At the Heart of WALL-E

We couldn't have made WALL-E back when we had that famous lunch in 1994. I honestly remember the conversation we had over lunch that we now have in the teaser for the movie. We didn't come up with fully-formed ideas at that lunch - we came up with little inklings of things that lead to fully-formed ideas - but I do remember the line, "What if everybody left Earth and someone forgot to turn the last robot off?" And that was it. I thought that was such a sad scenario and I couldn't forget about it.