Toy Story 5 rumours are flying so it's the perfect time to take a second to remember the stomach-dropping story of how Toy Story 2 almost got completely deleted during the final edit stage. When I say completely deleted, I mean 90% of the film actually did get erased, almost throwing the project into complete disarray.
But how could this happen? Well, a Pixar employee accidentally ran a delete command on the film's servers, and horrified witnesses could only watch as a folder dropped form 40 files to just four files in seconds. Because Pixar's backup servers had been failing for a month, there was no recovery option. It seemed all was lost. Years of work down the pan.
But then a miracle happened (or just an organised employee). Technical director Galyn Susman was on maternity leave, working from home with her newborn. She'd been regularly syncing the film's files to her personal laptop so she could keep contributing remotely, and that habit accidentally preserved nearly everything that had just been lost.
Colleagues rushed to her house, carefully wrapped her laptop in blankets, and drove it back to the studio. After a painstaking, file-by-file recovery process, the production was saved.
The twist? Pixar's leadership reviewed the recovered version and decided it wasn't good enough anyway. The film was largely rewritten from scratch into the beloved movie audiences eventually saw.
And in a bitter postscript, Susman was laid off by Disney in 2023 , 25 years after saving one of their most iconic franchises.
The moral? Always back up! For more trivia, see these mind boggling facts about the making of Toy Story 4.
