The Hidden Hand: Galyn Susman, the Woman Who Saved Toy Story 2 From Deletion
You won’t see her name in big lights. But the lights stayed on because of her.
This week, our team is gearing up to head to NAB and thinking a lot about the unsung heroes in this industry. So, we asked Efosa to find us a great story about someone you may not know, who saved a movie you're very much aware of from disaster. Let us know what you think.
-- Shamir
PS: check out “Extras” at the end to see some of the other things we're digging, plus an invite to grab dinner with us if you're at NAB.
Galyn Susman.
That’s a name you probably haven’t heard of but if someone saved a $100 million movie from vanishing into the void, you’d think you should.
If you’ve seen Toy Story 2—if you’ve ever cried during “When She Loved Me” or laughed at Buzz Lightyear’s Spanish mode in Toy Story 3—you owe her.
She didn’t just work on those films. She saved one of them from being deleted.
Like, actually deleted.
Not the Director. Not the Star. The One With the Backup.
Let’s rewind.
It’s 1998. Pixar’s deep in production on Toy Story 2. The sequel is nearly finished. The team is tweaking lighting, fixing animations, polishing every last pixel. Then someone notices something…
A mistaken command— /bin/rm -r -f * if you speak UNIX—inputted by one of the animators on the root folder.
And just like that, the movie started deleting itself. Scene by scene. Character by character.
Gone.
Ninety percent of the film, gone, actually.
Of course Pixar had backups, but when they went to check those backups: they discover: the backups haven’t been working. For months.
So now the studio is staring down a catastrophe. Two years of work, erased in a flash. Deadline looming. Budget spent. One wrong line of code, and Toy Story 2 might actually be DOA.
Cue Galyn Susman.
Who Is She?
Galyn wasn’t a director or a producer. She was Pixar’s Supervising Technical Director. A title that doesn’t turn heads, but she was the one managing Pixar’s massive library of assets, data, and digital workflows. Think: a hybrid of software engineer, project manager, and fire extinguisher.
By the time Toy Story 2 came around, Galyn had been at Pixar since the beginning. She worked on Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, and was already known as the calmest person in the room when things caught fire.
She was also, crucially, a new mom. Which meant she was working from home a lot more often. Which meant…
Yes.
She had a full backup on her home computer.
Remember this was ‘98. Working from home really meant physically copying the film onto your machine. No remote servers. No Dropbox. Just raw files, a home rig, and a lot of trust in your hardware.
The Volvo That Carried a Studio’s Soul
When she realized her backup might be the last existing copy of Toy Story 2, she and a colleague bolted from their studio meeting, jumped into her Volvo, speeding home to save the day.
Galyn’s home computer was strapped into the backseat like a newborn.
But still, this was ‘98.
What kind of home computer would be able to store that amount of data for feature film?
And not just any film. It was Toy Story 2—a landmark all-digital, data-heavy beast.
Galyn required 8 people (yes, eight), to help carry her computer from her Volvo in the parking lot, to Pixar's studio.
It worked.
The files were there. The movie was saved.
Well, sort of.
Let’s be clear: it wasn’t a saved .mp4 file or a full cut of the movie. It was the character database—the foundational code and models for the characters themselves.
Without that, they would’ve had to rebuild everything from scratch.
They still had to manually review and restore over 100,000 files, line by line. But thanks to Galyn’s backup, the film was alive again.
Why It Matters
It’s a case study in invisible labor.
The unsung heroes. The ones who do the backups. Who double-check the systems.
This wasn’t out-of-scope. Galyn was doing her job—managing assets, safeguarding data, carrying the film’s infrastructure on her back (and, for a moment, in her Volvo).
But the fact that a $100m Hollywood film hinged on a home copy of the character database tells you everything about how different things were in 1998.
No cloud. No auto-sync. The whole production pipeline was fragile, manual, and one overlooked tape away from catastrophe.
Today, studios run backups in triplicate. Whole departments are devoted to workflow and storage. Pixar even had to hire a whole IT department after this disaster.
The Final Frame
Would you believe me if I told you that after all that, Pixar ended up reworking Toy Story 2 from top to bottom anyway.
Upon recovering the film, Pixar executives—including John Lasseter—determined the movie wasn’t strong enough.
As a result, much of Toy Story 2 was scrapped and entirely reworked in under a year to meet the release deadline.
The point isn’t whether the original version got used. It’s that it existed and that it was recoverable. Without that, the reiteration process wouldn’t have happened and the Toy Story 2 that many of us adored would never have seen the light of day.
It’s really hard to imagine this story ever happening again. Which is why it’s more of a time capsule. A beautiful, slightly terrifying artifact from another era of filmmaking.
A reminder of what once was and how disasters pave the way for advancements in technology.
The systems we have now—the ones that make it so this kind of disaster doesn’t happen—only exist because of people like Galyn Susman.
Because of the fire she helped put out. Because someone once had to carry a studio’s future in the backseat of a Volvo.
And yet, even legends get lost in the shuffle.
In 2023, Galyn was laid off from Pixar along with 7,000 other Disney employees. No major press release. No big sendoff. Just a quiet exit for the woman who once saved one of the most beloved animated films ever made.
Maybe that’s the irony: the person who protected the story didn’t get to finish her own.
Still, her legacy remains.
You won’t see her name in big lights. But the lights stayed on because of her.
Extras
Going to NAB? We’re hosting a dinner. Let us know if you want an invite.
Two Substacks we’re loving this week include Ted Hope’s Hope For Film interview with director Tracie Laymon. And the case for having a lot of dreams vs. having a narrow focus by Anonymous Production Assistant.
We’re planning to feature video pros and their wildest workflows in the coming weeks, want to be featured? Email erika@heyeddie.ai.
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