LEGEND REVEALED! Toy Story 2 Was Really Deleted

There is a movie urban legend out there that says while Toy Story 2 was being worked on, the majority of the film was deleted by accident because of computer errors. Well, is this true or not? You’ll soon find out.

Ever since the computer developed into the main place where people conduct business and complete school work, too many horrible tales have been told about peoples hard work disappearing because of an error. Mistakes such as, accidentally deleting it, their computer crashed, the power was out, just to name a few things. These errors have been occuring ever since computers came about. An error occurred during the making of Pixars Toy Story 2 where nearly 90 percent of it was accidentally deleted. Keep reading to see the story unfold!

It was just two years shy of the year 2000, and the wonderful people working at Pixar could be seen working very hard. All of the employees were working on: A Bug’s Life to be released that autumn. There was a good amount that were a little less than a year into production on Toy Story 2. It was due to be released the following November. One day, the Associate Technical Director of Toy Story 2, Oren Jacob, was working in a room with a couple other associate technical directors when they managed to view a catalog where everything for the character, Woody were being kept. After being refreshed, they realized the characteristics kept going down and down. Woody was supposed to be wearing a hat, then, he was seen with no hat on at all. The next to go were boots he was wearing and then, his entire body disappeared. So, they hurried to view the rest of the characters and when the page was reloaded all remaining characters were starting to disappear too!

It appears that somebody ran a certain command that is supposed to take files away from directories. The directories are stored on a shared computer system that is known as UNIX. But, this time, an employee mistakenly used it on the whole entire system. It is unknown how just one person can erase every single file on the whole system, the manner in which Toy Story 2 was created at that time was that just about every employee could gain access to every single file. This was because everybody was working on a separate part of the movie simultaneously. It would take just too much time for every one of the tons and tons of workers to look for special permission to alter the files so it was decided that everybody was able to change files, from the lowest person to the biggest workers at Pixar. Jacob totally lost it and got somebody to remove the plug to the whole system just in time to save some of the project. This happened and a few hours later in the day, when they start up the system once again,, they see that nearly all but 10% has disappeared.

Normally, somebody would freak out, items of that importance being deleted is not as flooring as you would believe. With over 400 different people all sharing access to master files, things can easily be removed. Once during all of this, the entire cast of bugs in A Bugs Life were deleted also. This is freaky but, there is always an emergency copy of all of the files. With A Bugs Life, they use the emergency copy and everything was okay. But for Toy Story 2, it was not as smooth of a process. In that time, all of the information to animate Toy Story 2 used only about 10 gigabytes. That’s not even as much space on a flash drive that you can buy anywhere. The emergency copy of his film only had less than 5 gigabytes of space. The back-up was set up in a way that, there was not an error prompt saying there was no more room for new data to be saved, it automatically overwrote the old data to make space for new data to be added. Pixar did not know that when it all started. When they took a look at the back-up it looked like they had their film back. Soon, they found out that there was only actually, less than half of what they needed for the film. Things slowly started breaking down. Everybody was in a full on panic. But, they grouped up and brainstormed solutions for this problem. Workers had use their own computers to save what they were working on, they were able to combine small pieces of the movie but, no one had the whole film.

Earlier mentioned in this article was Supervising Technical Director Galyn Smith. Just months before, she became a mother to a sweet little boy. She wanted to work from home to spend time with her son so, Pixar gave her a computer loaded with the entire film. Also included were periodic updates to the film. When it was last updated was unknown, whatever she had on her computer was better than having nothing. So they took a trip to her home and took the computer with them as they traveled back to the office of Pixar. The computer was started up. Much to everyone’s surprise, the last update took place nearly two weeks prior. They had the first emergency copy from a few months prior. They also had her version that was kept current and also anything else they could put together. They gained back about 70 percent of the project, working just fine. Next they checked the directories for the 30 percent that they were still missing by hand. That required the help the whole staff to work the entire weekend with little to no sleep. Eventually, it was completed and production was done. The film was moving forward.

Oddly enough, the film was done by the end of the year in 1998. But, they felt that they could not release it as it was, because the company was still new. So, it was decided to toss the whole and what originally took two years to create, was remade in no more than nine months so that it could be released in November of 1999.

So, the answer to the original question is, TRUE.