How Pixar Almost Lost ‘Toy Story 2′ Before Its Release: Video

COMMENTS (14)

• This is VERY old news, this is an extra from one of their bluray releases, I think from the TS2 release, it’s been available for quite some time to anyone who bought the BD…

  Comment by Chris — Saturday May 19, 2012 @ 8:54pm PDT  Reply to this post

  • Thank you for alerting us to the fact that a story about a thirteen year old movie is not breaking news. I’m sure the 1-2% of the population that bought the Blue Ray of TS2 are outraged that they clicked on this link. Maybe there’s some other useful information you could provide, like “FIRST”?

    Comment by Kerry Maxwell — Sunday May 20, 2012 @ 5:44am PDT  Reply to this post

  • Who cares if it’s “VERY old news” that’s an extra on the DVD release? What’s that got to do with anything? What, is Deadline only for breaking news and interesting stories that haven’t been told before?

    I’ll bet that most people who saw the story here had never known of it before.

    You win the award for Most Pointless Comment of the Weekend.

    Comment by Wannabe — Sunday May 20, 2012 @ 11:12am PDT  Reply to this post

    • Why are you two flipping out on this guy? He didn’t go crazy. He wasn’t mean. He just made an observation. The very first thing I thought when I saw this article was, “How strange? Deadline posting a Toy Story 2 DVD bonus feature from several years ago as a news item.” For goodness sake, they did start the article off with “A tipster alerted us…” It’s kind of amusing. And yes, the title of this site is “Hollywood Entertainment Breaking News.” So, I’m going to go ahead and nominate “Wannabe” and “Kerry Maxwell” for “Most Pointless Comment of the Weekend.”

      Comment by JohnT — Sunday May 20, 2012 @ 3:30pm PDT  Reply to this post

• Correction: Narrated by Danny Pudi.

  Comment by Abed — Saturday May 19, 2012 @ 10:22pm PDT  Reply to this post

• don’t care if it’s a retold story – it bears repeating. And not to be too wisened projectionist on yo asses but this would never have had happened if someone had put this thing on some Kodak. But Kodak is not cool now so digital knows best – even in it’s temporary as hell condition.

  Comment by digital-is-an-etch-a-sketch — Sunday May 20, 2012 @ 2:48am PDT  Reply to this post

  • You can’t put an unfinished, yet to be rendered CGI film on kodak in any way shape or form. It’s the raw digital files that were lost, not finished elements.

    Comment by Coltrane — Sunday May 20, 2012 @ 10:19am PDT  Reply to this post

• For the sysadmins involved in the failed backups, this is a pretty serious if not career-ending move.. The phrase “You’ll never work in this town again!” is particularly apropos.

  Of course, Pixar could have cheaped out on their backup and storage infrastructure, and this is the way that cheap bastards learn why you spend money on a robust backup architecture.

  Comment by Dr. Kenneth Noisewater — Sunday May 20, 2012 @ 9:03am PDT  Reply to this post

• I worked on a film very recently where this same situation happened on a smaller scale. A really vital folder containing a library of core files utilized by everyone in my department was accidentally deleted by someone who meant to type in the command to review the files instead of delete them (the command differed by only one letter). There was lots of panicking. Deleting that one folder effectively shut down my department until a backup could be recovered overnight off of magnetic tape.

  It’s rather surprising that the error presented above still happens. Studios need to be very careful about making sure completed shots and archived files are set to “read only.”

  Comment by Some VFX Worker — Sunday May 20, 2012 @ 9:41am PDT  Reply to this post

• Saved by a bootleg…

  You could flip the story and wonder what would have happened to the production if a burglar broke into her house and stole the computer.

  Although, yeah, I realize it was an early version of the project.

  Comment by Ironic — Sunday May 20, 2012 @ 12:05pm PDT  Reply to this post

• It’s not that they cheaped out on backups, the two backups failed. Pixar were lucky that an employee (no doubt illegally) took an entire backup home to work on albeit at a earlier state.

  Comment by Mark — Sunday May 20, 2012 @ 4:27pm PDT  Reply to this post

• That’s pretty amusing. Good thing she copied the film to her computer… although I wonder whether or not she was supposed to. I’m sure she didn’t get in too much trouble, though! haha

  Comment by Michael. C. Thompson — Sunday May 20, 2012 @ 5:27pm PDT  Reply to this post

• I wish they had lost “Toy Story 3″!

  Comment by CynicalCritic — Monday May 21, 2012 @ 2:21pm PDT  Reply to this post

• Oh gosh, if Toy Story 2 was never released, I would’ve unknowingly been leading an incomplete life. Seriously.

  -90′s child

  Comment by B — Monday May 21, 2012 @ 6:10pm PDT  Reply to this post