In 1994, Steve Jobs was trying to sell a money-losing company to Hallmark or Microsoft. That company was Pixar. This episode traces the turbulent biography of Pixar Animation Studios, from a 1974 computer graphics lab at the New York Institute of Technology funded by Alexander Schure, to the secret exodus of Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith to Lucasfilm in 1979, to George Lucas selling the graphics group after his divorce, and Jobs buying it for $5 million in 1986 after 35 other investors passed.

We cover the strange years selling the Pixar Image Computer to hospitals for CT scans, John Lasseter's dancing Listerine commercials, the CAPS system that digitized Disney's ink-and-paint process, the 1991 three-picture deal, Toy Story's 1995 debut and record IPO, and the bitter contract war between Jobs and Michael Eisner that led Disney to create Ci ...