The disc opens with John Lasseter, creator of Woody, and Ed Catmull, head of Pixar since its Lucasfilm days, giving a short introduction and explaining the purpose of the disc, as well as giving a short tour of the campus (seems odd; if you were working there, you'd know where everything is). So how did they clear all the ads and movie clips on the disc? They didn't. To quote John, "All this is copyrighted, of course, (nervous laugh), we don't own the copyrights to this stuff, therefore we beg of you, PLEEEEASE don't sell this!" Until now, every single one of them obeyed him. Perhaps a female staffer finally said "I'll show YOU, Mr. Grabby Hands!" and gave the whole thing to the Lost Media Wiki in revenge. Hey, however we got here...

The Pixar Shorts Vol. 1 Blu-Ray is for the most part an improvement on the Point Richmond transfers, retaining the commentary....but this first short, Beach Chair, is not on that disc at all. It's more of a tech demo than a short, but I never knew it existed until the leak and I'm shocked they left it out. Two more demos, Blowin' in the Wind and Flags and Waves, were never made public either.

Ready for almost an hour of commercials? Starting with their 1989 Tropicana juice ad and stretching all the way to 2000, this is, at last, every single ad Pixar was contracted to animate, gathered in one place and digitally mastered. These gigs kept the lights on while John and company prepared to launch the first ever all-CGI movie. There are probably more than a few that'll take you back. I saw the drink box ad a LOT in 1991 (and I just obtained a TGIF airing that has the ad in it, so...I've got proof).



The REAL curiosity here are the "party videos," AKA the annual presentations Pixar employees would shoot for fun and debut at their Christmas party each year. They're a glimpse into the company's formative years we otherwise might not have seen. Pixar started out as a division of Lucasfilm, selling high-end digital rendering computers to other, bigger companies who would pay top dollar for them. The first Christmas video was shot in 1986 when they were just beginning to produce shorts. Luxo Jr. was only a few months old. Never mind the corny jokes typical of office-party videos like this (har har, the stuffy accounting department is dressed like the A-Team -- I can hear the guffaws coming from the back table). As these videos go on, you see Pixar transform from just another white collar employment facility into a dedicated animation unit.



My apologies for the extra click you have to make when trying to watch some of these videos -- some of them, due to licensed music, will only play on the YouTube website.

The 1987 video is an improvement, but mostly for historical reasons -- it's mainly about the making of Pixar's second short, Red's Dream. Lasseter was barely in the 1986 video, but this time he's all over it.

And in 1988, Lasseter directed the video himself! The DVD is actually mistitled -- not everything on it was produced in Point Richmond, CA. Pixar's formative years took place in San Rafael, which is where John is walking the streets. Not only was his idea for a video a good one, it's held up especially well over time by illustrating just how unknown the company was in the late 80s. Imagine somebody having not heard of Pixar today. Then everybody sings "Don't Worry Be Happy," because it's 1988.

There wasn't much to the 1989 video to speak of. As the ending implies, Lucasfilm had just sold off Pixar to Steve Jobs, and Jobs was loaning Pixar to Disney. The Mouse did not own the company outright at this point.

The videos started getting shorter after 1990. "Twin Peaks" was huge that year, so here is "Twin Pix," two minutes of redubbed footage from the pilot. Whoever made this one was probably fired.

In 1991 they shot interview footage with several employees, took the audio and recreated their statements with puppets. To make things extra-cheesy, the same two puppets (male and female) are used over and over with different wigs.

The 1992 video is about how they can't come up with an idea for the next video. Instead John and some other employees rag on every previous video, but...it's not like they're doing better.

They get a little more creative with 1993, featuring "Pefessor Cornelius" riding around the campus interviewing people. You'll find out where that thumping is coming from soon enough, but it might help to know this was filmed shortly after the infamous "Black Friday" incident. Pixar's early story reel for Toy Story was so bad that Disney threatened to walk out of the project if Pixar couldn't turn it around in two weeks. The reason the reel was so bad was because Jeffrey Katzenberg kept calling for Toy Story to be "edgy," and being new at the whole "pleasing a giant corporation" thing, they took his advice so literally that every toy in the movie was written as an unlikeable, loudmouthed jerk. You can see two minutes of this on Toy Story's latest Blu-Ray, but two minutes is plenty. This is also the first time anything Toy Story-related would make an appearance in a video, but if you blink you'll miss it -- someone is holding a model of Buzz Lightyear's head with a grid drawn on it for digitizing into the computer.

1994 would turn out to be the last year Pixar made a Christmas party video, and this time they went back to the "interview people on the street" well -- with results not as good as before. People were asked what they would call "the next big movie from Walt Disney Pictures," but the interviewers were NDA'd from describing said movie when asked. The people on the street had nothing to go on and most of their answers were limp.



Also....DOOM! Lots of Doom! If you were surrounded by computers in the mid-90s what else would you be doing with your time?