This meme is based on a real (and pretty legendary) story in animation history about how Toy Story 2 was almost lost forever.
Let’s take a deeper look:
What the meme shows
- Top panel: Captioned “Pixar accidently deleting 90% of Toy Story 2”.
- This represents the real-life disaster when Pixar accidentally erased most of the film’s files during production.
- Bottom panel: Captioned “The animator with backups on her home computer”.
- This refers to the fact that the movie was only saved because one Pixar employee had a copy of the film’s files on her personal computer at home.
The Real Story of the Toy Story 2 Data Loss
- In 1998, Pixar was working on Toy Story 2, which was deep in production.
- One day, someone at Pixar accidentally entered a command that started systematically deleting files on Pixar’s servers.
- The command was something like rm -r / (remove recursively from the root directory).
- At first, people didn’t notice, but suddenly characters, models, and whole scenes started vanishing from their computers.
- Within minutes, 90% of the film was gone, all the animation, character models, and assets that the team had been working on for years.
- Pixar immediately tried to restore from backups.
- Unfortunately, the studio’s official backup system was broken, it hadn’t been properly saving files for months.
- That meant they had nothing usable to restore the film with.
- The movie was essentially doomed… except for one incredible stroke of luck.
The Hero: Galyn Susman
- Pixar animator Galyn Susman, who was supervising work on the movie, had just had a baby and was working a lot from home.
- Because of this, she had a copy of the entire film’s files on her home computer so she could keep working remotely.
- When the disaster happened, Pixar rushed to her house, carefully transported her computer, and used her copy to restore the film.
- Thanks to her, Toy Story 2 was saved, otherwise it might have been completely lost, and we never would have seen it.
Aftermath
- Pixar learned its lesson: they completely overhauled their data storage and backup systems after this near-tragedy.
- Toy Story 2 went on to be released in 1999 and became a huge success.
- This story has since become a famous “cautionary tale” in the tech and film world about the importance of backups.
But there’s More…
The “almost lost forever” part is only half of the chaos behind Toy Story 2.
The other half is that Pixar actually scrapped and remade the entire film even after they recovered the deleted files.
Here’s the story:
The Original Plan
- Toy Story 2 wasn’t supposed to be a big theatrical sequel.
- Initially, Disney wanted it as a direct-to-video movie, like a cheap sequel you’d find in the bargain bin.
- Pixar reluctantly agreed, and a small team started working on it.
Growing Ambitions
- As production went on, Pixar leadership realized the movie was too good for straight-to-video.
- They decided it should be a full theatrical release, but that raised the stakes enormously.
- The problem? The version they had already built wasn’t up to the quality Pixar wanted on the big screen.
The Decision to Remake
- By mid-1998 (less than a year before release), Pixar’s directors looked at what they had and decided:
“This isn’t good enough. We need to redo almost the entire movie.”
That meant rewriting the script, redoing major scenes, and reanimating everything, basically restarting the whole film.
Crunch Time
- The team now had only about 9 months to remake an entire feature film.
- Animators worked brutal hours, sometimes 100-hour weeks.
- People slept at their desks, skipped meals, and burned out. Some animators later said it was one of the hardest times of their lives.
Injuries & Lasting Effects
- The extreme overwork led to serious health problems for some staff.
- Famously, one Pixar employee even developed carpal tunnel so badly that they had to have surgery.
- This crunch culture became a big cautionary tale in the animation industry.
The Final Release
- Despite all the chaos, the accidental deletion, the rescue from Galyn Susman’s home computer, and the complete remake, Toy Story 2 made it to theaters in November 1999.
- It was a massive critical and commercial success, considered one of the best sequels ever made.
Why This Is Wild
- Most films struggle to survive one disaster.
- Toy Story 2 survived two massive catastrophes:
- Accidentally deleting 90% of the movie.
- Throwing out the recovered version and rebuilding it almost from scratch.
And it still ended up a masterpiece. Pixar’s reputation for quality was cemented largely because they refused to release something subpar, no matter the cost.
More about Pixar:
Leave a Reply