Skip the iPhone, See A Rat

Please congratulate The VAR Guy. He’s made it through this entire week without mentioning that new mobile device from Steve Jobs. And while everyone else focuses on that darn device this week, The VAR Guy would prefer to mention Steve’s other big technical achievement…

Pixar! Sure, June 29 marks the day that tech device from Apple (you know the one) ships. But it also marks the premiere of Ratatouille–the latest guaranteed hit from Pixar, the computer animaton studio that Jobs built into an empire before selling to Disney. Is there another movie studio — digital or otherwise — with Pixar’s track record for success? Look at this US box office performance for Pixar’s movies:

• Finding Nemo ($340M)
• The Incredibles ($261M)
• Monsters Inc. ($256M)
• Toy Story II ($245M)
• Cars ($244M)
• Toy Story ($192M)
• A Bug’s Life ($163M)

Heck, even George Lucas (“Howard the Duck“) and Steven Spielberg (“1941“) have delivered a few bombs. Not so with Jobs in the movie business.
So go ahead, buy that nifty new phone. But The VAR Guy will spend about $400 less than you and will instead take his family to see an animated rat running through France, care of Mr. Jobs. If it’s from Pixar, it’s got to be good.

Side note: Anyone remember where the original Pixar team came from? Some pundits point to George Lucas’s special effects business. But actually, Pixar’s roots extend back to NYIT (New York Institute of Technology), a college on Long Island that spent the 1970s building one of the world’s first and most advanced digital animation studios — the NYIT Computer Graphics Lab (see the story “Out of this World“).