I have to tell you, I freely admit leaping to conclusions yesterday. I saw this tweet, knew nothing of the back story and thought, “WELL!! Isn’t that classic corporate?! They boot even a sainted icon – probably some snuffy who turned into Cinderella – to the curb when it suits them? This is why loyalty to corporate blackguards is completely misplaced.”

Galyn Susman was the individual who saved ‘TOY STORY 2’ by having a copy of the film at home after someone accidentally ran a command that deleted 90% of the film from Pixar’s files.

Today, she has been laid off from Pixar. pic.twitter.com/Ivi1yw68sR

— DiscussingFilm (@DiscussingFilm) June 3, 2023

I mean, who hasn’t watched hours of work – less mind months – go poof with a single, errant keystroke, whimper in pain (or scream in anguish to the heavens), and wish there was someone in the vicinity who could magically restore what you just flushed away?

We’ve all been there. Some of us (*just guessing*) multiple times, being charter members of the clumsier sub-species.

So this struck a chord and I hadn’t heard it before.

“That’s when we first noticed it, with Woody.”

“[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”

“I grabbed the phone… unplug the machine!””

GULP

…That’s Oren Jacob, former Chief Technical Officer of Pixar — then an associate technical director for Toy Story 2 — recounting the moment they discovered that the movie was being deleted off of the company’s servers after an erroneous command was executed, erasing two months and hundreds of man-hours worth of work.

Frantic Pixar employees started going like mad through what files remained but they were just smoked.

…“That was the big meeting, in the conference room back in Bugville (Pixar’s corporate complex). All the big brains in the studio are like, “Uh, I don’t know. Oh my God!”

That’s when [Gaylyn] Susman said, “I have a machine back at my house.”

Susman, the Supervising Technical Director on Toy Story 2 (pictured below), had given birth to her son Eli shortly before, and had been working from home. This meant that she had a Silicon Graphics workstation at her house. It was either an Indigo 2 or an Octane, pictured right, and it was loaded up with a full copy of the movie.

They drove out to her house in her Volvo, carefully retrieved the workstation, and drove at 35 mph back to the studio with it swaddled like an infant in blankets, strapped with seatbelts into the back seat.

…At that point, the Volvo had become a $100M machine, as the entirety of the team’s efforts so far on the project were ensconced on its drives.

They made it back to Richmond in safety. “Eight people met us with a plywood sheet out in the parking lot and, like a sedan carrying the Pharaoh, walked it into the machine room.”

It booted and the files with a two week old version of the movie safely transferred back to Pixar’s computers.

WHEW

Then, in the way things go, they wound up trashing the whole thing and rebuilding it anyway, into a film that garnered an Oscar nomination and grossed over half a billion dollars.

But Susman was the real-life hero of Toy Story 2, and that just added to the feel-goods of the film’s accomplishments.

…A huge chunk of Toy Story 2 was indeed deleted, and was only recovered by a stroke of luck and the intense efforts of the Pixar staff.

But what most people don’t know is that the whole movie was actually tossed out again, not by the computers, but by the filmmakers themselves. It was then completely remade with mere months to go before a release date that was set in stone, cementing Pixar’s legacy as a crucible of commitment to quality.

Susman has remained at Pixar all this time, working her way up to being a producer of Pixar classics like Ratatouille and Finding Nemo.

But now we come to the part they left out of the tweet and which a friend on FB pointed out to me – her most recent film?

YOICKS

Reuters was more straightforward in their reporting on it.

Walt Disney’s (DIS.N) Pixar Animation Studios has eliminated 75 positions including those of two executives behind box office disappointment “Lightyear,” sources said on Saturday, the first significant job cuts at the studio in a decade.

The cuts included “Lightyear” director Angus MacLane, a 26-year animator who was part of the senior creative team on such acclaimed films as “Toy Story 4” and “Coco.” Galyn Susman, producer of “Lightyear,” also departed. Susman had been at Pixar since the release of the original “Toy Story” movie in 1995.

…“Lightyear” could not be shown in 14 Middle Eastern and Asian countries because of its depiction of a same-sex relationship. This had an impact on its box office performance.

“Disappointment” is a polite euphemism for “COMPLETE BOMB.” You can’t be so woke that you spend $200M of someone else’s money and “flop,” no matter what your saintly status is.

…Lightyear flopped in its first weekend in theaters, with the new Toy Story spin-off film earning only $51.7 million in North America – and has lost the studio an estimated $106 million.

The movie was also pulled from 14 countries for including a gay kissing scene that Disney refused to pull.

And Susman doubled down on the woke – even happily dumping Buzz’s human alter-ego, conservative actor Tim Allen, for the Lightyear stand alone film.

…But those involved in the Lightyear movie said it was a creative choice.

‘Tim Allen is Buzz Lightyear the toy,‘ Lightyear producer Galyn Susman stated, according to Yahoo.

‘We weren’t making a Toy Story movie. We’re making Buzz Lightyear’s movie.‘

That seems unnecessarily snippy to me. But that’s how these holier-than-thou types roll.

Unfortunately for Miss Snippy, Bob Iger, Disney’s CEO, is not protecting venerated statues in moss covered niches at the moment, particularly when the pseudo-saint has punctured the bottom line so thoroughly while doubling down on the touchiest subject of the moment.

Almost to a one, the stories covering Susman’s firing are all hosannas and moaning “How could they?” and very few – brief at that, if at all – mentions of the “disappointment” of her last production gig.

When, in fact, what she may have done is fatally shiv the baby she saved all those years ago.

That’s quite a story.