As with what finally got released, this earlier version of the movie centered on Woody being pursued by a toy collector, but it was also an apparently slighter effort with lower stakes: Woody’s choice to return home to Andy was presented as a given. The film that was salvaged from deletion maintained the “it’s only a sequel” pitch Disney approved of, but a clear problem was still brewing even after disaster had been averted.
Jacobs has acknowledged that some of the files were never restored, but the film managed to flow so well without them that they went ahead. The computer was retrieved-as in literally driven across the bay area to Pixar’s studios as if it were a world leader-and the film files were restored… for the most part. She had set up a backup program to get the Pixar files to her home computer, and it still delivered all those files on a weekly basis. Galyn Susman, the supervising technical director, had been working from home after the birth of her second child.
With the Disney deadline looming, the 11th hour solution was almost as accidental as the crisis itself.
Grab a FREE TRIAL of Disney+, on us, right here! But it was not to be: the backup system didn’t work correctly, and there was nothing there to restore.
They had backups, after all, and they’d only lose a half day’s work. Jacobs rushed the systems team to pull the plug on the Toy Story 2 machine before the whole movie was erased, but it was too late: 90 percent of the film had been deleted.Īt first, the team didn’t panic. The process almost happened in slow motion: team member Oren Jacobs watched the event in real time as first Woody’s hat disappeared, then his boots, and then Woody himself. During a routine cleaning out of file storage, an animator unintentionally hit a key-command that erased all sets in the system, including all of Toy Story 2. Before the new team began to rework the film, they almost lost the film all together. The most epic of the disasters that befell Toy Story 2 was a computer accident. Disney, however, saw the initial reels and thought it was good enough-and they required Pixar to meet the initial schedule. Lasseter and his team felt the movie played flat and didn’t have the emotional pull it needed to be a huge success. It wasn’t until A Bug’s Life wrapped that Lasseter sat down to look at the production… and Toy Story 2 was a mess. They requested help from Lasseter regularly, but the Pixar team continued to express confidence that they could handle it. Read more: Tom Hanks on Saying Goodbye to Woody with Toy Story 4 Because John Lasseter and the creative team from the original Toy Story were busy working on A Bug’s Life, two first-time directors, one of whom was Ash Brannon, were given the responsibility of helming Toy Story 2. The team took a concept that had already been developed-the idea of Woody encountering a toy collector had been created and then dropped from the original Toy Story-and added to it some themes that had been in development for other projects, such as the unproduced Tin Toy Christmas, in which a toy character was put into storage. Toy Story 2 had been imagined to be an easier project than the original, in large part because so much of the world and story building were already in place. (The conflicts between Disney and Pixar over Toy Story 2 continued to cause friction between the two companies until Disney eventually purchased Pixar.) Unfortunately for Pixar, Disney told the team that this would not count as one of the five films they’d contracted for distribution, despite its new big-scale appearance. Pixar asked Disney to consider changing the film over to a theatrical release, and when Disney looked at the initial reels, they were impressed enough with the quality to give the change a greenlight. The idea of intentionally aiming low wasn’t something that Pixar had ever done, and the “B team,” despite their budgetary requirements, didn’t want to settle for less. But the culture at Pixar wasn’t one where creative teams were set up to accept mediocrity. The studio, which was also producing A Bug’s Life, ended up creating two teams: an A team for the big screen productions still in the works and a B team for the direct-to-video. Unfortunately, aiming for a cheaply-done, low quality project was not a strategy Pixar had ever utilized before. Disney originally planned to turn the sequel over to Disneytoon Studios, but Pixar was sure they’d do a better job.