T is for

TOY STORY!

If you have kids, (or you teach kindergarten...) you know that Toy Story is a hit. Here are some cool facts....especially close to home here because the then mayor of the town I live in worked for Pixar when it won an Oscar.

"Hey, there's a snake in my boot!" My favorite quote...enjoy the rest...

In Toy Story 2 one of the rock-'em sock-'em boxing robots in Al's office has a chunk out of his ear, just like Evander Holyfield!

The crowd voices of the little green aliens are actually John Lasseter and crew after breathing in helium gas!

The original star of Toy Story was going to be Tinny, a mute windup musician and star of Pixar's Academy Award-winning short Tin Toy. Woody was going to be his sidekick.

Buzz's first name was Lunar Larry, but it was changed because it didn't fit the grand space hotshot he became.

The entire first half of Toy Story had to be reworked in a matter of three months after it was agreed that the story just wasn't working right.

Next to Sid's lava lamp, there is a poster that reads "Kill'n Paul Bunyan and his Blue Ox of Doom" while they both hold weapons. Typical of Sid.

The human skin in the movie was produced with ten layers of textural details, including dermal and epidermal skin, fine facial hairs, primary and secondary wrinkles, oil, and blood layers.

The head of Molly, Andy's little sister, is reborn in Babyface, the mutant toy. The X and Y coordinates were squashed , an eye taken out , hair pulled out , and put on an Erector set!

In a single finished frame of Toy Story, there are over 1.4 million individual pixels. They're fine enough so that even on a big movie screen you'll never see the individual dots.

The average time required to render a single final frame is three hours, and some of the more complex frames can take up to 24 hours!

Pixar has 300 computers that render images 24 hours a day.

A boyhood story from Pixar artist Andrew Stanton is our introduction to Sid: one time he made an M-80 into a little backpack for a toy to be set off in a field.

Pizza Planet was first Pizza Putt: a combination pizzeria and miniature golf course.

Sid's room contains: coils of barbed wire, crushed and uncrushed cans and cups, cassette tapes, spring-loaded mousetraps, assorted knives, regular and burnt matches, darts, pencils in the ceiling, bumper stickers, and over a hundred pieces of crumpled paper.

One of the movie's editor's, Julie MacDonald, wanted her name in the movie. So on Sid's backpack it is written, "Julie Macbarfle has kooties."

21 of the license plates mean something special to the crew. One license plate says "MOLYK9" in honor of Pixar's resident sheepdog Molly.

In its most productive week, Pixar completed 3.5 minutes of animation.

Sid has 15,977 hairs on his head; that's 3,593 more than Woody.

Andy's block has about 100 to 120 trees, all of which have about 10,000 leaves.

To get the feel of how plastic army men would actually walk, the animators nailed an old pair of shoes to a piece of wood and took turns hopping around in them.

Sid's desk includes seven blotches, two crayon marks, four kinds of moss, five kinds of rust , three brush marks, 16 splats, four dirt marks, 15 drips, two holes, two scrapes, four spills, eight cup rings, three smudges, two chips, two sprays, three wood-grain chips, one splotch of rug dirt , 15 scratches, and six watermarks! Also, his bed has a urine stain.

Animators spent 15 hours creating hardwood-floor scratches.

When an animator is done with a shot (he/she has watched it an average of 3,000 times!), John Lasseter tells them to go pick out a toy as a reward. The number of toys on an animator's desk demonstrates his prowess.

The books on Andy's shelf are named after Pixar's previous short films: Tin Toy and Knickknack.

The real-estate agent for Andy's house is "Virtual Realty." Notice it on the "for sale" sign in the front yard.

The moving company is named "Eggman Movers" (on the side of the moving truck) for Ralph Eggelston, the art director, whose nickname is Eggman.

Sid's desk has four different layers of textures: a "splatter" layer of paint marks, a "bump map" where Sid hit it with hammers or scraped it with blades, a "specularity" layer to determine where light is reflective around those areas, and a "dirt" layer for general grunge.

*Facts taken from http://wide-eyed-webs.com/instat2/TVMov/ToyStoryFacts.html