Trivia / Pixar Shorts

• Adored by the Network: On Freeform.
• The Cameo: In "Lava" Uku sees two sea turtles nuzzling on his beach. The male appears to be Crush.
• Development Hell: In 2015, a fifth Cars Toons: Tales from Radiator Springs short, "To Protect and Serve" was announced to be released in May, with books and merchandise produced featuring footage of it. So far, it has not aired, and is most likely cancelled.
• Disabled Character, Disabled Actor: Madison Bandy, who is autistic and mostly non-speaking, plays Renee, a non-verbal autistic thirteen-year-old girl in Loop.
• Doing It for the Art:
  • Steve Jobs lost money on every one of the initial Pixar shorts, but fully supported making them in spite of it because he knew that the prestige and acclaim the shorts got were the real reason Pixar was on the map. Its been estimated that he blew a whopping $50,000,000 on the studio between 1986 and 1991.
  • Even after Pixar started making features, they recognized the benefits that these small "experimental" films had for their bigger projects and continued making them.
  • Taken up to eleven with the SparkShorts, which are made entirely independent from any studio executives, allowing animators to tell more personal stories in more varied, experimental visual styles, including Motion Capture and even hand drawn animation.
• Executive Meddling: Subverted. It's assumed that the decrease of the women's bust size in Knick-Knack is Disney executive censorship as usual, but John Lasseter and the studio actually made the decision to do so themselves.
• Instant Web Hit: Kitbull managed to hit one million views on YouTube in less than 24 hours.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: The original 1989 version of Knick Knack. Every official release of the short barring the "Tiny Toy Stories" VHS of Pixar shorts and the Toy Story Deluxe CAV Laserdisc, both of which are out of print, is the altered 2003 version.
• No Budget & Shoot the Money: The spin-offs of the full length movies were likely made as part of the original's production, likely helping the shorts' production value (and, considering they continue to make original shorts that can't make heavy use of old models, money's not the only consideration in making spin-offs). Pixar Popcorn is the ultimate example in Pixar's canon; they were made by animators inbetween feature films and HAD to use existing assets (likely why Toy Story, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles and Cars were featured as they all had recent sequels).
• Permanent Placeholder: In Knick Knack, the "Blah, Blah, Blah" song during the credits was actually a result of vocalist Bobby McFerrin improvising. McFerrin, a vocalist famous for his A Cappella work, was hired by Pixar to compose and perform the soundtrack for the film. The work print he was given to compose over featured "blah blah blah" as a placeholder for the credits, and he ran with it. The folks at Pixar liked it so much that it made the final cut.
• Pop-Star Composer: Bobby McFerrin, fresh off his success from "Don't Worry, Be Happy," did the music for Knick Knack.
• Reality Subtext: Even before he was fired for sexual misconduct, John Lasseter faced harsh criticism for how unaccommodating he was of female employees at Pixar. What was the first short to come out after his firing? Purl, a short about a feminine employee (represented by a sentient ball of pink yarn) trying to be accepted by an all-male, hyper-masculine company.
• Role Reprise: In The Radiator Springs 500 1/2, instead of being voiced by The Other Darrin Keith Ferguson like in the other Cars Toons, Lightning’s normal voice actor Owen Wilson returns to voice him for the short.
• Throw It In!: The reveal of a "Sunny Atlantis" in Knick Knack was improvised on the spot by one of the animators during a script reading.
• What Could Have Been:
  • A fourth Toy Story short titled "Mythic Rock" was intended to be made and released in 2013. It never came out of Development Hell.
  • A fifth episode of Tales from Radiator Springs titled To Protect and Serve was planned and has released merchandise, but never got released.
  • The initial storyboards to Float contained Caucasian characters, but one of Bobby Rubio's co-workers told him that he should depict Filipino-American characters instead. While he was initially unsure of this idea, he decided to make this change to "empower [his son] and empower children of color".
• Writer Revolt: The team were burned out after the monumental efforts made to get Tin Toy to work and had just seen Who Framed Roger Rabbit, leading to the creation of the slapstick-heavy Knick Knack. As John Lasseter put it, "We just wanted to make a cartoon!"
• Write What You Know:
  • Knick Knack came from John Lasseter and his wife's tradition of buying a snow globe every time they went on vacation.
  • Partly Cloudy was inspired by the communication problems that Peter Sohn, an American-born son of Koreans who's first language is English, experienced with his mother, who mostly only spoke Korean.
  • Purl is based on Kristen Lester's experiences of trying to fit in with the hyper-masculine and all-male staff when she first started at Pixar.
  • Float is Bobby Alcid Rubio's allegory for the struggle he went through while coming to accept his son's autism diagnosis. To make it more personal, the father and son, like Rubio, are both Filipino-American.
  • Out was based on Steven Clay Hunter's own experiences being in the closet.

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