The loyal pull-string cowboy at the heart of the 1995 film Toy Story was originally written as a sarcastic tyrant so unlikable that the actor voicing him complained in the recording booth, and that version nearly got the movie canceled. This deep dive treats the film itself as a biography, starting with a junior animator fired from a traditional hand-drawn studio for pitching a computer-animated movie about a toaster after seeing early light-cycle effects. He joined a computer graphics division that became a struggling tech startup owned by a famous entrepreneur, made short films to sell hardware, and won the first Academy Award for a computer-generated animated short in 1988 with a story told from the perspective of a tin toy.

The episode explains the one-sided deal that gave the major studio ownership, story control and sequel rights whil ...