I think The Movies That Made Us on Netflix is great. The general premise is exploring a classic film and the arduous journey to make it happen. The films and their directors are household names now but at the time they really had to push to make it happen with some directors being complete unknowns. Sometimes they were basically establishing their genres as with Toy Story and Halloween. With others, like Elf, they were using techniques like forced perspective and stop motion animation when they were under tremendous pressure to use CGI. I think it's a really great illustration of how the obvious classics were, at one stage, a long shot like everything else.
