We were 9-39 in four years 2016. Darrell Hazel had put the program in disarray. No light in sight.
Fast forward 6 years later: back to back 8 win seasons, our 4th bowl game in 6 seasons under Brohm, and a trip to Indy. What a damn good job he’s done rebuilding this program
John Lasseter took time off from Pixar in 2000, packed his family into a car, and drove the old Route 66. The towns he passed had died the day the interstate bypassed them. That drive became Cars.
Back at the studio, he called Michael Wallis, the historian who literally wrote a book about Route 66, and asked for a tour. Wallis loaded eleven Pixar animators into rented Cadillacs and took them down the old road twice. They ate in diners that were barely hanging on and talked to people who had watched their main streets empty out after Interstate 40 bypassed the old route. Radiator Springs is built from those towns. The movie's whole idea, slow down and matter to someone, came from places the country forgot, not a writers' room.
The animation was the harder problem. Lasseter wanted reflections that actually bent across the paint, because a shiny car shows you the entire world around it. Every Pixar film before this had faked reflections by pasting on flat images. Cars couldn't cheat. So Pixar rebuilt its software to follow each ray of light the way light really bounces around a room. One frame took 17 hours to finish. Even with about 3,000 computers running nonstop, a single second of the movie could take days.
Joe Ranft co-directed Cars, had led Pixar's story team since Toy Story, and drew the first sketches of Mater. In August 2005, with the film nearly done, he died in a car accident at 45. He had already recorded his lines. The movie is dedicated to him.
Cars cost $120 million and made $462 million in theaters, sixth-biggest of 2006. Then the toys showed up. The merchandise sold more than $10 billion in five years, and over 200 million die-cast versions of the cars have sold. Pixar made a story about a racer who learns the finish line matters less than the road to it, and the toys from that story have outsold the movie more than twenty times over.
My wife survived a school shooting in her first year as a teacher and kept teaching, and is still teaching 15 years later while being a Mom of two. She very much lives in the real world. You do not. What a completely ignorant and stupid thing to say.
“A family from Mexico arrives this morning legally has as much right to the American Dream as the direct descents of the Founding Fathers.”
Bob Dole accepting the Republican nomination for President in 1996.
We're not stopping with the Bears. We're heading to Cincinnati tomorrow to see how the Batesville Bengals sounds to them. We are Indiana. We are a football state. We are unstoppable.