5 Amazing Things That Didn't Make It Into Inside Out

First off, if you haven't seen Pixar's latest film, Inside Out, stop reading this and go see it. Like, now. I guarantee you'll get misty eyed at least once. That said, here are five things the folks working on the film originally had planned for Inside Out that never made it to the final cut:

01
Spider Web Memories

via Matthew Paulson

Once upon a time, Riley's memories were going to be held in jars, or be represented by dew drops on spider webs. In an interview with io9, Production Designer Ralph Eggleston explains,
I had fallen in love with, not the regular old spiderwebs, not the Charlotte’s Web spiderweb, but the ones that look like gossamer sheets, the real dense ones. And then they have lots of minute, small teeny dewdrops. Wouldn’t it be great if that was a memory? You could pull it off. As a matter of fact, before we had shelves, they were nothing but thin threads. They weren’t spiderwebs, but they were thin threads, kind of wrapped around them [the memories] like DNA. And whenever a memory was recalled, you would hear like a whine glass ‘Eeeeeeehhhh,’ and then you would see the string gently do this,” he bobbed his fingers. “And one of them would glow and it would get shot up and come right back down.
Eventually, the film landed on these huggable, surprisingly durable orbs:
02
The Departments of Names and Faces

via io9

You know how sometimes it's incredibly hard to remember the name that goes with a face? Inside Out was going to have an explaination for that; there are two departments, Names and Faces, that collectively create 'Appointing Faces to Names,' which hate each other. Visiting the two departments results in a run around of 'you'll have to ask the other guys.'

Other scrapped departments included one for music cognition, meant to represent the unique connection human beings have with song. Director Pete Docter says,
When you watch your cat and there’s something musical playing, you know your cat doesn’t hear it. It’s just noise for the cat, but to us it means something. So we thought it would be fun if maybe we could represent that in some way. And Joy starts talking and then it becomes music itself. It forms into shapes and things. And that was really cool, but it ended up being really redundant with Abstract Thought.
03
The Secrets Vault

via io9

Another area of Riley's brain we never got to explore was the "Secrets Vault," where she kept all of her most guarded secret information locked away.
04
The unfortunately named 'Hobo Camp'

via io9

You know what would have been sadder than just Bing Bong? Bing Bong plus all of the other forgotten creations of Riley's mind all huddled together like homeless people:
It was all stuff she had created as a three-year-old and outgrown, Bing Bong, that was his first appearance, along with Miss Scribbles, who was sort of a stick figure bad drawing, and Mr. Sun, which — you know how you would always draw the sun as that quarter arc in the corner of the page? It would float down and it was only a quarter. So they were all kind of out-of-work actors, who are like, ‘Well, we had our day! Come on, pull up to the fire. Let’s reminisce.’ And Joy was like, ‘No! We’re going to go back there and we’re going to bring childhood back!’
I for one am glad they abandoned this idea. You already got enough tears from me, Inside Out! I don't know that my heart could have handled this much childhood crushing.
05
Alternate console designs including a fountain and fire pit

via io9

The team went through a ton of different designs for the control console, including one where each emotion had a little area of their own. Eggleston explains, "there was one where we had Sadness have a water fountain. It was all about water and sadness and it was all droopy. Then Anger’s was like a fire pit. I forgot what Disgust’s was, but it was all about not touching things."

I don't know about you, but I love the idea of Disgust getting mad when the water from Sadness' fountain splashes into her super neat area. Ultimately, the production team realized the way the console looked wasn't that important; "it became about how the emotion used the buttons. It became more about the emotion doing something with the buttons than what the buttons actually were."
06
Bonus facts about Inside Out:

via slashfilm
- Riley's house in San Francisco is a real place! The location has been changed, but it's based entirely on a real home. The city itself is also designed to be conceptually the opposite of the San Fransokyo that appears in Big Hero 6.
- The "mind canyon" is ten miles long (relative to Joy, who stands at 4'2")
- When you see Riley with her family in Minnesota, she's almost always featured at the center, between her parents. In San Francisco, she's most frequently on the outside, to express her feelings of isolation and disconnection.
- Early versions of Joy had giant pigtails, while early Sadness was just a lump.
- At one point, Riley had a "chit chat" island at the core of her personality, which was eventually deemed too similar to some of her other personality traits.