1. A Bugs Life - (November 20th, 1998)
The sophomore outing for the newly establish powerhouse and innovator of animation, Pixar Animation Studios, A Bugs Life followed suite with Toy Story and brought audiences into a world that we would see no other way. But heres a question. How many of you went to go see White House Down this summer? Im sorry. Do you mean the one with Morgan Freeman and Gerald Butler? Oh, you must be getting that mixed up with Olympus Has Fallen. A movie that has something to do about the White House being taken over or something along those lines. I dont blame you for not wanting to see the same movie twice. So what does that have to do with A Bugs Life? Well, some time ago, a few people had creative differences. So one of those men left that group and created Dreamworks, that man being Jeffery Katzenburg, or at least the story goes. And who was the group of people he left? Well the story goes it was the early workings of Pixar. There are a lot of details that I apologize may be fuzzy. But Dreamworks created a film called Antz about bugs and an ant, and it was released only a month or two before A Bugs Life. It too is about bugs and an ant. So who came up with the idea first? That's a dispute I rather not contribute to in public, but many do know or believe that is was stolen from Disney. The thing here is that ABL seemed like a carbon-copy of the earlier Antz. If only ABL could have pulled forward its release date then I might be talking about Antz here instead of the Disney/Pixar film. In the end, someone was cutting it close, and that was Disney. Granted, ABL still made enough money to keep Pixar going to create some of the most beloved movies in history. but they know how to push their luck against competitors.