did them all out in Lord of the Rings as well. It's an intermediate stage. Nice.

Now, for each eight-second shot, it could take a week just to fit the facial expressions to the audio. An animator studied videos of Hanks and Allen in the recording booth to pick up their facial expressions when pronouncing. or making certain sounds or letters, every leaf and blade of grass had to be created individually. One of the most complicated sequences for Pixar's animators. Can you guess what it was, Chris? Hmm. Sequences.

It's one of my favorites in the whole movie in terms of what the animation looks like. It's not all the aliens inside of the... No. No. The claw. I love that one. The claw. The claw decides.

No, it's the Little Green Army Men at Ants. Andy's birthday party and the way they're navigating. It's so good. It's amazing. This is really fun. In order to figure out how those plastic figurines would move, Pete Doctor actually nailed a pair of jogging shoes to a plank, and the team took turns hopping around,

trying to figure out how you would move your feet. There was a digital painter named Tia Cratter, who was hired and given the job title of Imperfectionist, and her entire job was to make sure that the CGI didn't look perfect. So adding scuffs, scratches, adding dirt. What a fun job. Yeah, and it also is story point, you know, when Andy's, the writing of Andy's name on his foot, you know, is wearing off. And I love that the handwriting's a little worse than with buzzes because Andy's grown older.

It's such a, it's a little subtle details that are so well done. It's amazing. Animating Toy Story took a total of about four years when you consider when this started, required more than 114,000 frames and over 800,000. machine hours. By late 1994, Toy Story had moved into post-production. Now, for animated films, post-production, not anywhere near as extensive as live action since pretty much most of the editing is happening during the production process. But even with Katzenberg gone and Pixar overcoming all of the script tech issues, they still had Disney breathing down their neck about one particular thing. Chris, if you had to guess, what do you think Disney's continued bone to pick with Toy Story

was, what was Toy Story missing? It's not a musical. That's right. Yeah, that's what I was wondering. It's interesting because all the Disney, all the successful Disney Renaissance films were musicals. That was the Disney thing. Was the music is as much a part of the story as the animation, as the characters,

and Toy Story would end up having that, but in a different way? That's exactly right. So Disney was adamant, and Pixar was equally as adamant that they would not do it. They were not putting songs in this. This was not going to be a musical. Could you imagine Tim Allen just breaking into song? It just doesn't work. No, it doesn't work.

And Pixar knew that, and they would not do it. So Disney just kept doubling down. But Disney's then head of music, Chris Monten stepped up with a compromise. And he said, all right, you know what? Fine. They don't have to sing. What if songs played over scenes with a narrative effect, a la Simon and Garfunkel's soundtrack on The Graduate?

So it helps set the tone without stopping the plot. Pixar said fine, and they had one person in mind, someone who would never talk down to the audience, someone who exuded warm Americana. Chris, who is it? Randy Newman. You got a friend in me. I hope that's exactly what he sounds like. You got a friend in me. Yeah, there we go.

Thank you. There was one person who strongly disagreed with this, though, and it was Steve Jobs. Jobs had a very different person in mind for the music, and he was pretty pushy about it. It's someone else who I think you could say is very affiliated with Americana, but... Bruce Springsteen? No, that would have been maybe better than who Steve Jobs had in mind. Okay, who did Steve Jobs have in mind? Bob Dylan.

And the toys went down to the dad. That would have been. I mean, listen, to be fair, could it have worked? Like Bob Dylan, incredible musician. Sure. Maybe, but I don't think. Distracting, I think. Maybe.

And just it doesn't, like you said, there is a come on in, guys. Like, listen to the music warmth to Randy Newman. That's so welcoming. I actually think Bob Dylan probably would have been fine for adult viewers. And it would have been a little alienating for kids. Yes, I think that's very true. Everyone agrees with you. And they're like, Steve, no, like, don't.

A, we can't afford him and be, no. Steve Jobs is so weird. I know. It's so weird, man. render man in every home and Toy Story, a musical as scored by Bob Dylan. But the thing is, Randy Newman at this point, was a multiple Oscar-nominated composer of, you know, grown-up scores like The Natural and Awakening's. His first nomination, I believe, was for Ragtime in 1981.

But he had never done an animated film before, and it really freaked him out. He struggled pretty hard to write the score, but he worked 12-hour days from 7 in the morning until late at night, and he later said Toy Story was the hardest thing he had ever written. But we got, I think, one of the best original songs ever out of it. You got a friend in me, which everyone agrees played a pretty enormous part in the commercial and critical success of Toy Story. And also, it just like, he does a fantastic job of still moving the story ahead with the songs that you see, you know, play over a couple of the montages here. Yeah. Without like, interrupting any of the flow.

He's entirely additive to this movie. And it also became a really nice stylistic choice that would follow this Toy Story films. And I just looked it up because I remembered, I remember very fondly the really moving sequence when you find out Jesse's story in Toy Story 2. And that song, I think Newman wrote it. It's called When She Loved Me, but Sarah McLaughlin performs it

because it's like a woman's voice. It's a great sequence. And again, it's not a musical. It's a montage. but the music tells you the story, or it heightens the story as you go. And it's a great device. Yeah, it is. It works really, really well for this.

So, while Pixar was finishing up the film, Disney's marketing team hit the ground running, and boy, did they crush it. You could not escape Toy Story. There were billboards, buses, TV ads, grocery store displays, fast food tie-ins. They built a 30,000 square foot Toy Story Funhouse next to the L-Capitan Theater in Hollywood. I wish we could have seen that. It was three stories tall. And this is where partnering with Disney really becomes an advantage.

Yes. On November 22nd, 1995, Toy Story hit theaters. It made $39 million during its first five days in cinema, and it would go on to gross $375 million worldwide, making it one of the highest grossing films of 1995. And that's basically a 10x multiplier off of, it's opening weekend or opening five days, that's amazing. Yeah. Because it had incredible legs. Now, behind the scenes, as we said, their original contract with Disney meant that most of the profits

and the merchandising went straight to Disney. So Pixar knew if they were going to survive, they had to become a full-fledged studio on their own and not just a production partner. One week after Toy Story's release, Pixar went public. And at the end of the first day of trading, their stock was at $39 a share. That gave Pixar a market-based. value of close to $1.5 billion. It was the largest IPO of the year, and it turned Steve Jobs into a billionaire. Toy Story was nominated for three Academy Awards, Best Original Screenplay, Best Original Score, by the way, the score is beautiful in addition to the songs.

Oh, the music in general is fantastic. It's just incredible. Yeah. And, of course, best original song for You've Got a Friend in Me. Excuse me. You've got a friend in me. That is a, that is Randy Newman, after being. shot with a tranquilizer art.

It won. Do you know how many at one, Chris? No, I don't. It won zero. Oh. Yeah. It was recognized by a special achievement award and the song that won

Best Original Song over Randy Newman that year, it's good. I don't think it's as good as you got a friend in me, but it was Colors of the Wind from Pocahontas. It is a great song. It's great. I still think this one's better. Yeah, I agree.

Especially if you just think about what has had more cultural staying power over the years. I think this is the more recognizable of the two. Toy Story certainly has held up better than Pocahontas, I think, even though I do think that movie's really well animated. So, yeah, I have to agree. But you know what, Chris? Zero Oscars didn't matter because Toy Story had legitimized animated movies for all ages. Animation was finally being taken seriously for the first time in decades. It also, of course, served as the blueprint for Pixar's enormously successful storytelling model. It launched collaborators like John Lasseter, Ed Catmull, Andrew Stanton, and so many

more Pete Doctor. Yeah. Into enormously profitable and powerful careers for better and, you know, possibly for worse in some scenarios. Toy Story also gave Pixar the leverage that it needed and in 1996, jobs called Michael Eisner to renegotiate Pixar's contract with Disney, explaining they'd be willing to pay for all or part of the production costs of their films, but from now on, Pixar wanted a true 50-50 profit share and to give an equal billing to Disney.

And Michael Eisner ultimately agreed. And then I believe they swallowed it up eventually. Eventually, yeah. Disney eventually paid. What's interesting is Disney eventually bought both Lucasfilm and Pixar for billions and billions of dollars. And what's wild is they had it. What's interesting is they were close to poaching Lucas in the 80s, right? I don't know how close they were, but they were close.

And they probably, if they bought all of Lucasfilm, they probably could have had it. But then the question becomes, is Lucasfilm as valuable? You know what I mean? As it is, if it's not just, if Disney does buy it early or do they squash it when they're doing layoffs, you just never know with these things, is my point. Yes. But what's also crazy to me is if you look back at Tron, they had it. Yes, no, I know. They had what they needed to be able to do this.

They could have gotten the guys. But Tron didn't break out. And they didn't want to invest in something that was... So they didn't buy it, but they kept making Tron. Yeah. What the hell? With Jared Leto, why? I am convinced.

Like, how did that happen? Does he have something on somebody? I think so. I think so. Or there's just like a couple really big 30 seconds to Mars fans inside of Disney. Yeah, that one's a real head scratcher. I don't know how that happened. But whatever.

We'll cover it at some point. All right. That wraps up our coverage of toy story, Chris. What Went Right? So many things. I have a controversial what went right. I do not condone this person's behavior in much more recent years. But after you explained this whole story to me,

I guess I'll give like a double controversial What Went Right? I think that Joss Whedon and Tim Allen cracked the Buzz Light your character. and I just don't think Toy Story works without it. Like, in so many ways, Buzz Lightyer kind of becomes the heart of the movie. A hundred percent. And I just, I don't see this movie having the cultural resonance, not that it wouldn't have been entertaining or remarkable technologically or well-performed,

but I just, man, what, that was such a, and again, not that the, I know all the scaffolding had been set out for him, et cetera, but that really was the key. stone that was missing at the top of the arch, in my opinion. So I give it to both of them, because they both, it seems, cracked that character. Yeah, I agree with you. All right, well, I'm going to give it to somebody whom certainly missed the mark sometimes, but who showed up when it counted. I'm going to give it to Steve Jobs. Chris's face says, don't do that. No, it's fine. I'm going to give it to Steve Jobs because, look,

And this is everybody who was a part of this, everybody who developed the technology and who were able to recognize the value in each other's abilities, they're all what went right. Every single person who worked on this movie is what went right. However, Pixar would not exist. Toy Story would not exist. Had Steve Jobs not been willing to pour so many millions of his own dollars into this company that was failing, it was not working. But he saw something in this that told him to keep going.

He protected the animation division, even though that's not where, in theory, the money was early on. He kept them there, and he kept them making art because he did believe that that was an important part of the business arm. And he was right. So I will give it to Steve Jobs. Without Steve Jobs, we don't get Pixar. And I think, as we've learned, if he really wanted to, something, he was not afraid to do basically anything to make it happen. And so clearly, I'm sure it was not fun to do, but clearly Lasseter and his collaborators were able to convince jobs

not to do certain things or that they did need to certain. And jobs listened, which, you know, kudos to him because it doesn't sound like he always did that. Well, he may have been taken down several pegs after being ousted from Apple. But yeah, sure. Yeah. I think it's a good choice. Also, I will mention what's so funny is Katzenberg goes on to make Shrek, which is clearly such a direct response to this and him trying to make the edgy R-rated 3D animated film that he had been, you know what I mean, attempting with Toy Story, I think. Something else is interesting about Shrek. It actually built on some of the technology from Toy Story, and it allowed for some of the things they were not able to do in Toy Story. There were some pretty big animation breakthroughs in Shrek. Yeah, especially the number of like Blades of Grass they could render and the dust and all of those things.

Organic materials. Exactly. Yeah. The breakthrough they did on fur was amazing on Shrek. He got the last laugh in the end. Yes. That was great. That's one of my favorite episodes we've done.

Great job. I love Toy Story. I hope the audience liked it as much as we did. It was really fascinating. And just exciting to learn about, you know, the beginnings of Pixar in addition to this movie. Well, next week, we are covering another animated film. We're doing a little back-to-back. and it's another director that was really established by animation in the 90s.

It is a somewhat traditionally animated 2D cell animation film, although there's some interesting things about the way it was animated, but it was done by not Disney, not Pixar, but by Warner Brothers. And that is, of course, the Iron Giant directed by Brad Bird. And I'm really excited for us to discuss that tearjerker, which is probably going to crack my top five films. We have a couple movies towards the end of this year that are going to crack my top five films. I've never seen it.

Prepare to cry. Okay. I'll get my tissues ready. Get your tissues ready. Prepare to cry. It's great. Guys, if you are enjoying this podcast, there are a few easy ways to support us. Number one, thanks for listening.

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Don't do me like that. Okay. I'll do my best. Adam Moffin, Adrian Pink Korea, Angeline Renee Cook, Ben Shindleman, you got a friend in me.

Blaise Ambrose, Brian, Donahue, Brittany Morris, Brooke, Cameron Smith, Chris, C, Grace B, Chris Lille,

Chris Zucker, David Friskillanty, D.B. Smith, I love L.A., Darren and Dale Cockling, Don Shibble, Ellen Singleton, M. Zodia, Evan Downey, Felicia G. Film it yourself. Frankenstein. Gailen and Miguel, the Broken Glass Kids. Grace Potter, I'm so sorry for this. Half Greyhound James McAvoy Jason Frankel Jan Maestro Marino J.J. Rapido

Jory Hill Popper Josie Salto Sorry about that, it's Jose K Kanaba 8 Elrington Kathleen Olson Amy Elgeslager McCoy Lawn Rolad, LJ Lydia House

Matthew Jacobson Michael McGrath Nathan Ive Nathan Santano Rosemary Southward Roger Sadie

Just Sadie Scott O'Shea Soman Chianani Steve Winterbauer Suzanne Johnson The Provost family, the old sound like us, you got a friend in me. All right, that's it.

Thank you so much for listening. Remember to watch Gray Gardens if you want to watch it before the episode that's dropping on Friday. And if not, we will see you on Monday for the Iron Giant. Bye. Go to patreon.com slash what went wrong podcast to support what went wrong. And check out our website at what went wrongpod.com. What went wrong is a.

Sad Boom Podcast, presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Post-production and music by David Bowman. This episode was researched and written by Laura Woods.