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 Circle 7 to make Pixar sequels without Pixar. Then we follow Bob Iger’s realization at Hong Kong Disneyland, the $7.4 billion acquisition in 2006, Ed Catmull’s firewall between the two studios, the Brain Trust, the streaming-era stumble of Lightyear, and the box office roar back with Inside Out 2 and Toy Story 5.

• What the alpha channel did and why it was essential to modern computer-generated imagery
• Why Moore’s Law forced both Lucas and Jobs to treat Pixar as a waiting game
• The Toy Story 2 loophole that let Disney deny it counted toward the three-picture deal
• How the Brain Trust gave brutal feedback with no authority to mandate changes
• Why Pixar keeps everything in Emeryville while the rest of the industry outsources animation