Pixar’s habit of naming “production babies” in its end credits, the list of children born to crew members while a film was being made, is trending again on Reddit this week, pinned to Toy Story 2. The documented record puts the start four years earlier: Pixar printed the first such list in the credits of the original Toy Story in 1995.
The Toy Story 2 link is easy to understand, though. That sequel, which premiered 27 years ago today at the El Capitan Theatre in Los Angeles on November 13, 1999, was made in one of the most punishing crunches in the studio’s history, and a new parent working from home is the reason it survived at all.
What a production baby credit is
The term covers any child born to someone working on a film during its production. In practice it means a short block in the closing credits listing the babies’ first names. The custom began in animation, where films can take years, and it remains most common there.
Pixar director Lee Unkrich has explained the thinking: crew members forever tie the birth of each child to the film they were making at the time, and the credit lets them share that memory. In his words, “It’s like our family lives are permanently woven into the movies.”
The crunch that made Toy Story 2 famous
Disney first planned Toy Story 2 as a direct-to-video sequel, made in a separate building while most of Pixar worked on A Bug’s Life. After it was upgraded to a theatrical release and the story was rebuilt over a single weekend, the release date did not move. Pixar had nine months to finish the whole film.
The strain showed. Co-founder Ed Catmull later said “a full third of the staff” ended up with some form of repetitive strain injury by the end.
Then, in 1998, an animator clearing files ran a deletion command on the root folder of the film’s assets. About 90% of two years’ work vanished, and the backups had quietly stopped working roughly a month earlier. The rescue came from Galyn Susman, a technical director who had been doing her job from home after having a baby. She had a copy of the film on her own machine. Nearly everything was recovered apart from a few recent days of work.
A short timeline
- 1995: Pixar includes the first production babies list in Toy Story.
- March 12, 1997: Disney and Pixar announce the sequel.
- February 5, 1998: Steve Jobs tells the crew it is going to theaters.
- 1998: the accidental deletion; Susman’s home copy saves the film.
- November 13, 1999: premiere at the El Capitan; US release on November 24.
How the credit spread
Other studios and Pixar itself have played with the format. Tangled (2010) added “Chameleon Kids.” Winnie the Pooh (2011) listed “Pooh Babies” on a scarf knitted by Kanga. Pixar’s Soul (2020) called them “Recent You Seminar Graduates,” Lightyear (2022) went with “Future Space Rangers,” and Elio used “Future Earth Ambassadors.” A star beside a name honors a baby who died before production wrapped, as with a baby named Cooper in the credits of Moana.
Video games picked it up too, with Call of Duty 2 in 2005 among the early modern examples.
For more on animation’s long road to the screen, see our coverage of Coyote vs. Acme entering the animated feature Oscar race and the US release of Louis Clichy’s hand-painted film Iron Boy.
As for the sequel at the center of the Reddit thread, it went on to gross $511 million worldwide against a $90 million budget, the third-highest-grossing film of 1999. That is about 5.7 times its budget, earned by a film that existed at one point only on a home computer at a new mother’s house.
Further reading
Image: Coolcaesar, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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