Home Depot is a much bigger business than you think it is.
And unbelievably, it has generated the highest total return of any company in the S&P 500 since it's IPO in 1981.
Episode live in your podcast players now!
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Hilarious computer animation trick: what do you do when one character is too tall and they need to talk to each other?
The full Pixar process, summarized neatly on the inside cover of their IPO S-1:
When the Toy Story team was making the army men in 1994, it would have been very difficult to put the 'chutes inside their backpacks. So instead...
They just made two different variants! And used some clever "camera" work to switch between the two models, and hide when the swap occurred.
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“Walt Disney built his company over his entire lifetime, from age 21 until he died in 1966. And if you look at the company's market cap today, compared to where it was in 1966, 99.95% of the value was created after Disney died.
There was just so much more running room with his concept than he had time on this earth to execute” - @AcquiredFM
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On our episode, we mentioned that there's some footage floating around of Toy Story scenes that have gone through the layout phase, but not full animation.
Here's one.
The characters are lifeless and just getting dragged around the screen. But even in low-fidelity, the team can still use it to get a sense of if the story's working enough to proceed through the rest of the pipeline.
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Excerpt from our Disney Part II episode is now live in the @WSJ.
It is astonishing how much of modern Disney is attributable to ESPN's profits.
How Pixar's animation process works:
Story reels → Layout → Animation → Shading (texture/color) → Lighting → Render
Amazing video of a young Pete Docter animating Woody during the making of Toy Story.
Because of computational limits in 1994, if you viewed a character in full-res, you couldn't get real-time feedback while animating. So they used these basic polygon approximations instead. Which are... a little terrifying.
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Truly insane that the highest-grossing piece of entertainment ever (single story, not episodic) is a Broadway musical.
Never would have guessed.
The original ESPN logo was so sick.
We're about to tick into waitlist-only territory for our big 500-person Acquired meetup in SF.
We've got a great night planned for all of you with our friends at @sentry!
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The Disney Renaissance illustrated:
From 1989 to 1997 operating income nearly 4x'd, growing at a 17.7% CAGR.
During this time, Disney released:
👉🏾 The Little Mermaid ('89)
👉🏾 Beauty and the Beast ('91)
👉🏾 Aladdin ('92)
👉🏾 The Lion King ('94)
@AcquiredFM
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What a press release.
Hilarious footnote to the Marvel acquisition: Disney isn't allowed to use Marvel Characters at Disney World!
Before the purchase, Marvel had licensed the exclusive rights to Universal for theme parks east of the Mississippi. And as long as Universal is actively using them... the rights are theirs to keep.
So if you live in the US, Avengers Campus is (forever?) only in California, not Florida.
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"Do you think that the next Lion King could be created by AI?"
Ben: "No."
David: "Well... nobody thought computer animation could work and look at where Pixar is now."
Thanks @andrewrsorkin and @MelissaLeeCNBC for having us on to talk Disney!
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"You know, Snow White is 60 years old. Who do you know who hasn't seen Snow White?" -Steve Jobs
Our @Disney finale. In your podcast players now!
Part II research trip. We had to.
