November 24, 1999: Steve Jobs gets another feather in his cap when Toy Story 2, the sequel to the original 1995 Pixar hit, debuts in theaters — becoming the first animated sequel in history to gross more than the original.

While more a piece of Steve Jobs history than Apple history, the release of Toy Story 2 caps off a spectacular year for Apple’s CEO.

The toys are back in town

Originally planned as a direct-to-video movie, Toy Story 2 turned out to be a massive hit for Pixar — and, by extension, for Steve Jobs, who was as engaged with Pixar as he would ever be at this stage.

With the first Toy Story, Jobs’ main contribution was negotiating its distribution deal with Disney, and acting as a cheerleader/one-man focus group as the movie came together. With its sequel, he arguably played an even bigger part in shaping the film it ultimately became.

In early 1997, it wasn’t even certain whether Pixar would produce the movie itself, or whether it would farm it out to a third-party, who could produce a stripped-down version that would satisfy a home audience made up predominantly of kids.

Steve Jobs, however, ultimately made the call for it to become a Pixar film — and decided to form the core production team by shutting down Pixar’s computer games operations (who had been responsible for the hit CD-ROMs The Toy Story Animated StoryBook and The Toy Story Activity Center) and putting them to work on the movie sequel.

Toy Story 2 also confirmed to Jobs that Pixar was big enough that its early successes were no fluke, and that it needed a bigger home. With Ed Catmull, Jobs began looking for headquarters soon after the movie sequel hit theaters; finding what they were looking for in an abandoned Del Monte fruit-canning facility.

Given that Jobs sadly passed away before Apple’s Campus 2 headquarters ever got properly started, developing this HQ for Pixar was one of the most hands-on building projects Jobs was ever involved with: going against the idea of a traditional movie studio with multiple separate buildings in favor of one large building based around a central atrium.

Anyone wanting to know where the philosophy for the Apple Park spaceship campus (complete with its focus on random encounters) comes from, look no further!

One more thing…

Toy Story 2 seems a relatively minor footnote in the Pixar pantheon, and the life of Steve Jobs in general, but it’s interesting for another reason. Just four years removed from the original movie’s debut, it’s fascinating to look back and see how much had changed for Jobs during that time.

In 1995, he was still outside Apple, with two businesses that certainly didn’t look like big successes to the outside world. Both NeXT and Pixar appeared to be money pits with failing or hardware businesses attached.

By 1999, Jobs had returned to Apple, become a billionaire thanks largely to the success of Toy Story and Pixar’s subsequent IPO, and was the feted mastermind behind hit products like the iMac G3 and iBook.

It’s appropriate that Toy Story 2 became a sequel to outperform its original, because this phase of Jobs’ life began his own second act: one which proved to be bigger and better than anything he had achieved up until this point.