Toy Story 4 Easter egg refers to typo that nearly wiped Toy Story 2 from existence
Film Features toy story
At its heart, the Toy Story franchise has always featured pretty heavy meditations on mortality, loss, and letting go. For every slapstick gag or cute, squeaky, three-eyed alien zealot, there’s a bunch of beloved characters confronting death by staring straight into its inevitable, uncaring, fiery eyes… often right before getting saved by all those cute, squeaky, three-eyed alien zealots. Knowing this, it’s perhaps unsurprising that a Toy Story 4 Easter egg is gaining traction on Reddit for apparently referencing a very real, barely avoided Pixar-pocalypse.
In a screenshot posted to the r/MovieDetails subreddit earlier this week by u/Numerous-Lemon, audiences can spot a car’s license plate reading “RMR F97.” As it turns out, “RMRF” was part of a deletion line command that a Pixar employee accidentally entered into the main computer unit housing the sequel production’s entire file archive back in 1997.
Did you just feel the bottom drop out in your own stomach, too? Imagine that poor bastard.
As filmmaker Austin McConnell explained via his YouTube channel a few years back: The entire story can be found in Creativity, Inc., a book on overcoming artistic roadblocks co-written by Pixar Studios co-founder, Ed Catmull. Back then, cloud storage obviously wasn’t a thing, so “all of the movie’s assets [were] kept in a big computer drive which the animators work out of.” Those assets were then accessed by a network of computers, but if something were to happen to that centralized unit…. Well, you get the idea.
And, of course, something did happen. During “a bit of routine storage cleanup,” a mercifully unnamed employee entered a command resulting in an entire memory wipe of the Toy Story 2 project.
“Wouldn’t anyone in their right minds back up a $500 million sequel on a separate, central housing unit?” many of you may be asking yourselves. Hypothetically, yes. But the accidental deletion apparently occurred after a month of IT issues that coincidentally involved—you guessed it—Toy Story 2's backup files. Disney and Pixar execs, in an understandable panic mode, quickly assembled to debate their options, ranging from starting completely from scratch to simply scrapping the entire project entirely (which probably would have meant the end of Pixar, too).
Luckily, Toy Story 2's supervising technical director (and future Pixar producer), Galyn Susman, following the birth of her newborn son, had created her own backup files to use from home, because women never get a goddamn break in this country. After retrieving her computer and booting it up at the studio, the team restored all of the film’s assets, ensuring no one (to our knowledge) was fed to Disney’s on-site wolves.
…And yet, somehow no one thought to “RMRF” Cars 2 at any point during its production.
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73 Comments
Cars 2 gets a bad rap. If you come into it _knowing_ that it’s a Mater story with Lightning as support, then you won’t be disappointed that it’s actually an adequately-entertaining sometimes-even-clever spy spoof.Maybe it was partially a Stockholm-Syndrome-induced effect of my then 3yo wanting to watch it every goddamn weekend, but I think it holds up just fine and doesn’t deserve the disdain that it gets.(Fair enough if you just don’t like Larry the Cable Guy. He’s not my favorite standup, but I’ve seen a few good bits, and I got nothing against him.)
Right there with you. We watched Cars 2 about 8,000 times (on a pirated Russian DVD that our nanny bought from a street vendor… the dialogue was all in English but any in-world text, like TV chyrons or whatever, was all in Russian) and while it is unbelievably silly, it’s also really entertaining. I’m a sucker for ridiculous spy fantasy stuff anyway.Cars 3 is the real disappointment: it was just boring. I’ll take Cars 2 over Cars 3 any day.
No, sorry, Cars 2 is garbage, and doubly so because it’s all about how it’s perfectly alright for an American to act like an absolute idiot when exposed to other cultures because he’s special!
I’m sorry someone hurt you.
Plenty of people have hurt me, none of them have anything to do with this movie being a turd.
Yeah, I didn’t hate Cars 2 at all. I liked the 180 they did on the story – instead of an anthropomorphic race car story they opted for an anthropomorphic spy race car story. I wouldn’t call that move “brave” but it was nicely unexpected.I’ve said this before about the Cars movies – I never loved the casting of Larry the Cable Guy, but Pixar was smart to use him as a character voice, not as himself. That is, he didn’t ever use his catch phrase – he was just a country yokel tow truck.
but Pixar was smart to use him as a character voice, not as himselfBut they did, because that’s not really his voice. It’s a fake character he made up. He’s a college-educated Nebraskan who doesn’t have any kind of “country” twang in real life.
Larry the Cable Guy got to use lots of his catchphrases as Mater.Mater literally yells “GIT-R-DONE”.
Oh, yeah, it’s great. I especially liked the part where the bad guy cars torture and kill a good guy car. And the way my five year old slept in our bed for a week afterwards was so cute! I guess the only good thing is that it freaked him out so much, it didn’t enter into his regular eternal rotation the way the first one did.
Yup, and that good guy car was voiced by Bruce Campbell!
That’s the reason I haven’t let my kids watch it yet. I think it was just too violent.
And when woody and buzz were going to be burnt alive?How about the ventriloquism dolls in 4?
You’re right. The incinerator scene alone I thought should have gotten the movie a PG instead of a G. But the torture scene in Cars seemed more gratuitous. Plus my kid was older for Toy Story 3 and 4 so it was easier for me to see my way past it.
Cars 2 is really fun if, as we did, you see it after digesting all the “Mater’s Tall Tales”. It’s basically a feature-length episode of Mater’s Tall Tales.“I wuz a super spy once.”
“No you were not!”
“Wuz so. It all started when….”My son was into it for a period of time. So we as a family watched it over and over. It’s very good.
Yes! Netflix had a special of like 10 Mater’s Tall Tales in a row a few years back, and my son would watch them over and over again. And somehow, me and my wife didn’t get tired of them either. They were funny!
They go into a donut shop in Japan, which from the outside looks like a normal donut shop but once inside is revealed to be just a big room with loads of cars doing donuts: I will confess that got a decent sized chuckle out of me, and is a better visual gag that a lot of the jokes in the proper franchise installments.
It sucks!And I haven’t even seen it 😉
Regardless of one’s feelings on the plot of Cars 2, the film is just gorgeous. I went in with sorta low expectations, but the animation on the ocean-in-a-thunderstorm opening really floored me.
What really hurts is the talent that got wasted on Cars 2.Eddie Izdard, Michael Caine, Bruce Campbell, all of them deserved to be in a better Pixar movie.
you ever hear David Cross’s take on “Larry the Cable Guy?” Larry is 10 kinds of horseshit in a too large skin suit. My boys, when little, like Cars for all of about 10 minutes and then pretty much begged us to never watch it again. I’m so thankful they have such discerning taste.
I find the whole Cars series, and especially 2 with its lame spy premise amd waaaaaaaay too much of Mr. Git R Done (I know it’s his movie, I’m saying he shouldn’t have got a movie) pretty dumb…. But they’re worth existing just for the creation of Cars Land at Disney’s California Adventure, which is actually one of the most delightful areas in the Disneyland/DCA park.
I imagine if he’d have turned Cars down we’d just have someone else in the role doing the exact same kind of voice
Never got the hate eitherIt’s Pixar doing a Bond movie!
I’ve never seen Cars 2 but I would probably prefer it to the increasingly calculated-feeling emotional beats that have become standard for Pixar since TS2/Up.
I am the same way with the original Cars. My son watched it SO MANY TIMES. that I went from this is stupid, to I hate this, to huh, to OK, to this is a well thought out morality tale. Repetition is a hell of a drug.
The lemon party joke was quite funny that it got slipped in there.
CARS 2 has Mater sing the entire State Farm commercial jingle, for ABSOLUTELY no reason. “I’m a secret agent!”“Oh, you mean like an insurance agent? ‘Like a good neighbor, Mater is there!’”That moment is easily Pixar’s low point, and that includes the second half of BRAVE.
I like how you use the word “entire”, as if 7 is a really large number of words.
Watch movies for grown-ups, weirdo
I’ve heard horror stories from people I’ve worked with that have been in IT or software for decades.One in particular I heard was where someone had entered the command to delete EVERYTHING on a particular system. This was from an era when these sorts of operations were thankfully extremely slow and this particular person, realizing the magnitude of the mistake he’d just made, ran his ass down to the server itself and pulled the plug in order to save as much data as possible. I do not recall the percentage that was ultimately deleted.
I love the story about how lovingly/gingerly they had to handle the computer retrieved from Gaylen Susman, including wrapping it in a bunch of cushion/bedding.
Could you imagine calling up Michael Eisner and being like “It’s okay, sir. We had TWO blankets on hand!”
If I’ve got my timeline right, didn’t Pixar wind up trashing the version that got deleted and then saved shortly after anyway? It’s a part of this legend that seems to get overlooked: https://thenextweb.com/media/2012/05/21/how-pixars-toy-story-2-was-deleted-twice-once-by-technology-and-again-for-its-own-good/
Interesting but as I read (and suspected) without the backup files from her home workstation they wouldn’t have had the assets to even attempt to rebuild it. The trashing of the original film is more like a massive reshoot where they replaced something around 70% of the movie but since you had the core assets to reanimate everything it wasn’t too bad.
I’m more fascinated in how much more money Hanks and Allen & Co got for what sounds like completely redoing their dialogue or was it all still in-house voicing until that point? It’s not elaborated on in the story…
I don’t think they completely trashed it, as they still used most of the assets and characters, and the basic story outline was pretty similar (Woody gets stolen by an evil toy collector and the rest of the original cast have to save him). I know that they heavily retooled the film nine months before release (I don’t know exactly what was changed between the scrapped cut and the final release, but the story had a similar premise).It’s pretty safe to assume that the retooled version was built off of some things that were almost deleted in this incident. They didn’t start work on the movie over from scratch, so this really did come really close to being a disaster for the studio.
All good points, though I do wonder what the balance between salvaged assets and stuff they scrambled to make in the last 9 months is. If the leaked script is legit (or even the “final” version of the original iteration), aside from the 99% different dialogue there are major locations, sequences, and characters completely absent from it. Pixar has been pretty cagey about what survived the original version beyond the basic plot beats — there’s no way they’d ever release that old version, but it would’ve been a hell of a bonus feature back in the day.
The (allegedly) old version of it is pretty interesting, if you want something to skim: http://web.archive.org/web/20121213100913/http://www.raindance.org/site/picture/upload//image/general/movies/toy_story_2.pdf
You do wonder if they would have restarted the movie sooner, had they not encountered this massive issue with the original version. Once you go to all the trouble of restoring it, you probably get blinded to the limitations of the project.
A similar thing happened on Warcraft II back when I ran Blizzard’s QA department. A combination of not explicit enough instructions from me and a distracted tester following them resulted in a (fortunately) brief loss of the entire source code for the game and earned the poor guy the (credited in the manual) nickname “Deltree”.
I discovered an amazing glitch when I tested where the game would crash on the PC version if you did one common activity on any resolution setting that wasn’t 720p or 1080p. We were submitting for certification that Friday. I pointed it out to my supervisor and we hit stop on everything. We had everyone run it and got a 60% failure rate across six different graphics cards when we ran through each resolution.
Reminds me of Gearbox’s Aliens: Colonial Marines’ AI being completely shot mainly because of one single typo in the coding that completely disassembled the AI behavior in how it was supposed to work
Are people just now learning about this? I remember knowing this tale before they could make an Easter egg out of it.
Found the hipster.
Yeah ok but this story is at least 9 years old. I guess remembering things makes me a hipster. https://thenextweb.com/media/2012/05/21/how-pixars-toy-story-2-was-deleted-twice-once-by-technology-and-again-for-its-own-good/amp/
Having read Creativity Inc., I already knew this story – and the full version includes nice details like the fact that she didn’t remember at first that she had this backup – she realized it in the middle of a meeting – and then they were very, very careful with this precious backup copy, driving like an old lady to Pixar HQ and then several people collaborating to carry it safely into the building. It’s like that sight gag near the end of Risky Business, where Tom Cruise’s character – his father’s beloved Porsche finally dredged up from Lake Michigan and repaired – drives it home so slowly that a kid passes him on a bicycle.
If it’s that precious, it’d make more sense to bring something to her house to back it up in situ, before they moved it.Sounds like they were really careless in general, if an employee can copy the whole thing without anyone knowing about it. You’d think bootlegging would be one of their biggest concerns.
Bootleg to where?? Pixar was the only company making films like this at the time. If it couldn’t get accessed on a high-end workstation paid for with money from the goddamn Disney corporation, it wasn’t happening.
I read the book too — I think they talk about bringing the computer back in the car surrounded by pillows and cushions to keep it from getting in any way jostled. She had been making weekly backups, so they ultimately only lost a few days’ work.I started using UNIX in ‘96 in my first college CS class, and I had a classmate who never got a handle on how merciless those ‘rm’ commands could be. I can think of multiple occasions when we’d finish up a big assignment in the computer lab, and before emailing his files to the teacher, he’d try to clean up extraneous files with a clever ‘rm’ and end up deleting his whole assignment.
Not having a (working) backup for something like this is nuts. Whoever was in charge of IT should have dropped everything and bought the biggest NAS they could find.
1997, folks. NAS was just file servers.Pixar was a small scrappy shop. And the article mentions that their backup system (which might very well have been tape!) was having trouble. 3GB was a big hard disk at the time folks.
If I remember it correctly, they had set up a system to automatically back up the files, but the system had broken a while ago and they hadn’t noticed it because they didn’t bother to check.It was obviously a serious of mistakes, but it wasn’t handled as grossly incompetently as some people here are claiming, especially given the technical limitations at the time. Backing files up was not nearly as easy back then as it is now.
Tape was exactly what I was thinking. Yeesh. The backup process, when they had it, probably took a literal day.Excuse me while I drink away my AS/400 flashbacks.
The company I worked at refused to pony up for the full-feature back-up software and just used the version that came with the tape-backup unit. The problem was the intro-version didn’t come with error reporting and, when a tape filled it would rewind and report “success,” leaving all the rest of the files without being backed up.
When I last did web development, our head technologist had a falling out with the founder of the company, so he just quit and took all the admin passwords with him. We were spread across five or six different services for different purposes (AWS, Drupal, etc) and we couldn’t access any of them. Shit happens.
And it wasn’t like back-ups hadn’t been invented. I was working on some science projects at the same time that had big shared files, and we still did full backups of what was on the servers. It’s especially crazy for a money-making project. Sounds like a penny-wise pound foolish scenario if they didn’t pony-up for proper back-up.
I work in software both now and then, and backups were, ironically, one of the most error-prone activities going. I don’t know if it was the software or the hardware, but it was an effing nightmare. 50% success was acceptable.
That Pixar employee’s name?Jeffrey Katzenberg.
And now you knooooooow . . . the rest of the story!
The thing about this story that people don’t know is that the film that got deleted was the straight to video version and was pretty much reworked fully when it was switched to theatrical.
Between this story and the infamous “Black Friday” reel of the original movie, it’s a miracle the finished products were as amazing as they were, because things had to go right AND wrong to get there
Despite the Win95 style dialog window, “rm -rf” implies that Pixar was using a UNIX system. Probably a Silicon Graphics workstation as that was pretty much the only way to render 3D stuff at the time (I was in grad school in the late 1990s and we used SGI workstations to model protein structures). Of course these days your phone is probably more powerful than those $20,000 workstations.
Was hoping some *nix nerd was already in these comments, to well-actually the fact that you need a dash in that command. Good on ya! I was going to roll up my sleeves and do it myself.
well if they ran rm -rf * at / , then they need to be denied access and told to do all their work using crayons instead.
at /, running as root, no less!
rm -rf ./blah*.blah , except maybe the operator used the keypad and accidentally hits enter, murdering everything in the current directory. Same with rm -rf and quotes, or breaking the line for multiple entries, or using the right shift for caps….
Ugh, that’s exactly what I did a week into my first job out of college as an engineer. I accidentally went up a couple levels beyond where I planned, unknowingly wound up at root (“/”) and executed “rm -rf *”. I completely freaked. Like a man about to face the firing squad, I marched into the sysadmin and told him the sad tale with the dialogue going something like this:Me: “Aaaaaaaagh! I accidentally did rm -rf * from root!”Sysadmin: (laughing) “You’re not the first. That’s why we have backups.”Me: (still shaking) “I thought I was going to lose my job.”Sysadmin: “Nah, only if you had tried to hide it. Try not to do it again.”Luckily it was only a single workstation and it didn’t affect much project data. Most of it was just reinstalling the applications software. Believe me, I never did it again. And just for you old school nerds this was 1986 on a Daisy Logician workstation, a specialty UNIX-based machine designed explicitly for electrical engineering work – with a whopping 10MB of hard drive!
The book “Creativity Inc.” mentions a Pixar Workstation used for earlier work. Yes, Pixar sold hardware. Not positive it was used for TS2.
my question is why anyone would be running that command in the first place. Who knows rm -rf but doesn’t know how dangerous it is?
They could have probably restored a bunch of the data with data recovery software such as extundelete if they caught it quickly enough. Deleting a file just makes that space on a harddrive available. It doesn’t convert all the zeros to ones or anything like that. Still, an `rm -rf` should be used with extreme caution.
Here’s a more succinct explanation of what happened. “Just pull the plug out of the fucking wall!”
I have a 3 year old son. Cars is the first full length movie I ever showed him and he loves it. We followed up with Cars 3 and now it’s either the first or third when he’s in the mood to watch racing. Cars 2 has a more complex storyline that he gets bored trying to follow. I don’t think the movie is bad. Michael Caine and John Turturro deliver. It’s a silly spy spoof. If I can help it, I’ll let my boy get into James Bond and the Mission:Impossible series as tween before we watch Cars 2 again.
“following the birth of her newborn son, had created her own backup files to use from home, because women never get a goddamn break in this country” – WTF? Author wants to imply (based on nothing) the cruel studio forced her to work rather than offer maternity leave. Given the specifics here, it’s as likely (if not more) that the arrangements made to work from home resulted from her requesting an accommodation to avoid going on leave.
lemme tell you a Toy Story of my own. There once was a little boy who played with clockwork toys. He’d wind ‘em up real hard and watch them go, for his own delight. That was his game. In doing so, he lost sight of the fact that not every toy is made of clockwork, some had a different maker. One day, a toy stopped playing, maybe he never was playing really. It wasn’t a fun game anymore, all the automatons whirring about, flashing lights and spiralled eyes and pre-recorded audio bytes.
So, in the dark of the night, the toy clambered up an electrical cord, climbed out the window (left open a crack) in to the fresh breeze, parachuted down in to the grass with a stray handkerchief.. and walked away. The end.
So Disney’s IT strategy was so incompetent, that performing tape backups so files could never be truly deleted was beyond their comprehension?