Toy Story 4 Easter egg refers to typo that nearly wiped Toy Story 2 from existence

As filmmaker Austin McConnell explained via his YouTube channel a few years back: The entire story can be found in Creativity, Inc., a book on overcoming artistic roadblocks co-written by Pixar Studios co-founder, Ed Catmull. Back then, cloud storage obviously wasn’t a thing, so “all of the movie’s assets [were] kept in a big computer drive which the animators work out of.” Those assets were then accessed by a network of computers, but if something were to happen to that centralized unit…. Well, you get the idea.

And, of course, something did happen. During “a bit of routine storage cleanup,” a mercifully unnamed employee entered a command resulting in an entire memory wipe of the Toy Story 2 project.

“Wouldn’t anyone in their right minds back up a $500 million sequel on a separate, central housing unit?” many of you may be asking yourselves. Hypothetically, yes. But the accidental deletion apparently occurred after a month of IT issues that coincidentally involved—you guessed it—Toy Story 2's backup files. Disney and Pixar execs, in an understandable panic mode, quickly assembled to debate their options, ranging from starting completely from scratch to simply scrapping the entire project entirely (which probably would have meant the end of Pixar, too).

Luckily, Toy Story 2's supervising technical director (and future Pixar producer), Galyn Susman, following the birth of her newborn son, had created her own backup files to use from home, because women never get a goddamn break in this country. After retrieving her computer and booting it up at the studio, the team restored all of the film’s assets, ensuring no one (to our knowledge) was fed to Disney’s on-site wolves.

…And yet, somehow no one thought to “RMRF” Cars 2 at any point during its production.

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