Featured Image Credit: LANDMARK MEDIA / Alamy Stock Photo / Disney
Topics: Toy Story, Pixar, Disney, Technology, Film and TV
Joe Harker
Topics: Toy Story, Pixar, Disney, Technology, Film and TV
Fans have been saddened at the departure of a Pixar producer who is credited with saving Toy Story 2 after much of the movie was accidentally deleted.
After the success of the 1995 animated move Toy Story put Pixar on the map as an animation studio to watch it seemed pretty inevitable that a sequel would follow.
At first it was going to be a direct-to-video affair as Disney was having some success in that field but when they saw some early footage they decided it should play in cinemas first.
Rather predictably a sequel did come four years later in the form of the arguably even more excellent Toy Story 2, but the film itself was almost wiped out in 1998.
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Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull wrote in his book Creativity Inc. that disaster struck the production of Toy Story 2 when an unnamed employee was doing a routine spot of server cleaning when they accidentally put in a command to delete the root file for the movie.
While Pixar shut down the servers in an attempt to save Toy Story 2 it wasn't quick enough and they lost about 90 percent of the work they'd managed to do.
Character models, assets and nine-tenths of the effort they'd put into making Toy Story 2 a reality had accidentally vanished, but luckily one woman was able to step in and save the day.
Technical director Galyn Susman had given birth about six months before the catastrophic deletion and had been working from home with a copy of Toy Story 2's database.
Disaster was averted as she and another Pixar employee went to her house, wrapped her computer in blankets and brought it in to restore what had been lost.
The nightmare was over and Galyn had saved the movie with her backup copy, though Toy Story 2 later ended up being redone from the ground up later on anyway after the idea for what the film should be was revised.
Susman would go on to work on the likes of Ratatouille, Toy Story 4 and Lightyear but now she's been laid off from Pixar as part of a wave of cost cutting.
On 23 May 75 members of Pixar staff lost their jobs, including a number of senior figures like Galyn, as part of Disney's overall plan to cut 7,000 jobs and save $5.5 billion in costs.
However, fans of Toy Story 2 were saddened to hear that the woman who had helped save one of Pixar's greatest movies had just been let go.
One fan said 'she should have a job at Pixar for life if she wants' while another said it was a stark reminder that 'everyone's job is at risk'.
Someone else said they hoped she'd be getting 'a great severance package' on her way out of Pixar after working there since 1995 and playing a major role in saving Toy Story 2.
Others said it was 'pretty impressive' to have worked for the same place for over two decades, and that having worked at the top of the business for so long she could probably 'retire after a very long and well paid career' at Pixar.