Toy Story 2 saved by mum on leave when accident nearly wiped the entire film
Pixar had quite a pickle on their hands prior to the release of Toy Story 2.
On the cusp of its cinematic debut, almost all of the film suddenly vanished, meaning years of hard work went down the toilet...nearly.
In the midst of the anarchy that erupted at the animation studio back in 1998, it was a new mum who managed to save the day.
It's now been 27 years since the world premiere of Toy Story 2 in November 1999, which introduced fans to a host of new characters besides Woody and Buzz Lightyear.
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This sort of thing doesn't happen overnight, of course, and a team of tech whizzes at Pixar had been feverishly working on the beloved film for two years prior.
By 1988, the second instalment of the film franchise was ready for the final edits to be made.
However, months and months and months of work almost went to waste thanks to one major mistake made by a member of staff.
Pixar's former technical director, Oren Jacob, recalled how he watched on in horror as files began vanishing from his computer screen - and characters such as Woody, Hamm, Potato Head, and Rex disappeared.
He previously compared it to watching 'a company vaporise in front of his eyes', given what was riding on this for Pixar.
"We first noticed it with Woody," Jacob told The Next Web in 2012. "[Larry Cutler] was in that directory and happened to be talking about installing a fix to Woody or Woody’s hat.
"He looked at the directory and it had like 40 files, and he looked again and it had four files. Then we saw sequences start to vanish as well and we were like, 'Oh my god!'"
It turned out that an unnamed employee had been cleaning up Pixar's servers and accidentally nearly tanked the production of Toy Story 2.
They unintentionally put in a command to delete the root file for the 92 minute movie, which was obviouslhy quite the seismic mistake.
Jacob suspects that the command which caused the devastation was likely ‘rm -r -f *’, which he explained essentially triggers a mass erasure - and despite disconnecting from the server, the damage had already been done.
Pixar realised that 90 percent of the progress they had made on Toy Story 2 had been wiped, and to make matters even worse, it then emerged that its backup systems had not been working properly for weeks.
As the studio's co-founder Ed Catmull noted in his 2014 book Creativity, Inc, the 'mechanism in place specifically to help us recover from data failures had itself failed'.
He told the Wall Street Journal earlier this year that this realisation prompted a lot of panic, as Pixar did not 'have the resources at that time to absorb that kind of delay and survive'.
As crisis talks unfolded while producers attempted to find a solution to the accidental deletion of Toy Story 2, the film's supervising technical director Galyn Susman suddenly had a brainwave.
She had recently given birth to her son Eli and had spent some time working from home - meaning she had a back-up of the sequel stored on her home computer.
Hilariously, she and Jacob hopped into her Volvo and headed to her pad, before carefully loading the computer into the car with tons of pillows and blankets to ensure its safe journey.
"Eight people met us with a plywood sheet out in the [Pixar] parking lot and, like a sedan carrying the Pharaoh, walked it into the machine room," Jacob once recalled.
After returning to Pixar's HQ, they retrieved the most recent back-up of Toy Story 2 from Susman's computer, making both her and Eli the heroes of this story.
But the tumultuous production of the second Toy Story film wasn't over just yet, as after all of that, studio executives decided that they weren't actually keen on it.
'The cinematic equivalent of a heart transplant'
Jacob went on: "Effectively, all animation was tossed. Effectively, all layout was tossed. So all camera work would start from scratch. Lighting was in the film a little bit, but that was tossed as well.
"We had to build new characters. So at that point, Buster showed up. And that character went from being out, to being in the screenplay, to in the final screen in nine months.
"That’s a fully animated quadruped...on the fly. And most of the humans in the film and show. All the background extras in the airport at the end."
He explained that the Toy Story 2 team pretty much 'started from ground zero' and had to 'build and assemble' a host of fresh characters, add in effects and reimagine various elements of the film.
Catmull described this switch as 'the cinematic equivalent of a heart transplant' - and thankfully, despite all of the setbacks, the finished product was well worth it.
Let this tale serve as a reminder about the importance of backing up your work, lads.
Olivia Burke
