... and they #@$%ing hated it.Â
Schure may have had complete faith in his "nephews," but that confidence didn't go both ways. Upon seeing the movie, Smith declared, "This guy doesn't have it," and his crew immediately started thinking of a way to ditch him, reasoning that no one would care about the first CG movie ever if the script sucked as much as Tubby's. They began having secret meetings with Disney but didn't get very far because most people there didn't really understand what "computer animation" meant, and those who did were afraid of it.
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Eventually, they met a guy who not only got it but wanted in on it: George Lucas. After a series of secret meetings, Lucas invited all the most important members of the Computer Graphics Lab to join LucasFilm's new Computer Division. In order to avoid hurting Uncle Alex's feelings (and, perhaps more importantly, a lawsuit), the CGL nerds left one by one over the course of a year and even got temporary jobs in other places to throw off suspicions. As Smith and another colleague put it, "We were laundering ourselves."Â
As for Schure, his dream CGI movie, tentatively titled The Works, was never finished. The furthest he got was a few clips that achieved the legitimately impressive feat of replicating the exact look and feel of '90s PC game cutscenes a decade ahead of time.Â