November 24, 2025
When toys outshone superheroes
Pixar: The Early Days
Steve Jobs’ lost Pixar tape drops, fans spar over nostalgia and roast Marvel CGI
TLDR: Pixar released a 1996 interview where Steve Jobs explains how Toy Story’s success reshaped the studio and his leadership. Commenters relive the magic, bicker about reposts, and drag modern Marvel CGI, arguing that 1990s Pixar set a quality bar today’s blockbusters can’t—or won’t—match.
Pixar just dropped a never-before-seen 1996 interview with Steve Jobs, and the comments treated it like a time capsule and a battleground. In the clip, Steve lays out Pixar’s long game: give artists and engineers a real stake, learn discipline from Disney, ditch ads to chase feature films, and build a culture to tell stories that last. By then Toy Story had made history, Pixar’s IPO had exploded, A Bug’s Life was underway, and Steve was already renegotiating with Disney. Fans swooned at the clarity, while others side-eyed the myth-making, wondering what parts of that tidy story got polished over time.
Then the drama: one camp shouted “repost police!” after mkl flagged an earlier thread, while another cheered the “second chance.” The spiciest jab came from a Marvel-skeptic who quipped that superhero movies still haven’t matched 1990s Pixar’s visuals. Cue a pile-on: nostalgia lovers declared “1995 > 2025,” defenders blamed brutal production schedules, and pragmatists argued Pixar’s secret sauce was focus and artist equity, not just fancy computers. Memes flew—“render farm vs content farm,” “toys looked more real than capes”—and the debate boiled down to this: timeless craft vs endless franchise churn. The video is history; the comments are fireworks.
Key Points
- •A newly released November 22, 1996 interview with Steve Jobs marks Toy Story’s 30th anniversary.
- •Toy Story was the first entirely computer-animated feature-length film; Pixar’s IPO followed, valuing the company at about $1.5 billion—the largest IPO of 1995.
- •Toy Story earned three Academy Award nominations and won a Special Achievement Oscar in March 1996.
- •In July 1996, Pixar closed its television-commercial unit to focus on feature films; the team grew 70% in under a year and A Bug’s Life was in production.
- •Jobs used Toy Story’s success to renegotiate Pixar’s Disney partnership and refined a talent-centered management approach with Ed Catmull, later applied at Apple.