Toy Story

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Speaker 12 Hello, dear listeners, 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.

Speaker 12 As always, I am Chris Winterbauer, joined by my co-host, Lizzie Bassett. Lizzie, how are you doing this afternoon?

Speaker 15 I'm doing great.

Speaker 15 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,

Speaker 15 what's your relationship with Toy Story and what was it like watching it again as a 36-year-old man?

Speaker 12 Saw it when I was a six-year-old man for the first time. And

Speaker 12 I loved it as a child.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 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...

Speaker 12 tipped its hat 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.

Speaker 12 Oh, this isn't just a movie for kids, it's a movie for grown-ups, too. And that made it an even more enjoyable experience.
It was then the first, we owned a lot of Disney films.

Speaker 12 I know this is not technically a Disney film, it's just, we'll, I'm sure, get into the distribution and stuff, but it's a Disney film, distributed by Disney.

Speaker 12 And so, we owned all of these Disney VHSs, right? They would unvault them from time to time. And then, Toy Story was the first film we ever owned on DVD.
Whoa.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 Rewatching 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.

Speaker 15 They're all great.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 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,

Speaker 12 I wasn't made by Mattel. It was a

Speaker 12 leveraged buyout of a smaller company.

Speaker 12 Just a little offhand. The Xenomorph references at the

Speaker 12 Pizza Planet, for example, Sid masking up before he does his surgeries. Like it's COVID 25 years in advance

Speaker 12 carpet did you recognize the carpet in his house the shining carpet and sid yeah exactly in sid's house um there's 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 laurie metcalf uh wallace sean john ratzenberger um 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.

Speaker 12 And I was doing our list, Lizzie, and I think this is

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 15 I think that's very fair.

Speaker 12 And you know what? Tim Allen is in two of my top five films we've covered so far because Galaxy Quest and this.

Speaker 15 Tim Allen plays a very important role in this. Well, not just as Buzz Lightyear, but as we're going to learn, he was instrumental to changing that character.

Speaker 12 So yet again, we all have to accept Tim Allen as the hero.

Speaker 12 I'm curious. I know a tiny bit about

Speaker 12 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?

Speaker 15 We're definitely going to talk about that.

Speaker 15 Yeah, I love this movie. I saw this in theaters.
Again, we were six years old when this came out.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 It's about toys, and yet it is one of the most human movies, I think, that Disney and Pixar have ever released.

Speaker 15 There's just, there's nothing bad about this movie.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 And the reason that that is so impressive is because you hinted at this, Chris, but this movie is an enormous technological leap forward.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 I'm looking at you, James Cameron Avatar. That doesn't happen that often.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 And I'm telling you this up front because in 2018, Lasseter 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 And again, these were allegations. There were no formal investigations as far as I know, nor were there any lawsuits or settlements.

Speaker 12 All right.

Speaker 15 So, as always, the details. Toy Story was released November 22nd, 1995.
It was directed by John Lasseter. Executive produced by Ed Catmull and Steve Jobs.

Speaker 15 Original story by John Lasseter, 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?

Speaker 12 Joss Whedon. That's right, Joss Whedon.

Speaker 12 Known feminist, Joss Whedon.

Speaker 15 He says so. That's right.
The cast includes Tom Hanks as Woody, Tim Allen as Buzz Lightyear, Don Rickles as Mr.

Speaker 15 Potato Head, John Ratzenberger as Ham, Jim Varney, R.I.P., as Slinky Dog, Wallace Sean as Rex, Annie Potts as Bo Peep, John Morris as Andy, Eric von Detten as Sid. I didn't know that.

Speaker 12 Brink, Soul Skater. That's right.
That's right. That's right.

Speaker 15 The man of my Disney youth.

Speaker 12 You gotta look before you leave.

Speaker 15 All right, the IMDb log line is, a cowboy doll is profoundly jealous when a new spaceman action figure supplants him as the top toy in a boy's bedroom.

Speaker 15 When circumstances separate them from their owner, the duo have to put aside their differences to return to him.

Speaker 12 That's right. Great.

Speaker 15 So the story of Toy Story kind of begins with John Lasseter. So let's talk about him.
In ninth grade, LA native John Lasseter had his sliding doors moment, as we often recognize.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 From this point forward, he was obsessed with all things animation and especially all things Disney.

Speaker 15 Now in 1975, he graduated from high school and was accepted into the California Institute of the Arts' first character animation program.

Speaker 15 If you don't know this, CalArts was founded in 1961 by Walt Disney and his brother Roy.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 We talked a a little bit more about this in the Beetlejuice episode because Tim Burton was another student there.

Speaker 15 Now, John Lasseter was one of the first students accepted into this program. It was an extremely tough program.

Speaker 15 And he loved Disney so much that Chris, he actually spent his summer working as a jungle cruise captain at Disneyland.

Speaker 12 I was just at Disneyland this Tuesday. Really? But for Nora's birthday.

Speaker 15 Did you go on jungle cruise?

Speaker 12 We did not go on jungle cruise. We were focused on all the princesses.
She met all the princesses. It was very exciting.

Speaker 15 Oh, that's amazing.

Speaker 12 Yeah, they were very sweet.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 Chris, do you have any idea why this was the case?

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 And I know it took a while for Katzenberg and Eisner to come in and kind of strong-arm things back into position, but

Speaker 12 that's about all the detail I have.

Speaker 15 That's about right. It sounds like executives were chasing more reliably profitable adventures like theme parks.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 12 Which is interesting because Sleeping Beauty was a departure artistically from the Disney movies that had come before it.

Speaker 12 The backgrounds in Sleeping Beauty are among the greatest ever made, I think, in any animated film ever. And

Speaker 12 the the artist responsible for those backgrounds, these just amazingly gorgeous, detailed, pastel-like backgrounds, his name's Avon Earle.

Speaker 12 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 office bomb.

Speaker 12 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 the it's on my list of movies to cover.
Okay, great.

Speaker 15 I won't take it from you. So animation at this point kind of felt like a dying art form.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 And especially when you consider what they're up against for the same age group during this bracket, which is what, Chris?

Speaker 12 Oh, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas.

Speaker 15 Yes, exactly.

Speaker 12 Yeah, it's like Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Star.

Speaker 15 Right. So Lasseter, as we said, had finally landed his dream job, but the magic was gone.

Speaker 15 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?

Speaker 12 It's the multi-time big-time flopper.

Speaker 12 Tron. Tron.
Tron is.

Speaker 12 Tron is flopping every time.

Speaker 15 Well, that's not true. Tron Legacy didn't flop.
It just didn't do gangbusters.

Speaker 12 That's true.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 Neither were big box office hits.

Speaker 12 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, et cetera.

Speaker 12 But not the performance that you would think would lead to multiple reboots, you know, every 15 or 20 years.

Speaker 15 And they keep rebooting it with Jared Leto.

Speaker 12 Why did you do that?

Speaker 12 I honestly don't know.

Speaker 15 Anyway, we could have an entire Tron episode covering every variation on Tron, but visually very cool.

Speaker 12 That's right.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 And this was, of course, during the light cycle sequence. It's pretty cool.
I know it looks like, you know,

Speaker 15 hokey and folky today, but it's, I still think it's very fun.

Speaker 12 It is cool.

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Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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?

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 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

Speaker 12 group of companies that was pioneering things like multi-plane animation, where you would have stacked backgrounds so you could push the camera through the backgrounds and get effects like parallax, etc.

Speaker 12 But the point is, with moving characters, you had to animate every single frame that they were moving.

Speaker 12 And a lot of early animation was done at a lower frame rate, right, than 24 frames per second in order to facilitate less

Speaker 12 drawing time, you know, downtime.

Speaker 15 And to be super clear, 24 frames per second means that you have to draw 24 hand-drawn frames for every second of the film.

Speaker 12 Yeah, I mean, there was a Miyazaki film. I think it might be The Boy and the Heron.
I can't remember. Recently, that has a crowd scene.
It's only a few seconds of all these people.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 That's right. And Disney infamously, I think, during the Dark Ages, had reused some animations in different movies.
For example, understandably. Right.
And

Speaker 12 the bare necessities dance in the jungle book is also used in,

Speaker 12 I believe,

Speaker 12 Robin Hood.

Speaker 12 They're dancing in Feminine. It's like the same animation.
They just swap out the animals. Nice.
So

Speaker 12 you got to find your shortcuts. Yes.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 You know, they're trying different things. They're trying layering backgrounds, but you cannot get it to look three-dimensional.

Speaker 15 And John Lasseter saw Tron and he was like, that is how you get it to look three-dimensional.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 12 He's like, probably inconsistently applied, you know what I mean, across each of them.

Speaker 15 They were each covering a couple of minutes tops, I think, and they were doing different things.

Speaker 12 And that's normal for big budget films now. You'll see multiple visual effects vendors, right? When you're trying to finish a film.

Speaker 12 But if you're, if every shot is VFX and every shot needs to match, that can become a really big problem.

Speaker 15 Yeah, definitely. So he figured he needed to be the person inside Disney advocating for this technology.

Speaker 12 Now,

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 But Chris, are you familiar with Moore's Law?

Speaker 12 Yeah, the number of transistors that you can fit onto a silicon chip doubles every 18 months.

Speaker 15 Whatever. Yes, that's exactly right.
I'm so annoyed.

Speaker 12 I worked for Intel.

Speaker 12 I know.

Speaker 12 I know. I'm still annoyed.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 It has to do with the processing power, specifically due to the number of transistors on microchips.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 Meanwhile, Lasseter back at Disney is like, Tron was fun, but it kind of felt like a flashy tech demo. He really wanted to use CGI to make images that looked real.

Speaker 15 So he collaborates with fellow Disney animator Glenn Keene on a hybrid short film that would combine hand-drawn animation with a CGI background.

Speaker 15 They got the blessing of Tom Wilhite, interestingly the head of Disney's live-action feature division, not the animation department, that's important.

Speaker 15 And they started creating a test based on Moray Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are. You can actually see this test on YouTube.
It's pretty cool.

Speaker 15 But as you may imagine, Chris, how do you feel like the animation department might have felt about John Lasseter's ambitions?

Speaker 12 Just wildly territorial and contentious. And

Speaker 12 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, like notoriously

Speaker 12 contentious and did not want these guys anywhere near the animation department and was going head-to-head head against Katzenberg.

Speaker 12 And so, again, and Disney War gets into this, the little fiefdoms inside the Magic Kingdom, pretty gnarly.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 12 Yeah.

Speaker 12 And I don't want to 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?

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 And so they're thinking, why are we going to change everything? Why are we going to reinvent the wheel?

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 It's entirely subsidized by these enormous investments by Silicon Valley.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 15 And rotoscoping is drawing an actual human figure as their movie is tracing it, right?

Speaker 12 Basically tracing. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 15 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 boss.

Speaker 12 He's the brave little toaster.

Speaker 15 It's so good. You and John Lasseter.

Speaker 12 He's so brave.

Speaker 15 So he pitched this idea to Ron Miller, who was then president of Walt Disney Productions and Walt Disney's son-in-law.

Speaker 15 And after hearing the pitch, Miller is 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.

Speaker 15 And Miller's like, so it's not cheaper and it's not faster?

Speaker 12 Goodbye, John. Yeah.

Speaker 12 Disney films were expensive. They remain expensive.

Speaker 15 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? Yeah.
I understand why he did this.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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 like textures, onto 3D models.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 12 From 1972?

Speaker 15 Yeah, it's really early. It's pretty crazy.

Speaker 12 No, I don't know.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 It's one of the earliest examples ever of computer animation.

Speaker 12 I'll check it out.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 12 Yeah, I assumed it was all just woodworking and there was no such thing as a computer in 1972. Yeah.

Speaker 15 So after college, he went to work at the New York Institute of Technology, heading up their computer graphics program.

Speaker 15 And in 1979, Catmull's work caught the eye of a newly minted blockbuster director who would become very reliant on CGI, Chris.

Speaker 12 George Lucas? Yeah. Who was famously courted very heavily by Disney in the mid-80s.

Speaker 12 They wanted him to come in and be there like, and because he had done Captain EO, he had helped on Captain EO with them, another theme park like tech demo ride.

Speaker 12 So, and he was very much in high demand. Little did they know he'd used all of his ideas.

Speaker 12 Just kidding.

Speaker 12 They were all George Lucas. No, he's great.

Speaker 15 So fresh off the first Star Wars, Lucas hires Ed Ed as VP of Lucasfilm's new computer graphics

Speaker 15 because he wanted to push filmmaking into new technological frontiers. That's exactly what they were doing.
So Catmull moved to California.

Speaker 15 He brought many of the researchers he'd been working with at NYIT, including Alvie Ray Smith, David D. Francesco, and later Ralph Guggenheim, basically everybody who ends up working on Toy Story.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 The goal was to create a computer with enough processing power to produce higher quality images.

Speaker 15 And Ed Catmull knew about Lasseter's talent as an animator, and he'd met him at these conferences, so he brought him on in December of 1983 to help with this short.

Speaker 15 The short was called The Adventures of Andre and Wally B. It was directed by Alvie Ray Smith.
It was shown at SIGGRAPH. I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 So in October of 84, Lasseter joined Lucasfilm as a full-time employee. And at this point, what happens is pretty cool.

Speaker 15 He's absorbing all the information that he can can from the computer graphics division about the software that's available.

Speaker 15 And they are also learning from him about how you actually make a movie, the animation, the art, the storytelling.

Speaker 15 But Chris, George Lucas' personal life is going up in flames because what was happening?

Speaker 12 He's getting a divorce.

Speaker 15 That's right. He's getting divorced from

Speaker 15 Marsha Lucas. And thanks to California's community property laws, this means he was basically losing half of his money.

Speaker 12 Yeah, wasn't it at least $50 million in this divorce?

Speaker 15 It's a lot.

Speaker 12 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

Speaker 12 American Graffiti and the trench run, you know, the Battle of Yamin at the end of Star Wars.

Speaker 12 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 kind of speak truth to power and say, George, I don't think this idea works.

Speaker 12 He had a ton of great ideas, and then he also had some bad ones

Speaker 12 from a story perspective. And so he lost that.
And I know

Speaker 12 Empire Strikes Back was really hard to make, and we're going to cover that next year. And he'd put his fortune at risk for that movie.
So, stressful time for George Lucas.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 But bottom line, he needed money real bad.

Speaker 15 So

Speaker 15 he put the computer division of Lucasfilm on the chopping block. And one by one, the departments are broken up.

Speaker 15 Layoffs dismantled the teams. But Ed Catmull and L.
V.

Speaker 15 Ray Smith, 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 A lot of times you'll see, oh, Lucas just sold the computer graphics division. That's not entirely true and doesn't give these guys enough credit for what they actually did.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 12 GM?

Speaker 15 Yeah.

Speaker 12 Weird.

Speaker 15 It is weird.

Speaker 15 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

Speaker 12 AutoCAD, like design, 3D rendering software. Yeah, I guess that makes sense.

Speaker 15 Yeah, there's a lot. Also, military uses.

Speaker 12 And then Halliburton said, yes, please.

Speaker 15 And Pixar is a very different company.

Speaker 12 Toy Story brought to you by Halliburton.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 Jobs had just been ousted by Apple and he was looking for his next business ventures.

Speaker 12 Pun intended.

Speaker 15 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 Catmole and Smith said no.

Speaker 15 They said that they would accept him as an investor. And Jobs, I think, kind of surprisingly said yes.

Speaker 12 I was going to say, that is shocking based on every story I've heard about Steve Jobs in the nation.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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'd been working on. This was a mistake.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 There is a mathematical function named after him.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 And by the way, it sold for $135,000. So it's not really, it's not really going to be in every home.

Speaker 12 No. But

Speaker 15 Lasseter 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.

Speaker 15 In late 1986, a short called Luxo Jr., featuring Lasseter's Luxo Desk Lamp, debuted at the SIGGRAPH conference. It was the first fully animated 3D short nominated for an Oscar.

Speaker 15 And Chris, I would like to show you this short.

Speaker 15 All right. Tell me what you see in that short in terms of what we get later.

Speaker 12 Well, it's amazing.

Speaker 12 The lighting's incredible because the light is being generated by the two lamps and there's like a very soft spotlight that can show off a few different lighting styles.

Speaker 12 The way the cord moves, like the sine wave as the cord follows the smaller lamp.

Speaker 12 I mean, in some ways, I think it, it's not that it looks better than Toy Story, but what's remarkable is that this is nine years before Toy Story.

Speaker 12 Because it looks like it should have been a year before Toy Story, not nearly a decade before Toy Story. It looks amazing.

Speaker 15 It looks amazing. And I also, again, I think it's really interesting that

Speaker 15 there's a very clear story here. It is.

Speaker 12 Yeah.

Speaker 15 Showing that.

Speaker 12 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.
Very good visual storytelling. It's really creative.

Speaker 15 And of course, that lamp, you can go watch this short. That lamp is the lamp that you see stomping out the eye in the Pixar logo.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 The new one's much better. And then it just says IKEA at the end.
It's a great commercial. That's amazing.
That's amazing.

Speaker 15 Well, so Lasseter's shorts were making waves, but Pixar was financially struggling.

Speaker 12 Right.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 I want Render Man in every home. So he's like running around trying to explain to people.

Speaker 12 It's not iMovie. 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.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 And meanwhile, Steve Jobs is like, imagine making a 3D film in your living room.

Speaker 15 Yes.

Speaker 12 And everyone's like, ah, I don't know how to turn on my camcorder, Steve.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 However, by the spring of 88, cash and morale were running very low.

Speaker 15 And according to Alvie 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.

Speaker 15 But he kept pouring money into Pixar.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 He asked for $300,000 straight out of Steve Jobs' own pocket to fund an idea that Lasseter had about toys called Tin Toy.

Speaker 15 Lasseter pitched it as a way to show off Renderman. At the end of the pitch, Jobs said, All I ask of you, John, is to make it great.

Speaker 15 And he did. It won the 1988 Oscar for Best Animated Short.
And what it did actually do was show Renderman's capabilities, giving Pixar a bit of the financial boost that it needed.

Speaker 15 Worth noting, Jobs had probably poured something like $50 million into Pixar at this point. In 1980s money.

Speaker 12 Yep. And Tin Toy's great, and you can see it online.
It's a fun, short film.

Speaker 15 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?

Speaker 12 That nerd? He's going to take our job.

Speaker 12 Yep.

Speaker 15 Disney CEO Michael Eisner and chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg were on a mission to coax Lassiter back, but he famously told Ed Catmull, I could go to Disney and be a director, or I can stay here and make history.

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Speaker 15 So Disney's like, fine. If we can't have have you, we still want to work with you.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 And Disney's like, fantastic-oh, we'll pay for it. And Pixar says, no.

Speaker 15 They were mad. They were mad that they'd been trying to poach John Lasseter for quite a while at this point.
So Pixar shopped the movie around, except absolutely nobody wanted this.

Speaker 15 And Disney is still sitting in the corner with Jeffrey Katzenberg and Michael Eisner rubbing their paws together saying, we'll take it.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 I believe he'd also just poured more of his money into this because I think right before this in 1991, he had actually bought Pixar outright from the employees.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 So it had to be an enormous smash hit for Pixar to gain anything financially.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 But Disney's like, go ahead, here's $30 million.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 And from the very beginning, the DNA of Toy Story was there. It's toys desperately wanting children to play with them.

Speaker 15 This desire is driving their hopes, fears, and actions, but the details were different.

Speaker 15 So Tinny, a naive one-man band, teamed up with his sidekick, a ventriloquist dummy, and they embark on a sprawling odyssey.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 12 Which is interesting because elements there

Speaker 12 do appear in later later installments of Toy Story.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 We will get into what the differences were, but the DNA is there from the beginning.

Speaker 15 So in mid-1991, John Lasseter 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.

Speaker 15 And also, I hate everything about it.

Speaker 15 So he and his team were like, Tinny's too sentimental. The ventriloquist dummy is creepy and weird.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 And Katzenberg's like, listen, I know what this children's movie about toys needs. More sarcasm, darkness, and edge.

Speaker 12 And you know what?

Speaker 12 A little bit true?

Speaker 15 Well, a little bit true.

Speaker 12 A little bit.

Speaker 15 He was right about the ventriloquist drumming 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

Speaker 15 that's right According to Alec, quote, Katzenberg really wanted it to have an edge.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 That first draft had characters breaking the fourth wall, cursing, and trying to kill themselves. It was a very dark script.

Speaker 12 So it's Deadpool. Yeah.

Speaker 15 It's Toy Story.

Speaker 12 Because Katzenberg's like, guys, we all know childhood, darkest time of your life, right?

Speaker 12 You all hated it. We all hated it.
Everyone's like, Jeffrey, no.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 So John Lasseter and Pete Doctor attended a three-day story seminar by Robert McKee. Yes.
And Chris, tell me about Robert McKee.

Speaker 12 Why the fuck are you wasting my time, my precious two hours with your movie? That is Brian Cox as Robert McKee in adaptation.

Speaker 12 Robert McKee, like the most famous screenwriting guru, arguably, of all time, right? As parodied and not parody or played in

Speaker 12 Spike Jones and Charlie Kaufman's adaptation by Brian Cox. What did McKee he the book he wrote was screenplay? Story.
Story by Robert McKee. Screenplay was the William Goldman one.
I can't remember.

Speaker 12 I think that's right.

Speaker 12 What had 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.

Speaker 12 Save the cat, like, you know, he wrote blank check, I think, was his

Speaker 12 most famous one.

Speaker 12 And so I don't think it's that McKee had a terrible number of credits, but he became known as the story guru

Speaker 12 in the industry.

Speaker 15 Many people would say that the criticism of Robert McKee's format is that it is a format. It's very formulaic.
There are rules that you're supposed to follow.

Speaker 15 And some people have argued that that sort of set people back in terms of storytelling.

Speaker 12 I think it's more like you need to understand these rules in order to break them. Exactly.

Speaker 12 That would be my suggestion.

Speaker 15 Yes. And also,

Speaker 15 they really provided the North Star that the Pixar team needed in order to understand like how to break this story.

Speaker 12 And you can see like they, there are, it's interesting. The first toy story.
It has enough momentum, it does not matter, but its story beats are a little odd in terms of how they time out.

Speaker 12 If you like actually sit down from a classic story perspective.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 They start thinking about what kind of toy would make a little boy stop playing with everything else. Yeah.
And of course, this is where we get Buzz Lightyear, who initially was a G.I.

Speaker 15 Joe sort of military action figure. And then they figured, what's cooler than an astronaut? Nothing.

Speaker 15 He was originally named Lunar Larry, then Tempest, and then Buzz Lightyear after who?

Speaker 15 Buzz Aldrin. Buzz Aldrin.
That's right.

Speaker 12 I was like, Jim Lightyear?

Speaker 15 Jimothy Lightyear. So throughout 1992, Pixar and the Disney-assigned writers, Joel Cohen and Alex Sokolov, churned out draft after draft.

Speaker 15 And finally, in January of 1993, Katzenberg approved the script for production, which allowed them to move forward with voice casting. So

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 Any guesses as to what this truly odd couple pairing would have been?

Speaker 12 Jeff Bridges is old Hollywood?

Speaker 15 No, but that would have been great. He actually wasn't old enough.

Speaker 12 He wasn't old enough. You know, Billy Crystal is the fast-talking new Hollywood.

Speaker 15 Interesting. No, Billy Crystal will come up, but I don't know.

Speaker 12 93, this was before Jim Carrey had really broken out. Was it Jim Carrey?

Speaker 15 Jim Carrey, yes.

Speaker 12 Oh, interesting. Oh, wow.
That would have been really interesting. Okay.
And then old Hollywood.

Speaker 12 It's Jack. Jack Lemon.
I don't know. It's really weird.

Speaker 15 Paul Newman. Can you imagine Paul Newman opposite Jim Carrey?

Speaker 12 Not as much the Jim Carrey, but I could see Paul Newman as Woody. To me, like, I think there is a warmth and

Speaker 12 elasticity to Tom Hanks' voice that is perfect for this role. But I think

Speaker 12 Newman feels like a better fit to me than Jim Carey, a little bit in a way, in a sense because, like, Jim Carrey fits the way that Buzz was initially written. There we go.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 15 Very good. So, the way that Buzz was initially written, he was an asshole.
He was like very full of himself, very

Speaker 15 uh, very not what you get in the final product. The reason that we don't get this pairing, they could not afford these two.

Speaker 12 Oh, yeah. Wasn't Carrie getting like 10 million a movie or something in the 90s?

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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 93-ish.

Speaker 15 He would have likely filmed Ace Ventura, The Mask, and Dumb and Dumber, but none of them had come out. They're all 94.

Speaker 12 That was his big year. Oh, okay.
Yeah, that was the year of Carrie.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 And besides, it didn't matter because John Lasseter always had one person in mind for Woody, and that was Tom Hanks.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 12 I know that's why he did Monsters Inc. eventually.
It is. Yeah.

Speaker 15 Yeah. Yeah.
He's so good in that. He is.
I love that one.

Speaker 15 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 what's so brilliant about it is that it brings out something so negative in Woody in such a fun way.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 15 Yes.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 12 Yeah, you'd have to. And it works, it works so well.
And then at the end, when he says falling with style, you get that payoff. It's so good.
It's so effective.

Speaker 15 It makes me cry when Buzz tries to fly and can't get out the window.

Speaker 12 It's and his arm falls off. It's terrible.

Speaker 12 Just what a beautiful fall from grace that mirrors Woody's, right? He went,

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 15 Well, we may have someone else to thank for that.

Speaker 12 So we'll get there.

Speaker 15 But they've got their Woody and Buzz. Tom Hanks and Tim Allen recorded early voice tests to help develop the story reels.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 And to give you an idea of the process that they were undergoing as they were writing this, here is Joe Ramft, who is the head of story, explaining.

Speaker 16 Here's like the first year on the film was like.

Speaker 16 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 better.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 12 And this, the room where they would screen it at Disney was known as the sweatbox, which we learned in Emperor's New Groove.

Speaker 12 And Katzenberg's just crushing diet codes as he's giving them note after note.

Speaker 12 It sounds so hard, but it also sounds so fun. It does.

Speaker 15 It does. But it just takes such a long time that this would really be exhausting at a certain point.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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 Blu-ray.

Speaker 15 So you can watch it. By November of 1993, it was time to show Disney what they had.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 So on Friday, November 19th, Pixar's creative team walked into the meeting with a pit in their stomach.

Speaker 15 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 these reels.

Speaker 15 They forced Pixar to shut down production and pulled the plug on Toy Story with immediate effect. Why?

Speaker 15 They took Katzenberg's notes a little too well. The story reels featured a really cruel,

Speaker 15 just

Speaker 15 mean, horrible Woody throwing Buzz out of the second story window intentionally.

Speaker 12 You can see some of these on YouTube.

Speaker 15 You can see them. He is verbally abusive.

Speaker 12 And he's even, the size difference is even more exaggerated. He's like enormous and Buzz is tiny.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 And again, yeah, you can watch this on YouTube.

Speaker 12 It's not good.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 17 Jeffrey said, well,

Speaker 17 why is this so terrible to me in the hallway? I said, well, because it's not their movie anymore.

Speaker 17 It's completely not the movie that John set out to make.

Speaker 12 Everything kind of fell apart at that point, you know.

Speaker 15 Credit to Schumacher, who was on the Disney side of it, you know, being able to understand, like, this is why.

Speaker 15 So John Lasseter begged for another chance. And surprisingly, Disney was like, okay, but you get two weeks to turn this around.

Speaker 15 So the Pixar team starts working day and night, and Disney drafted in a young writer to help them out. Who was it, Chris?

Speaker 12 Joss Whedon. Josh Whedon.
Josh Schweden.

Speaker 15 Yes, Joss Whedon. And according to Whedon, 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.

Speaker 15 The concept was gold. Now, according to Whedon's biographer Amy Pascal, one of his biggest contributions was making Buzz unaware of the fact that he is a toy.

Speaker 12 Brilliant idea. It's like the whole movie.
That's great. Well, that's where all the conflict, because then the conflict stems

Speaker 12 not from necessity, it is still a place of cruelty. And Woody wants to reveal that to him, but you also kind of understand exactly.

Speaker 12 You understand the frustration.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 12 You get dramatic irony, comedic irony. It's great.
Yeah. It motors so much of this movie.

Speaker 15 It breaks the whole story, basically.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 It's more that you're sad to see him making those decisions because you know he's better than that kind of.

Speaker 15 And now that they've been allowed to do what they were trying to do the whole time, Katzenberg loved it. So thanks, Jeff.
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Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 And Joss Whedon, who'd been brought in for what was supposed to be a three-week job, actually ended up staying for six months before leaving to pursue other projects.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 Chris, what happened?

Speaker 12 Frank Wells passed away. Yep.
Katzenberg assumed he was going to be able to move into the number two position under Eisner. That's right.

Speaker 12 Eisner, I don't know if he delayed the decision, and that's what pissed off Katzenberg or just generally overlooked him. But Katzenberg did not get the position he felt he was promised.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 12 A lot of people think that Eisner basically believed, well, Wells isn't going anywhere. So I'll just say, sure, you can take over.
And then Wells dies in a helicopter crash.

Speaker 12 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, hey,

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 And 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.

Speaker 15 So Katzenberg out of Toy Story at this point. But Toy Story keeps pressing forward.
They hired Ralph Eggleston as the art director.

Speaker 15 He had just finished working on Fern Gully, and he really had like a painter's eye for color and light.

Speaker 15 He hired visual artist Bill Cohn to help shape the film's aesthetic.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 12 You got to simulate the sun, you know, in the same way that if you were lighting a sound stage, you have to simulate the sun, you know, coming in through the window. Right.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 12 And this was like morph cut technology. Yeah.
If you, if you, did you ever see Lizzie, that very famous music video, the Michael Jackson song, Tyra Banks is in it.

Speaker 12 And as the head moves, it switches to a new actor.

Speaker 15 No.

Speaker 12 It's a really cool cool music video. It kind of showed the potential of the Morph Cut technology.

Speaker 12 Cool.

Speaker 12 It holds up today, in my opinion. It looks amazing.

Speaker 15 What's the song?

Speaker 12 It's Black or White, which brings up a

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 And he says, like, no, I'm listening to this. No, it was Macaulay Culkin.
But guess who directed Black or White?

Speaker 15 I don't know.

Speaker 12 It's a director we've covered whose on-set decisions were arguably the cause of a horrible accident that resulted in the deaths of three actors.

Speaker 15 John Landis. That's right.
I forgot about that.

Speaker 12 Wow. Because he'd done Thriller back in 83.
That's right. Damn.
All right.

Speaker 15 So this technology. allowed for much faster manipulation of characters expressions as well.

Speaker 15 And 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.

Speaker 15 By 2019 in Toy Story 4, can you guess how many Woody had?

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 15 I'll say 2,000. I don't know.
7,000.

Speaker 12 Wow. Yeah.

Speaker 15 Also, let's talk about the toys that they chose for this.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 12 Absolutely.

Speaker 15 Now, the toys they chose were a function of nostalgia.

Speaker 15 Obviously, these were toys that, you know, Lasseter and the team had grown up playing with, but they were also toys that worked within the limitations of the software they were using.

Speaker 15 Organic materials were very hard.

Speaker 12 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

Speaker 12 the one thing that does still look a little odd now to me is the human characters.

Speaker 15 The humans and the dog.

Speaker 12 And the dog don't hold up quite as well, but the toys do.

Speaker 15 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?

Speaker 12 Do they show up in...

Speaker 15 One of them does show up in later toy stories.

Speaker 12 A teddy bear?

Speaker 12 Okay. But I love the teddy bear in Toy Story 3.

Speaker 12 So good. I don't know.
Viewmaster?

Speaker 15 No. It is Barbie, who of course would later be.

Speaker 12 Yeah, also Toy Story 3 and 2.

Speaker 15 Yes. And G.I.
Joe.

Speaker 12 Okay.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 12 That sounds amazing.

Speaker 15 I know. But Mattel was like, no way.

Speaker 12 Can't make a har if you want to live. Yeah.

Speaker 15 So first of all, they were afraid this movie was going to bomb.

Speaker 15 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?

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 So the script called for this Toy Soldier to be blown up, which you do see in the final.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 12 But you know what's funny? So I had those little green plastic soldiers as a kid.

Speaker 15 Oh, no, it's the one that Sid straps to a rock.

Speaker 12 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 is that was the evolution of the tin soldier, right?

Speaker 12 From earlier. So it feels like more of a classic toy than a G.I.
Joe.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 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?

Speaker 12 Or a really modern-looking Barbie, would they draw attention away from Buzz and the impact that he would have on the story as he's introduced?

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 12 I mean, the real toys that are missing in terms of the zeitgeist, this was the heyday of Beanie Babies.

Speaker 12 Well, Beanie Babies would be, I think, a hair after this, but Star Wars merchandising, right? This was when there were more Star Wars toys on the planet than anything else at this point in time.

Speaker 4 That's true.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 That's also the reason Andy doesn't have a dad.

Speaker 12 Yeah.

Speaker 15 They just didn't want to animate a dad. So he's not there.

Speaker 12 Also,

Speaker 12 all of Andy's friends at the birthday party are Andy.

Speaker 12 Like if you watch that scene and like you look at the overhead shot, you're like, I think they changed the hair, but those are all just Andy's like copy and pasted over and over again.

Speaker 15 That's also why all of the clothes had to be very tight-fitting

Speaker 15 and why hair was either short or tied back very tight, like Andy's mom.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 15 Even with tools like Menv and Render Man at their disposal, animating Toy Story was a serious grind. Some fun facts about Animating Toy Story.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 12 A maquette, I believe they're called. Oh.
They do them a lot in Lord of the Rings as well. It's an intermediate stage.
Nice.

Speaker 15 Now for each eight-second shot, it could take a week just to fit the facial expressions to the audio.

Speaker 15 An animator studied videos of Hanks and Alan in the recording booth to pick up their facial expressions when pronouncing dialogue or making certain sounds or letters.

Speaker 15 Every leaf and blade of grass had to be created created individually. One of the most complicated sequences for Pixar's animators.
Can you guess what it was, Chris?

Speaker 12 Hmm.

Speaker 15 Sequences. It's one of my favorites in the whole movie in terms of what the animation looks like.

Speaker 12 It's not all the aliens inside of the... No.
No.

Speaker 12 The claw. I love that one.
The claw.

Speaker 15 The claw decides.

Speaker 15 No, it's the little green army men at Andy's birthday party and the way they're navigating.

Speaker 12 It's so good.

Speaker 15 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

Speaker 15 trying to figure out how you would move your feet.

Speaker 12 Yep.

Speaker 15 There was a digital painter named Tia Crater 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.

Speaker 15 So adding scuffs, scratches, adding dirt. What a fun job.

Speaker 12 Yeah. And it also is story point, you know, when when Andy's, the writing of Andy's name on his foot, you know, is wearing off.

Speaker 12 And I love that the handwriting's a little worse than with Buzz's because Andy's grown older. It's such a, it's the little subtle details that are so well done.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 By late 1994, Toy Story had moved into post-production.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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?

Speaker 12 It's not a musical.

Speaker 15 That's right.

Speaker 12 Yeah, that's what I was wondering. It's interesting because all the Disney, all the successful Disney Renaissance films were musicals.
Yep.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 15 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 music.

Speaker 12 Could you imagine Tim Allen just breaking into song?

Speaker 15 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 Montan, stepped up with a compromise.

Speaker 15 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?

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 Chris, who is it?

Speaker 12 Randy Newman. You got a friend in me.

Speaker 12 But I think that's exactly what he sounds like. You got a friend in me.
Yeah, there we go.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 12 Okay, who did Steve Jobs have in mind?

Speaker 15 Bob Dylan.

Speaker 12 Hand the toes went down.

Speaker 12 That's what I've been.

Speaker 12 I mean, listen, to be fair. Could it have worked? Like Bob Dylan, incredible musician.

Speaker 12 Sure, maybe, but I don't think it's.

Speaker 15 It's distracting, I think.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 I actually think Bob Dylan probably would have been fine for adult viewers, and it would have been a little alienating for kids.

Speaker 15 Yes, I think that's very true. Everyone agrees with you, and they're like, Steve, shh, no, like, don't, A, we can't afford him, and B, no.

Speaker 12 Steve Jobs is so weird. I know.

Speaker 12 He's a weird man.

Speaker 15 Render man in every home and toy story, a musical as scored by Bob Dylan.

Speaker 15 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 Awakenings.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 He struggled pretty hard to write the score, but he worked 12-hour days from seven in the morning until late at night. And he later said Toy Story was the hardest thing he had ever written.

Speaker 15 But we got, I think, one of the best original songs ever out of it, You Got a Friend and Me,

Speaker 15 which everyone agrees played a pretty enormous part in the commercial and critical success of Toy Story. And also, it just like

Speaker 15 that 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.

Speaker 15 He's entirely additive to this movie.

Speaker 12 And it also became a really nice

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 Yeah. And that song that 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.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 15 It 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.

Speaker 15 There were billboards, buses, TV ads, grocery store displays, fast food tie-ins. They built a 30,000-square-foot Toy Story fun house next to the El Capitan Theater in Hollywood.

Speaker 15 I wish we could have seen that. It was three stories tall.

Speaker 12 And this is where partnering with Disney really becomes an advantage. Yes.

Speaker 15 On November 22nd, 1995, Toy Story hit theaters.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 12 And that's basically a 10x multiplier off of its opening weekend or opening five days. That's amazing.
Yeah. Because it had incredible legs.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 And at the end of the first day of trading, their stock was at $39 a share. That gave Pixar a market value of close to $1.5 billion.

Speaker 15 It was the largest IPO of the year, and it turned Steve Jobs into a a billionaire. Toy Story was nominated for three Academy Awards: Best Original Screenplay, Best Original Score.

Speaker 15 By the way, the score is beautiful in addition to the song.

Speaker 12 Oh, it's great. The music in general is fantastic.
It's really incredible. Yeah.

Speaker 15 And of course, Best Original Song for You've Got a Friend in Me.

Speaker 12 Excuse me. You've Got a Friend in Me.

Speaker 12 That is a

Speaker 12 Randy Newman after being shot with a tranquilizer bar.

Speaker 15 It won. Do you know how many it won, Chris?

Speaker 12 No, I don't.

Speaker 15 It won zero.

Speaker 12 Oh.

Speaker 12 Yeah.

Speaker 15 It was recognized by a special achievement award. And the song that won Best Original Song over Randy Newman that year, it's good.

Speaker 15 I don't think it's as good as You Got a Friend in Me, but it was Colors of the Wind from Pocahontas.

Speaker 12 It is a great song.

Speaker 15 It's great.

Speaker 15 I still think this one's better.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 Toy Story certainly has held up better than Pocahontas, I think, even though I do think that movie is really well animated. So, yeah, I have to agree.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 It also, of course, served as the blueprint for Pixar's enormously successful storytelling model.

Speaker 15 It launched collaborators like John Lasseter, Ed Catmull, Andrew Stanton, and so many more, Pete Duck Dart,

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 12 Eventually.

Speaker 12 Disney eventually paid. What's interesting is Disney eventually bought both Lucasfilm and Pixar for billions and billions of dollars.

Speaker 15 And what's wild is they had it.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 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?

Speaker 12 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

Speaker 15 they had it like yes they had 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

Speaker 12 so they didn't buy it but they kept making tron yeah what the hell with jared leto why

Speaker 15 i i am convinced like how did that happen Does he have something on somebody?

Speaker 12 I think so. I think so.
Or there's just like a couple really big 30 seconds to Mars fans inside of Disney.

Speaker 15 Yeah, that one's a real head scratcher. I don't know how that happened, but I don't either.
Whatever. We'll cover it at some point.
All right. That wraps up our coverage of Toy Story, Chris.

Speaker 12 What went right?

Speaker 12 Ah, so many things.

Speaker 12 I have a controversial what went right. I do not condone this person's behavior in much more recent years.

Speaker 12 But after you explained this whole story to me, I got, I guess I'll give like a double controversial what went right. I think that Joss Whedon and Tim Allen cracked the Buzz Lightyear character.

Speaker 12 And I just don't think Toy Story works without it. Like,

Speaker 12 in so many ways, Buzz Lightyear kind of becomes the heart of the movie in the back half.

Speaker 12 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

Speaker 12 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 keystone that was missing at the top of the arch, in my opinion.

Speaker 12 So I will, I give it to both of them because they both, it seems, cracked that character. Yeah.

Speaker 12 I agree with you. All right.
Well,

Speaker 15 I'm going to, I'm going to give it to somebody who 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.

Speaker 12 No, that's fine.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 Every single person who worked on this movie is what went right. However, Pixar would not exist.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 So I will give it to Steve Jobs. Without Steve Jobs, we don't get Pixar.

Speaker 12 And I think, as we've learned,

Speaker 12 if he really wanted something, he was not afraid to do basically anything to make it happen. And so clearly.

Speaker 12 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 certainly. And Jobs listened, which,

Speaker 12 you know, kudos to him because it doesn't sound like he always did that.

Speaker 15 Well, he may have been taken down several pegs after being ousted from Apple, but yeah, sure.

Speaker 12 Yeah,

Speaker 12 I think it's a good choice.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 15 Something else that's 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.

Speaker 15 There were some pretty big animation breakthroughs in Shrek.

Speaker 12 Yeah, especially the number of like blades of grass they could render and the dust and all of that. It was the organic texture.

Speaker 15 It was the texture.

Speaker 12 Exactly. Yeah.
The breakthrough they did on fur was amazing on Shrek.

Speaker 15 He got the last laugh in the end.

Speaker 12 Yes. Well, 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.

Speaker 15 It was really fascinating and just exciting to learn about, you know, the beginnings of Pixar in addition to this movie.

Speaker 12 Well, next week, we are covering another animated film. We're doing a little back-to-back.

Speaker 12 And it's another director that was really established by animation in the 90s.

Speaker 12 It is a traditional, somewhat traditionally animated 2D cell animation film, although there's some interesting things about the way it was animated.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 And And I'm really excited for us to discuss that tear jerker, which is probably going to crack my top five films.

Speaker 12 We have a couple movies towards the end of this year that are going to crack my top five films.

Speaker 15 I've never seen it.

Speaker 12 Prepare to cry.

Speaker 15 Okay, I'll get my tissues ready.

Speaker 12 Get your tissues ready. Prepare to cry.
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Speaker 12 Don't do me like that.

Speaker 15 Okay, I'll do my best.

Speaker 12 Adam

Speaker 12 Moffitt, Adrian Pink,

Speaker 12 Angeline, Renee, Cook, Ben Schindleman, you got a friend in me. Blaze Ambrose, Brian, Donahue, Brittany, Morris, Brooke, Cameron Smith,

Speaker 12 C. Grace B

Speaker 12 Chris Leal Chris Sucker David Frisco-Lanton D.B. Smith I love LA Darren and Dale Cockling Don Scheibel Ellen Singleton

Speaker 12 M. Zodia Evan Downey Felicia G

Speaker 12 Film It Yourself

Speaker 12 Frankenstein

Speaker 12 Galen and Miguel, the broken glass kids. Grace Potter, I'm so sorry for this.

Speaker 12 Half Greyhound, James McAvoy,

Speaker 12 Jason Frankel, Jen Mastramarino, JJ Rapido, Jory Hillpopper,

Speaker 12 Josie Salto.

Speaker 15 Sorry about that, it's Jose.

Speaker 12 Kay Canaba, 8 Elrington,

Speaker 12 Kathleen Olson, Amy Elgeschlager McCoy,

Speaker 12 Lonroulat, Lena L. J.

Speaker 12 Lydia Howes, Matthew Jacobson,

Speaker 12 Michael McGrath,

Speaker 12 Nate the Knife,

Speaker 12 Nathan Santano,

Speaker 12 Rosemary Southward, Roll Ger,

Speaker 12 Sadie, Just Sadie, Scott Oshida, Soman Chinani, Steve Winterbauer, Suzanne Johnson, the Provost family, the O sound like O's. You got a friend in me.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 And if not, we will see you on Monday for the Iron Giant.

Speaker 12 Bye.

Speaker 12 Go to patreon.com/slash what went wrong podcast to support what went and check out our website at whatwentwrongpod.com.

Speaker 12 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.