Pixar

Jonathan Strickland and I'm Ariel Casting. And this is a suggestion from Nathan in St. Louis. Thank you Nathan for writing in. It was great to hear from you, and it's a great suggestion. St. Louis. St. Louis fair enough St. Louise from good old St. Lou So, Yeah, we're gonna talk about Pixar, which is I love this topic. It's uh, it's one of those studios that has produced a remarkable number of amazing films when you look at like the percentage of all the films made and plus some other

films that aren't so amazing. Dinosaur, Oh my gosh, we didn't even plan that guy. But I've I've seen it. I have not. It's that's why I haven't seen it. So it's not it's not bad, it's just it's just not remarkable. That's see. That's the thing is that Pixar set the bar very high with some of their movies, and so when things are just good instead of great, you're like, well, that's a disappointment when it when for

any other studio it would be considered a hit. So but we're gonna talk more about the founding of Pixar and how it was never a sure thing that it was going to become the movie studio that it is. Say, it didn't even really start as a well, it kind of started as a studio and it became not a studio, and then it became a studio again. So yeah, let's get into that. So the story starts not with John Lassen, who I think a lot of people associated with picks.

It doesn't start with Steve Jobs or even George Lucas, who would become one of the key members of Pixar. It actually really starts with a guy named Edwin E. Cat Mill, and cat Mill had dreams of working for Disney as an animator, but he had one major issue, which is that he really just couldn't get down the artistic talent for hand drawn animation. Yeah, that's that's kind of a necessity when you want to be an hand drawn animator. Yeah. So, and he went into computer science.

He really threw himself into it. He got like advanced degrees, not just a bachelor's, he got a master's and a PhD. Smart, yeah, super smart. And he went to grad school and in grad school in nineteen seventy two he would actually get the nod to designing a computer animated graphic for a feature film. And it's a film of a of a movie you've seen. You've seen West World, right, Yeah, and I've seen the movie that you're talking about, Future World. Yeah.

Future World is the sequel to a film called Westworld. The film, Yeah, there was a film before the TV show guys. Yes, this is the film that inspired the HBO series. So back in the seventies, we may do with you, ol Brenner as a robot writing around and being terrified. I don't know if make do is the right word to put with you, old Brunner, but it depends on the movie. I guess he was great in

West World. So Future World was the sequel to West World, and it had this computer and animation sequence in it. It actually was Captain Moll's hand. He animated his own hand into it, and this was the first time that computer animation would be used in a feature film. Then he graduated with his PhD and he got contacted by the New York Institute of Technology to go over there and to serve as the director of a computer graphics lab brand New. Yeah, and and that's where he met

his cohorts for the eventual Pixar. Yes, the alv Ray Smith is one of those, in fact the probably the most important of the ones, who also had a PhD in computer science. He had uh was he's a little bit older than Catmill, but he had also worked at xerox is Park Research Center. Park is the p A r C. That's the same research center where stuff like the first graphic user interface, the first computer mouse, like

all that kind of stuff grew out of there. Although to be fair, the computer mouse actually came from somewhere outside of Park but got adopted. You get where I'm going. That's funny because Steve Jobs will them into our story later here, and Steve Jobs in Park have a tenuous history, yes, because Steve Jobs got to tour Park and then stole everything. Yeah. Yeah, I think we talked about that a little bit in our Zerox episode. I think he also met David Di

Francesco and Ralph Guggenheim there. Yes, both of them would become founding members of Pixar as well. So they all are working at this this computer graphics lab together when a a certain independent filmmaker came knocking at the door. That independent filmmaker was George Lucas. Yes, he said, I am your employer, Yeah he was. He was putting together a little, little little special effects studio called Industrial Light and Magic. Just a little studio, yeah, right right up

there with Wetta. You know, there's one of the big ones out there. And so George Lucas being George Lucas, he wanted to get the best people in the world to work on this. And computer effects were like new, Yeah, they were like unheard of. So he was going for the cutting edge, the bleeding edge of that technology. And he recruited Cat Moll to come in and head up

the computer division of Industrial Light and Magic. And Cat will being you know, familiar with the work of his colleagues reached out and essentially plucked them all up to be part of this group, thus gutting the computer graphics division over it. Yeah yeah, no, but smart move on on George Lucas's part, and smart move on Cat Moll's part. Yep. So their original work was mostly to make computer animation not like computer animation, which is understandable, like you're trying

to make it. We see that today too, to say it's something that we still struggle with. You know, I think when you said he originally animated his hand, Yeah, like I've dabbled in drawing hands of the hardest part for me on two D animation. So, but I think on three D animation to actually melts away and hair and hare's another big one. Yeah, it's and eyes too, right, like you look at something like Polar Express, which is not a Pixar film and who you can just get

those dead eyes. Okay. So they're trying to make their computer animation not look like what it was, yeah, which is again like you see action movies that have like the the c g I blood spray if someone gets shot and it's always incredibly obvious. They wanted to try and create new stuff, and so they also had to do things like figure out, well, how do we work around the fact that computer animation is super clean, right,

Like it's all virtual. It's not a real camera you're using, but real cameras when you're shooting on film, if you move the camera, you get blur, right, because cameras are just taking a series of photographs super fast. So they actually one of the things I had to figure out was how do we make blur in the computer graphics effects so that it looks like it's actually they're on film as opposed to an effect you just eat a greasy burrito and then you wipe your finger across the screen. That's,

oddly enough, exactly not what they did. So they're working on this stuff and there really isn't much for us to comment on other than they were they had steady work in industrial line, okay, so let's get ahead to then. Sure, that's when cat Moll would hire on a contract worker, so not full time yet. This guy was named John Lastener, still his name, John Lsener, who had previously worked as an animator for Disney, so exactly what kat Moll wanted

to do. Yep. And the thing that Lastener had encountered, at least according to most stories, is that he wanted to introduce computer animation to Disney features but just encountered a lot of resistance. So he was eager to try those skills somewhere else, and he thought the Industrial line Magic would be the place to do it. Yeah, and he did by he was a full time employee, and he had the title of interface designer. Yeah, because they didn't technically have an animator position, so that was the

closest that they could come up with. They would work on several big motion pictures, including one called Young Sherlock Holmes, which have you seen. I haven't seen, but I did look up the scene that you're about to talk about, where uh they took a two dimensional night I think from a stained glass window and made him like pop into the scene and and interact with somebody. And it's it's interesting because they definitely got the look of like

going through stained glass. But it's pretty row. Yeah, it's it's a rough one. It also makes me think of the animated the c g I intro to Steven Spielberg's television series Amazing Stories. It was very similar. But yeah, this was the idea and Young Sherlock Holmes is that it's a hallucination. The bad guys have these hallucinogenic darts, and when they shoot you with one, you have these

nightmarish hallucinations that then compel you to commit suicide. Spoiler alert if you haven't seen Young Jill movies, like four years old, I think we're outside of the spoiler alert rules. But anyway, this was the first time they had a scene where live action actors and a c g I character would be interacting in the same frame. So that was that was a new benchmark. Yeah, and to do that, they needed special hardware to do it. Yeah, they didn't have like, yeah, no one had built a computer system

for that. So they're like, well, I guess we'll build our own dan dang darn computer system. And they called it the Pixar Image Computer. Yes, now this is a Yeah, this is before they had given a name to the division. They were still just part of Industrial Line Magic and um, yeah. The funny thing is, I'm not going to go into specs. Anyone who knows me from texting you knows I could. But technically, if you have a smartphone, then you have a you have a computer more powerful than this thing

was back in its day. But for its time, it was an incredibly sophisticated computer. Yeah. But then they used it for more than just entertainment special effects. Yeah. Well, they figured that in order to get the best return on investment, they could actually market this computer system for

lots of other stuff, including like medical imaging. So the idea was, why should we build this computer system, which will be very expensive, and just use it in house if we could also market it as its own product and make more money by selling it to other, you know, organizations. So they started. It's almost like they were side hustling as a hardware company, not just as an effects division within Industrial Line Magic. They're they're kind of making extra bets.

They're hedging their bets. Yeah. And one of their big early customers for the Pixar Image computer was Disney. Yep, they are looking at use such a thing, not to create three D c g I films, No, No, to digitize their cell animation. And I'm trying so hard not to go into this tirade about Disney three D animation versus two because I like the Pixar Disney movies, but I really missed the Tudi animation. Well, and there was, Yeah,

there was a thing time at Disney. This is outside the realm of our discussion, really, but there was a time at Disney where the prevailing wisdom early on in the Pixar years was that, oh, the audiences love these movies because they are computer animated movies. And even lasseter as As, the man who was really heading up that effort at the time, said, knew, what's most important is story. Story, and then you know, you determine how you're going to

tell that story. But story is way more important than whether it's hand drawn or computer animated. Yeah, okay, tie right off. The system they made for Disney was called the Computer Animation Production System, nicknamed CAPS, and uh they actually would still be working on that when the division would split off from Lucas Film. So why did this division of Industrial Light and Magic get spun off, Well, it's because Lucas was having some issues. So but but

I mean, he just did Star Wars. Star Wars was super successful. He did Return of the Jedi and eighty three, so he had just had three blockbuster films he had made. I think I think the right term is a metric crap ton of money, very scientific, Jonathan, not just not just off the films, but through merchandizing. That was I mean, that was one of the biggest money makers that Lucas stumbled on. That really wasn't as big a thing until

the Star Wars franchise came around. And so this is a point where you know, you would think everything's going on great, but Lucas also was kind of looking for the next next project. Yeah, he didn't have another Star Wars film. No, so he made an amazing movie called Howard The I knew you would. I knew you would. I knew this. Look, it's not a good movie. It's a horrible movie, but it's an amazing movie. I saw

it in the theater when it came out. It's so bad it's good disturbing, which is frequent from that film. Um Leah Thompson's in it, though she's very cute in that movie. But no, the it's a it's a terrible movie. And then it bombed. It absolutely bombs. So Lucas had just had a flop of a film come out. He was also going through a an acrimonious divorce that was incredibly expensive. In fact, there's talk about the reason why Indian and Jones in the Temple of Doom was so dark.

It was partly because Lucas was working out his feelings about his divorce. Yeah, but it made a really good movie. Okay movie. And then he so he's he was in a bad place and he was thinking, well, I don't have another Star Wars lined up. Howard the Duck was a total ust. I think I'm going to focus on independent, smaller films. Uh. And so he decided he was going to sell off this computer division of Industrial Light and Magic. So this was a possible point where this whole thing

could have just gone away. Yeah, but thankfully capt Moll was kind of already preparing for this spinoff. Yes, he knew that this was coming, and so he had already started to kind of set the foundation. And Uh, they decided that they were going to create their own standalone company, Computer Animation and Effects Company. Uh. They did have one little problem, which is that no one was really keen on what to name it. Like, there were a lot of no one No one had the one idea that

everyone immediately glommed onto. So there was a lot of disagreement on that. Yeah, apparently one of the names was gif fix, yeah, g f X for graphics. Yeah, it was just this. It was just a temporary name. Is literally something that they had to put in to a field on a forum. They forgot the R to they were well and there are a lot of issues with that particular acronym doesn't make any sense. So they ultimately obviously decided that they would name their company after the

computer system they had designed. That's why they called it Pixar. And then they just needed to get somebody to help fund this because they couldn't they didn't have any money when they're just getting spun off. They had to find some sort of angel investor, and they knew just the guy who could get the jobs done. I don't know whether they're grown or do you like at Dune done done? Tell you what, how about we take a break and

you can figure it out. So obviously I was referring to a very specific person with that angel investor, and that would be Steve Jobs. And he paid five million dollars to George A Kiss four Pixar. Yeah, and then he spent another five million dollars to help fund the company to get it really situated. Uh. At this time, Jobs was actually going through his own transition. This was during the period where he had been effectively forced out of Apple or he had quit, depending on who you ask. Yeah,

and uh. And so he had gone on to found a different company called Next and he decided to to swoop in and generally he was going to be hands off. He was going to leave the running of the company to cat Moll and to Smith. They were going to keep going. But he did have majority steak in the company. Yeah, absolutely, he owned seventy percent of the shares is a private company, not publicly traded, but seventy of the shares of the company, and then the Pixar employees owned the other thirty percent.

That will be important later in our episode. Yeah. He also decided that he wanted to really that Picks are up to be a computer hardware company, so all of that imaging stuff they were looking at unless the animation studio side, and we all know how that went eventually. Yeah.

So this was this was largely a practical kind of determination, the idea that computer animation was not quite at the level of sophistication where you could make, say a feature link film that you had people like Lasseter who wanted to do it. There were a lot of people at Pixar who wanted to do it, but they had all determined that as the technology stood at that moment, it just wasn't really possible. Yeah, but I mean they didn't give up animation entirely. Lester still made shorts which were

then used as um kind of just like a sales pitch. Yeah, like a sales pitch system exactly. They said, well, yeah, you want to know what's possible with this computer, here's some animation that we designed using this computer. So it's

kind of like a demo. But you know, obviously Laster being Laster, he wasn't gonna just do you know, a bouncing ball or something that would play a part of it, especially in the first one, and that would be uh Luxo Jr. Where we got the little lampy guy that you see jump on the eye on the Pixar and it smushes the eye and it's now the eye exactly. I said, I wait, I I but yeah, Alexo Jr. That's They would later go back and sort of remaster that, but that became one of the early pitch films that

they would use. And it also really kind of helped set Pixar's kind of aesthetic and tone, like there's this sort of cheeky humor that tends to be in Pixar films, and that was that was evident even as early as six when they designed this short. Yeah, it also got nominated for an Academy Award. Yes, it did not win

that Academy Award, but it was nominated. And then in nineteen eight, just two years later, uh, they got another Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Short Film, and that film was called Tin Toy t I N Yeah not t E N Yeah t I N toy and a little It's a Little Tin Soldier and that one did win the Academy Award. It's also another adorable film that got remastered later on, and it would become the inspiration for a future Pixar mega blockbuster hit. Yes. Uh, In nine,

we got another short from Pixar. Yeah, knick Knack. This is another one that got remastered and re released actually as one of the shorts that would come before a Pixar feature linked film. I don't think I've actually seen. This was a little snow globe with the snowman in it, and he's desperately trying to get over to a It's like a it's like a little a little souvenir choch key that you would buy at you know, Hawaii or something.

Oh yeah, I do remember that. Yeah, And so the whole thing is the snow man's just desperately trying to get over to this hula girl y. Yeah. So that was another super adorable short. And that was when some other very important people to the future of Pixar would join the company. This was nine. That's when Peter Doctor and or Pete Doctor I should say, and Andrew Stanton joined the company. So they're making all these animated shorts, are getting lots of praise for them, Yeah, but the

business side of things is still struggling. Yeah. They were not selling enough Pixar Image computers to pay off the costs of running business. And according to a lot of different stories, over the years, Steve Jobs collectively poured in about fifty million dollars of his own money to keep the company up float. And I would say, like, the average person doesn't even know that Steve Jobs was involved in Pixars. I mean, if you if you followed it early on, you would have heard about him being on

the board of directors and things like that. But yeah, he was very much the reason why the company was still. If it had not been for Steve Jobs pouring money into Pixar, it would not have survived. Yeah, well it looked like they may not have at that point because they started getting layoffs and downsizing and uh, you know, at the same time, Steve Jobs is also struggling with his company Next. Yeah, Next was not doing well either.

Next had created a very high end educational computer. It ran for like five thousand dollars a computer, so very expensive and no big surprise here. That meant that there weren't that many customers because not a lot of people are ready to drop five g s on a computer. And uh, even though people thought that, I think the elements of the operating system were really really innovative. So Jobs was having this issue where he's got one failing

business and then another one. That is he's just constantly pouring money into He sees the potential there, but the question is can you ride it out long enough for that potential to pay off? Well, he kind of didn't. He kind of didn't, So he sold off the computer hardware division of Pixar that everything that he had set them up to do with the imaging and and such,

he decided to get rid of it. Yeah, that was the part where he said, all right, we're gonna focus on the computer animation side, but we're going to not worry about producing actual computers anymore. And a company called Vicom Systems purchased the computer hardware business unit of Pixar for just two million dollars. That's not a huge turn on investment there, and Vicom in turn would end up going into bankruptcy just a year later. So it was not it was not the the the shot in the

arm the Vicom needed to succeed. Not to be confused with Viacom. Yes, no, this is Vicom v I c O M. That's not the same as the cable company. So the hardware divisions gone, So the animation division just flourished. No, no, not quite. They still we're not. You're ruining my happy ending. Well he's gotta have. You gotta have the low point in act too before you can have the happy ending in Act three. Al right, continue on, all right, So

here's the low point in act too. Pixar still wasn't making money and This led to another round of layoffs and half of Pixar was fired. Fifty of the employees were let go. One of those was co founder Alvi Ray Smith, who may have actually just left on his own after the changes, and he went on to co found another company called Altamira Software Corporation, which would later get acquired by Microsoft. He would stick around with Microsoft retire, So he's out of our story. And Steve Jobs was

not done. He knew that something big and major was going to have to change soon, and to do that, he felt he needed to have absolute control of the company. But here's the problem. He had a majority stake in the company, but of those shares didn't belong to him, they belonged to employees. Yeah, so he shut the company down. Yep, he effectively ended Pixar. Pixar Pixar was no more. He

closed the company. Is this one of those like Barrenstein Barrenstein issues where we think Pixar exists but it's actually in another reality, Jonathan, We'll have to answer that question after we come back from a quick break. Okay, so we're back and spoil alert. We know the Pixar comes back to because obviously the movies came out. Something had to happen, right, But it is true that that Steve Jobs he shut Pixar down. Then he decided to start a new company, a brand new company called rex Raxip.

Neither of those that was I was trying to say Pixar back backwards. No. He he named the company Pixar. Yes, and then he hired back all the people who had been with Pixar just before he shut it down. Yeah, but he didn't give them their shares back. No. No, he would be the only one to hold the shares. Now, if I were employee, I'd be a little upset. So yeah, he shut down the company and then reopened the company, and now it was wholly owned by Steve Jobs, and

the employees had no shares. Yes, And so then he decided to sell this company that he shut down or he considered it shut down and reopened. Yeah. He was thinking, well, now I owned the company, so no one can stop me, and I might be able to make back some of that fifty million dollars I've been pouring into Pixar for the last several years. So he started looking around at the possibility of another buyer. But while doing that, another

opportunity came through the door. Yeah, they landed a twenty one million dollar deal with Disney for Toy Story, not just Toy Story, for five films. So that was where the real issue would come in. The original deal was to create three films. You're right, that was the original deal. So the original deal with three films, and it was a twenty one million dollar like up front and then they would get a certain percentage of profits afterward, but it was a very small percentage, as we will see.

So it was definitely something that the company needed, Like the company needed that money. But if you look at that deal and you think twenty one million, that's like seven million dollars per film. Yeah, it's not. I mean when you think about what film budgets are, especially by today's standards, which of course, you know this was twenty years ago or so even then, like an animated film,

I mean, that's nothing. So it's it is one of those things where it's it was it opened the door to Pixar, but it could have also spelled the end of the company. So they decided that they would make this film about toys that was inspired by the Tin Toys short that they had made before and um this was possible largely because Disney was looking at the possibility of funding animated films that the company itself wasn't having

to animate. Yeah. Yeah, I mean they had success with that with The Nightmare before Christmas in Yes, so so there was some precedence for this where they the company Disney was saying, all right, well, we're still producing animation out of our our two studios, one was in l a and one was in in Florida, um at laced until Yeah. I remember going to the animation studio in Florida. It was great because you could actually I mean I remember seeing animated cells for things like a labin I

did do and it's great. You got to see like stuff before it would come out. And then they shut it down. Yeah. But all this time Jobs were still thinking about selling the company. Yeah, and then he thought, well, you know, I could sell it off, maybe even to Microsoft, which is interesting because you know, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and that sort of relationship. Yeah. They they've they've definitely been on either side of the friends enemies lines

what from each other. And so they decided he said, you know what, I'll wait, I'm gonna wait a little bit, see how this goes, because if these films turn out really well, it'll put me in a better position than I would have been had I just sold it. At this point, so toy story ended up slowly taking shape. I mean, this was the first time that most of these folks over at Pixar had ever tried to put together a feature link film, and not everything turned out

the way like the movie we got. It was very different from some of the concepts they had, which we will talk about towards the end of this um. So Lasseter directed it, and a whole bunch of people helped to write it, including Josh Sweden. Yep, he wrote one of my favorite lines, which is wind the frog. Yeah. Yeah.

So at this point, Steve Jobs to you know, as Jones has has decided to hold off and hold on to Pixar for a while, and he was named CEO, which was interesting because technically cat Moll was still calling all the shops. He was just kind of the face man. Yeah. The idea was that because Jobs was well known and was a recognized figure in business, that that would add enough legitimacy to Pixar to give it a stronger market position like it was all about and I hate this word,

but it was all about optics. Fun. Yeah, But what was fun was that toy Story. As we all know, big hit, yeah, enormous hit. It was actually funny story. I didn't even think about this when I was making the notes. That was the first film I ever saw with my wife in a theater when we were dating. It was and I had the convincer to go see it because she was like, I don't want to see

a kid's movie. She loved it when yeah, I had already seen it, and I was like, just trust me, just trust me, and she trusted me, and twenty two years later she still won't let me pick the movie. But here's the thing. Toy Store is a huge hit. So you think, Okay, now Pixar's rolling in. Yeah, they're they're past their their struggles. Except that that deal I talked about earlier, the twenty one million dollars for three films. Part of that deal was that Pixar's share of the

profits was tiny. It was around fifteen percent of the profits and everything else was going to Disney, so of the profits, right, So the movie's box office global box office was around three hundred sixty million dollars, which you know, again, you think about today and everyone's like, oh, if it doesn't hit a billion, I don't care. But back in the nineties, sixty million dollars, that's like huge take. Yeah,

things were much more reasonable. Yeah, yeah, dollars. It was a dollar movie and you could get a bucket of popcorn. But and a song in your hot no, um no. But they that's the thing is that that they only got fifteen percent, so Disney's taking the profits essentially, and so this was tough. But Steve Jobs had an idea, right, yeah, yeah,

he took the company public. He took Pixar public about Disney obviously, just a week after Toy Story premiered, which is great timing because everybody's really excited about this new Pixar movie, the first feature length animated film computer anim and so you know, perfect timing. Everybody wants in on

that well. And this is also at a lull for Disney's animation, right, Like Disney had its renaissance with Little Mermaid and Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast and then the other films like Pocahontas, Hunch Mulan, those were starting to be more of a lull, at least as far as audience response, now that we're not saying those movies aren't great. Mulan, I like, I like I like Mulan. I don't like either of the other two, but I like Mulan, And so that also helped. Like this was

so this was a great move for Steve Jobs. Like he was like, we're gonna put the company out, make it public right after this huge success. Everyone's really excited. It drives up the value of the company. Uh, it was the biggest I p O in even beat out Netscape, which was, you know, like the dominant web browser of Yep, we'll have to do an episode on that. But then, so the markets when they opened. Before they opened, the shares were estimated to open up at around twelve to

fourteen dollars. It actually opened at twenty two and it got up as high as forty six dollars at at its peak that first day of trading, then settled down to thirty nine dollars, still an incredible gain considering that they originally thought it was gonna be twelve bucks of share. And is this what made Steve Jobs a billionaire? Yes, this is how Steve Jobs went from being a rich millionaire to a super stinking rich billionaire overnight. Here I thought it was all Apple. No, no, it was actually

Pixar that really pushed him into the billionaire club. And at this point you probably think that, well, I bet some of those employees are said that they didn't have their shares anymore. I would be because they were no longer they weren't going to be billionaires. So the thing that this did allow Jobs to do is to go back to the bargaining table with Disney and say like, well, now Pixars a publicly traded company, we're valued very very high. Like,

our our valuation is incredibly high. Uh, let's talk about this deal. So the deal, the three picture deal, was scrapped and a new deal was put in place, and this time it was a five picture deal that would last over ten years, so five movies and ten years, and the profits would be split right down the middle fifty fifty between Disney and Pixar. So this made, you know, picks are obviously happier, but also it kind of shut up some analysts that were saying that Pixar shouldn't be

as value valued as high as it. Yeah, there were there were people who were questioning whether or not Pixar's value really was what it seemed to be in that in that week of the I p O. Because they were saying, people are really excited because you had one success, but until you have a proven series of successes, that doesn't really mean anything. Like you could you could have a freak home run and then you strike out the rest of the season. That was what they were saying.

But it wasn't It still wasn't fair. All fairy tale endings for Disney and Picks are yet. No, No, that was the early years were rough. So the next film to come out was A Bug's Life, which I really enjoyed. It's often kind of grouped in some of the lesser Pixar films. Then you got Toy Story two, which originally Michael Eisner, the CEO of Disney, wanted to go as a direct to video type of sequel. I would have been fine with that. Laster, however, was not. Yeah, I

love Toy Story too. I like Toy Story. I like Toy Story three better. No, I like Toy Story two more than three, but I like I like the original more than either of those. But you know what, I like more than either of those myself, What Monsters, Inc. And Finding Nemo, which came out next. Yes, so he had Bugs Life, Toy Story two, Monsters Ince Finding Nemo. But Steve Jobs and Michael Eisner were starting to have some problems. They were largely disagreeing over which films counted

towards that five picture deal. Yeah, because Eisner didn't want Toy Story two to go to the theaters, so he didn't want that to count towards the deal. Yeah. He essentially said it's a sequel. See girls don't count. Yeah, the five five picture deals just for totally original I p and Jobs is like, the heck, did you just say we didn't say five ideas. Yeah, we said five films.

So by the time Finding Nemo came out, word was getting around that Disney and Pixar had been holding talks about perhaps extending this agreement beyond those five pictures, but that the talks were not going well. And Steve Jobs actually released a statement and here's a quote quote after ten months of trying to strike a deal with Disney,

we're moving on. We've had a great run together, one of the most successful in Hollywood history, and it's a shame that Disney won't be participating in Pixar's future successes end quote sadness. But Disney was like fine, and they tried to establish their own Well, they did establish our on computer animation studio and they called it Circle seven, Yes, which never made a movie by the way. No, it

was intended to create sequels to the Pixar movies. Yeah, the idea being that Disney owns that intellectual property, so they could turn out as many sequels of Toy Story and Monsters in Finding Nemo as they wanted without Pixar's involvement at all. Um. Clearly that would have been rough, if not disastrous. Yeah. I think of some of the directive video sequels that Disney has done that have not been great. There have been something that have been really good.

Line King one and a half is great, but a lot of the a lot of the ones are not so hot, and so that raised a lot of concern. But while this argument was still going on, Pixar was still making movies for Disney, and the Incredibles and Cars had come out, and that meant that they were beyond the five picture deal at this point that they something

had to change. Cars came out in two thousand and six, and at that point Disney and picks Are we're able to settle their differences, and that's when Disney made the announcement that it would acquire Pixar for And this is amount, an amount that was astonishing when you think about how close picks Are was to going out of business just

a few years earlier, for seven point four billion dollars. So, yeah, here's the computer animation studio that was losing so much money that a millionaire had poured fifty million dollars of his own money in it just to keep it afloat. Now acquired for seven point four billion dollars, Jobs would end up joining the board over at Disney UM and was an even richer billionaire. Yeah, and you know, you might be thinking, I thought Disney made some computer animated

movies by themselves, and they did, but that's later on. Yeah, and it wasn't Circle seven. That was a division that they formed to do that, and ultimately Circle seven didn't do that in a gut kind of folded into other departments. So it was just one of those things where a company makes a division specifically to do something and then it just never works out, all right, So we want to end this episode of some fun facts. Yep. So here's some of the weird stuff about toy story. The

original version of Woody was not a pole string cowboy. No, he was a ventriloquist dummy, which is creepy. Yeah, that's what Michael Eisner said. He said, no one thinks ventriloquist dummies or anything other than creepy. I don't want to have a creepy character as the protagonist. Change it. I'm sure at one point they weren't, but now they are mainly creepy. It's it's kind of hard. Like most of

the Ventrolak was dummy movies. I've seen cast it in the form of like possessed dummy all you know, chucky, but that's all I've watched. Jeff Donoman not gotten scared, so that's you know, he scares the heck out of me. Anyhow, Next fun fact, Okay, well, buzz Lightyear was not originally buzz light you're His original name was Tempest, named after the classic arcade game. He also originally was aware that

he was a toy. I'm glad they changed that. Well, apparently the reason why they changed it was that when Tim Allen came in to read for the character, he was playing him with such bravado and such like completely earnest, earnest and not not knowing he was a toy, like treating it like he is a space ranger. That the these these the writers were all saying, no, wait, this

is way better. And that's when they made the choice to fear away from Buzz Lightyear, knowing that he was a toy um And and the last time fact is that Toy Starter was kind of it kind of had snow white syndrome. So they thought it would take eight animators and it needed thirty three yep. And they thought it would take fifty three processors and it took three hundred. Yeah.

So yeah, this is is funny because when we did our episode about Disney uh going into snow White, it was very much the same thing, right, Like Walt Disney drastically underestimated how many animators and how much time it was going to take, and and they underestimated the time to make Toy Story as well. Yeah, as it turned out, the reason why they had to go with those three processors was because rendering each of those frames just took so much time, and when you think about like a

frame is one of a second. So a full movie, a feature league movie, has thousands and thousands and thousands of frames, and when it takes hours to render a single frame, you then extrapolate that and you realize we will never finish making this movie. So obviously things have improved since then. But then also as technology improves, Pixar tries to push the envelope of how much it can

do with that technology. So it's it's constantly a seesaw right that they'll animators will come up with a new way to test the technology to its limits, new technology will come out and rinse and repeat. Yeah. Well, this was a really fun topic. Thank you Nathan for requesting it and and kind of hitting a love of both Jonathan and mine. Yeah, we loved going back and looking at this story and again, like it's really interesting to see how much of it was rooted not just an animation,

but in hardware. Yeah, yeah, which I always appreciate an aerial's eyes glaze over. No, I do appreciate it. Look, I like technology, This is just not the place for it. Okay, fair enough, entirely, Well, what is the place if people have suggestions to send us for future companies we should focus on. Well, that place would be our email. In our mail is feedback at the Brink Podcast Dot Show. Yeah, and Ariel reads every single one of those. Yes, please

please write in. I love hearing from you guys. It makes my week. She's so lonely. And if you want to visit our website, that's The Brink Podcast Dot Show. We have an archive of all of our past episodes, so if you've ever missed one, you can go check that out. You can search to see if perhaps the company you were thinking of has been covered already, and if it hasn't, then definitely reach out to us. Or if it has, but you feel like there needs to

be an update that's legit too. So that's that, and uh, that's it. I think until next time, I have been Jonathan Strickland and I've been aerial casting to infinity and be all business. On the Brink is a production of I Heart Radio and How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. E