May 31, 2021 • 38 mins
The Disneyland attraction Great Moments With Mr. Lincoln originally started out as a World's Fair attraction before taking up residence in the Happiest Place on Earth. We look at the history, technology and evolution of this popular Disney attraction.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Radio and
I love all things tech. And it is Monday, May
Memorial Day, which means it's holiday here in the United States,
(00:27):
and because of that, I am actually taking the day off,
and so rather than having a new episode for you,
this is an episode that originally aired on a different holiday,
the fourth of July, back in two thousand eighteen, and
it is titled tech Stuff Moments with Mr Lincoln because
(00:47):
I think of Memorial Days being like the beginning of
the summer season, and for me, summers were often coupled
with trips to Disney World because I lived in Georgia,
Florida was not that away, and my sister and I
were fanatics. So sit back, enjoy this episode, and on Wednesday,
(01:08):
We're going to continue our story about the very complicated
evolution of Warner Medium, and I'll chat with you a
little bit at the end of the episode. This episode
is to publish on the fourth of July two thousand eighteen,
and here in the United States that date is treated
with some reverence as we consider it Independence Day. And
(01:31):
back in seventeen seventy six, the Continental Congress representing the
thirteen colonies of the America's declared those colonies a new
nation called the United States of America. But that actually
happened on July two, seventeen seventy six. John Adams was
convinced that that was going to be the day we
all celebrated. As it turned out, we decided to do
(01:52):
it on July four, because that was the day the
Declaration of Independence, that famous document outlining America's arguments for
seceding on the British Empire was dated, was dated on
July four, seventy six. Also, um, despite what popular musical
numbers would have you believe, it's mostly likely that that
most of the representatives did not sign the Declaration of
(02:14):
Independence that day. They probably did it on August two,
seventeen seventy six. But never mind all that, The fourth
of July is when the US celebrates Independence Day. Whenever
it happened doesn't matter. It just matters when we celebrate it.
And in the past on tech stuff, I've tried to
time vaguely related topics to that date. Whenever we've published
(02:36):
on or around the fourth of July. We've talked about
the tech of say Independence Day, the movie, or like Fireworks,
and today I want to talk about a Disneyland attraction
called Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln, because I feel that's
sort of quintessentially American, even though Lincoln was our sixteenth
president and governed in the nineteenth century, not the eighteenth century,
(02:59):
but never America, right, And you know, they're talking about Disneyland,
something that is truly a piece of Americana, and Great
Moments with Mr Lincoln is located on Main Street, USA.
That was Walt Disney's monument to the classic Americana, a
small town almost like an America that never was an
(03:21):
idealized America. So I figured it was a good topic
to cover in this episode. Now I have done an
episode about audio animatronics in the past, and I'm going
to be covering some of that ground again here. But
we're specifically looking at the development of the Mr. Lincoln
attraction in this episode, so I'm not going to focus
(03:43):
too much on the other stuff. I'll have some stuff
to say about some of the predecessors, because that's important
to understand in order to figure out how Mr Lincoln worked.
So if you're unfamiliar with the attraction Great Moments with
Mr Lincoln, here's kind of how it goes. You would
go into a building, it's the Ground and Opera House
on Main Street, USA and Disneyland, and you would see
(04:04):
a little pre show piece before going into a theater,
and you'd sit down. You get another little film, and
then a screen would lift up and you would see
seated center stage, the audio animatronic figure of Abraham Lincoln,
and then Abraham Lincoln stands up out of his chair
and speaks to the crowd. And the content and the
(04:26):
technology of the attraction have changed several times throughout the years.
In fact, these days you wouldn't call it audio animatronics
at all. It's the only reason anyone would refer to
it that way is just because that's what the technology
had been called for years and years and years. But
the current incarnation at Disneyland isn't really audio animatronic. It's
(04:47):
not working on that same system. Now, before I talk
about how it works, let's go into the history of
audio animatronics and the development of this attraction in particular,
because I think it's pretty fascinating to learn about not
just the technology side, but the business side of this.
So first we got to go back to nineteen That's
when Walt Disney took his family on a vacation in Europe,
(05:09):
and on that trip, Disney got enamored with some clockwork
mechanical toys, including a mechanical little bird. You would wind
it up and it with tweet and flap its wings
and would move in a pretty convincing way. And he
was inspired by that to take these toys back to
his his folks over at Walt Disney Studios and say,
(05:30):
you know, we've we've animated stuff on film. We've taken
cells and we've drawn pictures on them, and we've taken
photographs of that and turned it into a film where
it looks like the inanimate is moving around. What if
we did something similar, but we did it in the
real world. We brought it into the three dimensions around us,
and make make this idea sort of a grander scale.
(05:53):
We're gonna take these little mechanical elements that I've seen
here and make it something much bigger. So he returned
to California, he brought ideas to his team of developers
that we now today would call imagineers. That's a portmanteau
of imagination and engineer, And he said, what if we
were to make something like this but bigger? So in
nineteen fifty one he gave an assignment to two of
(06:15):
his employees, Roger Braggy and Wattle Rogers Uh. Roger Braggy
was born in nineteen o eight in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and
he attended a vocational school and trained in machine shop work.
He would relocate to Los Angeles and he found a
lot of work in the film industry. He even developed
technologies like a rear projection system for major movie studios,
(06:39):
and in nineteen thirty nine he got an invitation to
join the Walt Disney Studio as a precision machinist. One
of his first jobs he had was to install the
multiplane animation camera in the studio's brand new Burbank location. Now,
this was a camera that consisted of not just a
film camera, but also a massive frame, and that frame
(07:00):
could hold multiple layers or planes of an animated cell.
So you might have a foreground image, you might have
a main image, you might have a couple of background images,
and they would all be held at different heights relative
to this camera lens, and then by moving the frames
either closer to or further away from the camera, you
(07:21):
can make elements within that animated scene appear to move
at different speeds and give this illusion of depth. So
it's almost like you're zooming in through an animated scene.
And that was something that was really really innovative. Well, also,
I should mention that Disney did not necessarily invent that
one of his former employees more or less invented this
(07:43):
approach of eyeworks, but that's a different story. Disney made
extensive use of that technology when his studio made snow
White in the Seven Dwarfs. By nine, Broggy had been
promoted to the head of the studio machine shot, and
when Walt started thinking about building a theme park, Braggy
was one of his go to engineers for attractions. Rogers, meanwhile,
(08:06):
was born in nineteen nineteen in Stratton, Colorado, and he
studied art at an institute in Los Angeles. He became
proficient in lots of different areas of art, including sculpting,
so he joined the Walt Disney studio also in nineteen
thirty nine, along with Braggy and Early on, he worked
primarily as an animator on films like Pinocchio, Bambi, Cinderella,
(08:29):
and Peter Pan. He also created props and managers for
the studio's live action films, and like Braggy, he would
be invited by Disney to work on attractions for the
upcoming Disneyland theme park. So Walt Disney comes up to
these two guys and he says, I want you to
build me a figure approximately nine inches tall of a
man that can move around like a human can, so
(08:53):
sort of like a puppet, but not puppeteered by any
person in real time. It would be an entire mechanical
system that would be able to do this, and it
was called Project little Man, so as to build a
nine inch human figure that could move and and move
its mouth as if it's talking, and be able to
synchronize that with an actual voice track. And essentially he
(09:17):
just wanted to bring that concept of animation into the
real world. Buddy Ebsen, the actor who would become Jed
Clampett in The Beverly Hillbillies, would come into the studio
and he did this whole song and dance routine in
front of a screen that was just a bunch of
grid lines so that the animators had a reference they
could work from. And Buddy would later say of Disney, quote,
(09:38):
he took me to a room where there were these
seven little guys with aprons and thick glasses working on
a contrivance that pulled wires, and a little mechanical man
that moved his arms, legs, head, and mouth end quote.
So the two engineers lead this team. They used cables
and cams and hinged limbs to create sort of a
rudimentary muscle and skeletal system for this little figure, and
(10:01):
the machinery would end up being underneath this little figures stage,
so the whole thing was actually quite large. The figure
was only nine inches tall, but the whole system was
really big, and it wasn't really that dissimilar to a puppet,
except again, the puppeteer was mechanical, not a human, and
it was it was. It kind of worked, but it
(10:24):
wasn't practical. Later, when it came time to look into
making audio animatronics for theme park attractions, Broggy would actually
go to All Disney and say that we should really
create larger life sized figures. It would actually make it
easier because you could fit a lot of the elements
inside the figure itself instead of having to find places
in the environment to hide all the mechanisms that would
(10:48):
make the figure move. So this would serve as the
genesis for a new field of innovation in Disney, which
was audio and animatronics. The term is defined as being
or consisting of a lifelike electro mechanical figure of a
person or animal that has synchronized movement and sound. Although
to be fair with the audio animatronics, it's synchronized to
(11:11):
sound and it's not the sound you hear. Ha ha.
So Walt Disney has this idea. He says, you know,
we've got Disneyland. We're opening that up. What have we
created a restaurant. Let's make a Chinese restaurant. And in
the lobby of this Chinese restaurant is a figure of
a little, old wise Chinese man who will dispense words
(11:32):
of wisdom like Confucius. But it's not an actor. It's
actually gonna be a mechanical man. And the team got
to work designing that kind of a figure. And according
to Rogers, he said, quote you could always tell who
was working on the job because they never looked at
your eyes when you were talking to them. They were
always looking at your mouth end quote. They did eventually
build a mock up of a head for this figure,
(11:54):
but they didn't get much further than that. Disney had
decided to drop that idea for something else, and that
idea would eventually be the Enchanted Teaking Room, which we
will come back to in just a minute now. Disneyland
open on July sev In nineteen fifty nine, Walt Disney
was working on the design of a new land that
(12:14):
would go in Disneyland. He was already thinking about how
to build it out more and originally this was going
to be called Liberty Street. It would run parallel to
Main Street and would feature an attraction called One Nation
Under God. In this attraction, the audience would be treated
to a view of audio animatronic figures of every single
president up on stage. Every president would be life sized,
(12:38):
would have lifelike motions, and would be animated. So he
tasked his engineers to get to work on that concept,
and they had to start somewhere. So the team chose
Abraham Lincoln as their first figure, and they were able
to get a copy of a life mask that Lincoln
had made back before he was president. They got a
copy of this, and a sculptor named Blaine Gibson, who
(13:01):
would go on to create most of the faces for
Disney Animatronics, would use that as a guide to create
the mask for the Lincoln animatronic. By nineteen sixty one,
they had an early build of the Abraham Lincoln figure,
and it had some limited mobility and expressions. It could
be controlled or manipulated if you prefer, live, by an
(13:22):
actual UH engineer, so it wasn't automated yet. So it
was not the finished product, but it was apparently quite
impressive even early on, because in nineteen sixty two the
team received a visit from a guy named Robert Moses.
Robert Moses was a public official from New York City
who held numerous positions, none of them publicly elected, and
(13:44):
had become incredibly influential. He was responsible for massive projects
in New York and some of them were controversial, and
he was in charge of getting New York City ready
for a World's Fair to be held there in nineteen
sixty four. So Disney introduced Moses to the audio animatronic
(14:05):
Abraham Lincoln. An engineer controlled Lincoln to make him stand
up and reach out his arm to shake Moses hand,
and Moses was so impressed they declared the World's Fair
would absolutely have to feature this technology, which would require
the team to step up their work if they were
to meet that particular deadline. How did they do it, Well,
(14:25):
I'll tell you in just a moment, but first let's
take a quick break to thank our sponsor. So the
team had a goal get a show featuring an audio
animatronic Abraham Lincoln ready to go for the New York
(14:48):
World's Fair in nineteen sixty four, that was thirteen months away.
A few other components outside the technology fell into place
to make this possible. Because the tech part was just
one aspect, another part was where is the money going
to come from? So part of that piece of the
puzzle was from the Illinois Commission. They had decided that
(15:11):
the theme for the Illinois pavilion at the World's Fair
would be the Land of Lincoln. The provisional chairman for
this commission was a guy named Fairfax Cone. So Moses
tells Cone, you gotta go and see what Walt Disney
is working on out in California. It's gonna make you
flip your lid. And Cone goes out there and ends
(15:34):
up meeting with Disney. He sees the Lincoln figure for himself,
he too, is really impressed. He would then recommend to
the Permanent Commission chairman, who was a Lincoln historian named
Ralph Newman, that he incorporate the Abraham Lincoln figure in
the Illinois Pavilion. So Newman would end up going out
and meeting with Walt Disney and he would see the
(15:56):
Abraham Lincoln figure and he too was blown away, and
he said, yes, we have absolutely need this. So the
next step was convincing the Governor of Illinois, Otto Kerner,
that this, in fact was something that the state should
sponsor in order to get that out to the New
York World's Fair. So Otto Kerner met with Walt Disney
and he was convinced that the Lincoln figure would be
(16:18):
a great addition to the Illinois Pavilion. But the expense
of the project was pretty high. Originally Disney said a
million dollars and that was kind of a figure that
was out of nowhere, but that was the point the
starting point for negotiations. Eventually, the Disney company would say
we can go as low as six hundred thousand dollars,
(16:40):
and we could divide that up over two years, so
the first year would be three fifty thousand dollars and
the second year would be two hundred fifty thou dollars.
But that was kind of putting Illinois in a tough position.
Kerner was having to negotiate not just with Walt Disney,
but with Moses as well in the World's Fair, because
(17:03):
Moses was demanding that any exhibitor at the World's Fair
had to go through him and his departments for things
like power and set up and tear down and all
these other things that had fees associated with them. So
the state was going to have to pay two different
groups an enormous amount of money in order for this
(17:24):
to happen. But Newman knew that Moses was really impressed
by this Lincoln figure, and Newman and Disney together met
with Moses talked to him about this stuff. They were
trying to convince him to uh to lower some of
the World's Fair requirements in order to make this happen.
And Newman in fact even let it slip that he
(17:48):
was going off to meet with some people over the
United Nations to make it sound like things were super
important on his end, and eventually Moses decided to renegotiate,
and so they gave several concessions to the state of Illinois, said,
you're not gonna have to pay these fees. These fees,
you're going to have a maximum amount of five thousand
dollars for something that could have cost you ten times
(18:10):
as much, and even agreed to a two hundred fifty
thousand dollars stipend to help fund the Lincoln attraction, because
that's how impressed Moses was of it. So Disney had
cut that deal where the nineteen sixty four rental fee
for Lincoln would be three fifty thousand dollars, and then
(18:31):
there was the option for the state to extend that
through nineteen six two hundred fifty thousand dollars. After Illinois
got that two d fifty thousand dollars stipend from the fair,
that men they got Lincoln for the low low price
of a hundred grand for that first year, and it
also marked the one and only time in the World's
(18:51):
Fair history that the fair subsidized and exhibit. The state
gave Disney the official news in August nineteen sixty three,
so nineteen four World's Fair was right around the corner.
It was super fast for them to get this turned around. Meanwhile,
the team was really hard at work to try and
put the show together. Much of the groundwork for audio
(19:14):
animatronics had already been laid by an electrician named Lee Adams,
who created the giant squid featured in the film twenty
Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. A lot of people point
at that as being the first true animatronic figure under Disney,
although of course that wasn't used as an attraction. It
was used in a movie. The tentacles of the massive
(19:35):
squid in that film were actually kind of like balloons,
so you would use a pneumatic system to pump air
into the tentacles. That would cause them to unfold, and
allowing the air to escape would cause the tentacles to
curl back up, so controlling the airflow would allow you
to puppeteer this giant squid. Disney Imagineers had also already
(19:57):
created a theme park attraction used audio animatronic technology at
that point. The Enchanted Tiki Room, which I mentioned earlier,
was the first attraction to feature audio animatronics, and it
opened at Disneyland in nineteen sixty three. It was originally
going to be that Chinese restaurant, then they decided to
change it to a Polynesian themed restaurant, and then they
(20:20):
decided to eventually drop the restaurant angle entirely and just
making an attraction. So how does it actually work well?
With the Tiki birds, everything was pretty much binary. Every
single element, every moving element had a neutral position. So
let's say that we're looking at one of the four
hosts that are macaus, and you're looking at the beaks
(20:41):
of those macaus. The neutral position would be a closed beak.
So if nothing is going to the the that particular bird,
it's beak should be closed. A pneumatic system, which is
one that uses compressed air to do work, would activate
a solenoid would actually act fate and allow compressed air
to move through to force the mouth to an open position.
(21:04):
So if you were to do that manually, you would
pull a trigger and that would open up a valve
and that would cause air to flow through the system
to the appropriate element, causing the beak to open. But
how was this done automatically, not with an actual human
operating the thing? Well, the secret was an ultrasonic tones
recorded onto magnetic tape, like like the kind of tape
(21:27):
you would use in a real too real tape machine
or even a cassette player. Disney used tape that was
an inch wide when it was first doing this, and
that inch wide tape that they used in in the
Enchantiqui room had fourteen tracks that you could lay on
that one inch of tape, and you could put up
to sixteen signals on a single track. So you would
(21:49):
record these ultrasonic frequencies on the tape and when played back,
they would cause metallic reads to vibrate in various relays.
When the reds vibrated, they would close a circuit. That
circuit would send an electric current to a solenoid valve
that would allow air to flow to the appropriate feature
(22:11):
like that mccause beak, causing it to open. And because
the system worked off these audio cues, Disney called the
tech audio animatronics. Even though the audio in question is
inaudible to humans, right, we don't hear in those ultrasonic frequencies,
So you could record an audible track that's within human
hearing on that same tape, and that way you synchronize
(22:35):
the ultrasonic frequencies that give the commands to the various
elements in the animatronic figure with the audio track, and
that way you can have the birds sort of. I
was gonna say lip sync, but I guess it's more
like beak sinc to the audio track you recorded. Some
of the audio animatronic technology Mr. Lincoln dependent upon was similar.
(22:59):
They had the pneumatic switches for certain parts of the
Lincoln animatronic, but only for the smaller features, because pneumatics
would not supply the power needed to move some of
the larger elements, like arms. A person's arms are pretty
big and the the air would not be sufficiently powered
to move them. Also, if you did use air and
(23:21):
you did use enough compression to make the arms move,
they would shoot around like like like Lincoln was some
sort of crazy karate monster. That would not work very
well for the attraction. So instead they put hydraulic systems
in place for some of the larger elements. Hydraulics use
liquids and they use pressure to move the liquids around,
(23:42):
and the liquids act as a source of mechanical force.
So it's similar to pneumatics, but With hydraulics, you can
do a lot more. You can move much heavier things,
and you can do so in a controlled way with
the right amount of pressure. So in theory, Mr Lincoln
would move according to the ultrasonic recordings on that magnetic tape,
and the playback would cause the reeds to vibrate, completing
(24:04):
circuits and forcing either air or liquid through the relevant
tubes to make Lincoln move in the appropriate way in theory.
Oh and um, let's talk about solenoids really quickly. I
mentioned it before. A solenoid valve. A solenoid is a
cylindrical coil of conductive wire, and when you pass a
current through the wire, it generates a magnetic field. You know,
(24:25):
this is a basic principle of electromagnetism. A solenoid valve
has a solenoid with a movable ferromagnetic core in the
center of this coil, so the core can move uh
laterally through this coil. The core is typically called a plunger,
so when there's no current running through the coil, the
(24:45):
plunger is in a rest position. Typically that means it's
closing off an opening that's otherwise inside this valve. So
the valve is closed. When you run a current through
the coil, it creates a magnetic field that pulls the
core out of its rest position. It lifts the plunger,
it opens the valve, so the solenoid valve acts as
the switch for the pneumatic and hydraulic elements. In addition,
(25:09):
the team began to develop a technology to make movements
more smooth and natural and less just on off or jerky.
You know, you didn't want your your positions to all
be one or two. You wanted to have a range,
especially once you started to get too larger figures, human
sized figures. So to do that, they need to create
systems that could respond to variable voltage. Increasing or decreasing
(25:33):
the voltage would activate the complex movements. So instead of
going from one to two, you could adjust the voltage slightly,
make it move from one to one point three or
one point seven, and you're not going all the way
to your final possible position. And that ended up creating
(25:53):
a much greater range of movements. Performers would use either
a potentiometer joystick for every single joint to send varying
voltages to the control system for that joint, or later
on they created harnesses, and the harnesses were able to
capture more complicated, coordinated movements by measuring voltage changes at
(26:14):
all of the different various joints. Otherwise, doing something seemingly
as simple as making the figure lifting arm and point
with its hand would be incredibly difficult because every single
joint needed its own control system under the potentiometer joystick approach,
and you had to coordinate all of that correctly, right.
You couldn't just have one person move the arm and
(26:37):
then rewind it back, and then try and move the
wrist and then try and move the hand. All of
that was really complicated. So once you rehearse all this,
whether it was with the potentiometer joysticks or with the harness,
you would then record this in the form of audio
tones overlaid on thirty five millimeter film stock, and each
joint would take up a real film and then all
(27:00):
the reels would be recorded to a master tape. Lincoln
would use both the potentiometer approach and the harness approach.
They got an actor named Royal Dano to provide the
voice for Abraham Lincoln. That would actually get some criticism
later on, where people said that his voice was not
appropriate for President Lincoln because Lincoln's voice was said to
have kind of a high tenor pitch to it and
(27:24):
Royal Dano's voice had a lower pitch to it. But
you know, some people argue that that was a show stopper,
and other people say it wasn't such a big deal.
Near mileage berries. One story does say that during an
early trial run of the show, one of the hydraulic
hoses inside the Lincoln figure ruptured. The valve itself actually broke,
(27:48):
and that red hydraulic fluid began to leak out and
staying Lincoln's shirt, prompting one of the guests to joke
that perhaps they were commemorating Lincoln's assassination, which did not
may Walt Disney laugh. He then told his team to
switch to clear hydraulic fluid, which they did from that
point forward. Then there were times when the valves didn't
(28:08):
operate properly. They would cause the figure to jerk around unpredictably,
which put more pressure on the rest of the system.
The technical issues forced the team to delay the opening
of the Lincoln exhibit at the New York World's Fair
for about two weeks while they worked out all the bugs.
But when it did open, it was so convincing that
some people were certain that the figure was a human
actor in a costume and not an audio animatronic figure. Now,
(28:33):
when we come back, I'll tell the rest of this
story as well as what has happened since Mr Lincoln
debut at Disneyland. But first let's take another quick break
to thank our sponsor. So while the World's Fair was
going on, Disneyland prepared its own identical attraction. The Great
(28:57):
Moments with Mr. Lincoln attraction would open in the park
on July eighth, nineteen sixty six, and it would use
pretty much an exact copy of the World's Fair exhibit.
Both would operate around at the same time for a while,
so you had the same show happening on both coasts.
And the Disneyland version was sponsored originally by Lincoln Savings
and Loan, not the state of Illinois. It was housed
(29:20):
in the Opera House on Main Street, USA. Disneyland never
built Liberty Street, but they did decide to repurpose the
Opera House that was one of the first, if not
the very first building constructed for Disneyland, and during the
construction phase for the park, it had served as sort
of a carpentry shop and workshop. Back in those days,
Disneyland attractions were divided up into various categories related to
(29:43):
how elaborate the attraction was. And this is where you
get terms like a ticket or a ticket attraction, and
that just referred to the level, uh that that attraction
belonged to. A ticket attractions were simple attractions, little bitty
things you you know, weren't weren't huge crowd pleasers. Maybe
(30:05):
it's a simple ride on Main Street, like a trolley ride.
But if you wanted to write something a little more advanced,
then you needed to be ticket or see ticket and
the really big ticket items were e tickets. Great Moments
with Mr Lincoln was different. It was absolutely free once
you got into the Disneyland park. Ticket books did often
contain a coupon for the attraction, but that was just
(30:26):
meant to help encourage people to go see it. There
was no need to actually have a coupon in order
to see it. You could just walk right in. The
original script for Great Moments with Mr Lincoln included snippets
from various speeches Lincoln gave throughout his life. The general
theme was freedom Liberty and Independence, and it would stay
that way until January one, nineteen seventy three. At that point,
(30:48):
Disneyland closed the attraction to convert it into a new
exhibit called The Walt Disney Story that was to honor
the life of Walt Disney himself, as he had passed
away several years earlier from lung cancer. The Walt Disney
Story was a twenty eight minute film about the life
of Disney and his work, but guests were upset at
the removal of Mr Lincoln, and so in nineteen seventy five,
(31:09):
the attraction was revised as The Walt Disney Story featuring
Great Moments with Mr Lincoln, and it became a combined exhibit.
The pre show area was dedicated to Disney's life, and
the theater was back to the Lincoln Show. In the
late nineteen sixties, Disney Imagineers developed the Digital Animation Control System,
also known as DAX D A c S. This system
(31:31):
could record control commands onto a disk rather than on
magnetic tape. That meant that programming could be done from
a control board with various buttons, switches, and dials, rather
than with a harness or a potentiometer. Joystick, and elements
could easily be deleted or overwritten, so you didn't have
to worry about doing endless takes to get just the
(31:53):
right performance. You could just fix any mistakes you made
as you went along. In the nineteen eighties, imagineers introduced
in another system called compliance. Compliance was meant to reduce
the wear and tear on animatronics as well as to
make them more show worthy. If an animatronic has to
do a quick move, let's say it's waving and it's
(32:13):
moving its arm from left to right. Once it reached
the end of its movement, it would frequently caused the
entire figure to vibrate. Usually get that little robotic vibration
at the end of a movement. If you ever see
anyone dance the robot, you know what I'm talking about.
There's that little jerky motion when you get to the end. Well,
Compliance would allow limbs to move just a little past
(32:33):
their normal end location, and that was in order to
be a shock absorber. So think about where your wave
would end and the the animatronic would start to slow down,
but it would continue to allow itself to move past
that point for just a little bit, so that it
had more of a gradual slowing instead of just a
(32:54):
sudden stop, and you wouldn't get that robotic shake great
moments with this or Lincoln underwent a refurbishment and there
was a new animatronic Lincoln installed that used more of
this technology. It also had updated artificial skin, It had
a new costume, it had more advanced digital electronics. But
that one closed in two thousand for another refurbishment, and
(33:17):
two thousand one it reopened and Lincoln now delivered the
Gettysburg Address instead of this sort of sort of grouping
of various clips from various speeches, so now he gave
the Gettysburg Address, And that version closed again in two
thousand five because Disneyland was celebrating its fiftieth anniversary and
the theater was given over to a special attraction about
(33:40):
the history of the park itself. That kept on going
until two thousand nine, and then Lincoln came back again.
The newest version is an electric animatronic figure. The speech
Lincoln gives is more or less the original one from
the nineteen sixty four World's Fair. Does have a few
edits to it. It's not quite as long as the
original speech was, so it's more like the version, though
(34:03):
not exactly the same. In two thousand thirteen, Disney would
shut down its internal division called MAPO M A p O.
Some people say that stands for Mary Poppins because it
was formed after the success of the movie Mary Poppins O.
They say, no, it's manufacturing and production. That was where
the name came from. But anyway, whether whatever its name
(34:25):
came from, that was the division that was responsible for
producing audio animatronics and then later electronic version of animatronics.
All of them came out from there for the most part,
and toward the end of its run, more and more
of those projects we're getting outsourced to other companies. So
in twenty thirteen the company decided, you know, we're just
(34:48):
gonna go with this contract approach. We're not going to
build them in house anymore. And the company that's mostly
in charge of developing animatronics for Disney is Garner Holt Productions.
That company is located out of California. It also makes
animatronics for lots of other clients, not just Disney, but
(35:10):
that's the company that's mostly responsible for them and has
had incredible demonstrations of really complicated, sophisticated animatronic figures that
are eerily realistic, like we're talking Uncanny Valley style realistic,
including an Abraham Lincoln bust that makes faces that I
(35:32):
would say start to lean toward the scary. But you
have to see the videos to to understand what I'm
talking about. Anyway, that wraps up the great moments with
Mr Lincoln's story. It's fascinating to me to see how
an idea could go from just hypothesis to an actual,
(35:54):
working attraction. How do you go from I want this
thing to exist to making it so. Walt Disney's imagineers
have a reputation for doing that time and time again,
and the attractions that Disney are are evidence of that fact,
(36:14):
And as a lifelong Disney fan, I have a great
appreciation for that, although I have seen comparable work at
other parks. I mean, there are plenty of other places
that have used that same philosophy to great effect, like
Universal's Islands of Adventure, for example. But that wraps up
this fourth of July episode. If you have any suggestions
(36:34):
for future episodes of tech Stuff, let me know. Why
don't you send me an email The addresses tech Stuff
at how stuff works dot com. Or drop me a
line on Facebook or Twitter. The handle of both of
those is tech Stuff hs W. Don't forget to follow
us on Instagram, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Well,
(36:55):
I hope you enjoyed that Classic episode. I guess Classic
is a little much right, came out in two thousand eighteen.
I hope you enjoyed that episode from three years ago.
And uh, I look forward chatting with you guys later
this week about tech News and about Warner because that
story continues to go into really interesting and weird places.
(37:16):
A lot of different players involved in that Warner story.
And if you thought the first two parts were complicated,
well just wait to have part number three. And with that,
I'm going to head off and enjoy the rest of
the day. I hope you do too, whether you are
in the United States and you know, observing Memorial Day
(37:38):
or wherever in the world you may be. May you
have a safe and pleasant day, and I'll talk to
you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart
Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit
the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
(37:59):
listen to your favorite jows
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Radio and
I love all things tech. And it is Monday, May
Memorial Day, which means it's holiday here in the United States,
(00:27):
and because of that, I am actually taking the day off,
and so rather than having a new episode for you,
this is an episode that originally aired on a different holiday,
the fourth of July, back in two thousand eighteen, and
it is titled tech Stuff Moments with Mr Lincoln because
(00:47):
I think of Memorial Days being like the beginning of
the summer season, and for me, summers were often coupled
with trips to Disney World because I lived in Georgia,
Florida was not that away, and my sister and I
were fanatics. So sit back, enjoy this episode, and on Wednesday,
(01:08):
We're going to continue our story about the very complicated
evolution of Warner Medium, and I'll chat with you a
little bit at the end of the episode. This episode
is to publish on the fourth of July two thousand eighteen,
and here in the United States that date is treated
with some reverence as we consider it Independence Day. And
(01:31):
back in seventeen seventy six, the Continental Congress representing the
thirteen colonies of the America's declared those colonies a new
nation called the United States of America. But that actually
happened on July two, seventeen seventy six. John Adams was
convinced that that was going to be the day we
all celebrated. As it turned out, we decided to do
(01:52):
it on July four, because that was the day the
Declaration of Independence, that famous document outlining America's arguments for
seceding on the British Empire was dated, was dated on
July four, seventy six. Also, um, despite what popular musical
numbers would have you believe, it's mostly likely that that
most of the representatives did not sign the Declaration of
(02:14):
Independence that day. They probably did it on August two,
seventeen seventy six. But never mind all that, The fourth
of July is when the US celebrates Independence Day. Whenever
it happened doesn't matter. It just matters when we celebrate it.
And in the past on tech stuff, I've tried to
time vaguely related topics to that date. Whenever we've published
(02:36):
on or around the fourth of July. We've talked about
the tech of say Independence Day, the movie, or like Fireworks,
and today I want to talk about a Disneyland attraction
called Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln, because I feel that's
sort of quintessentially American, even though Lincoln was our sixteenth
president and governed in the nineteenth century, not the eighteenth century,
(02:59):
but never America, right, And you know, they're talking about Disneyland,
something that is truly a piece of Americana, and Great
Moments with Mr Lincoln is located on Main Street, USA.
That was Walt Disney's monument to the classic Americana, a
small town almost like an America that never was an
(03:21):
idealized America. So I figured it was a good topic
to cover in this episode. Now I have done an
episode about audio animatronics in the past, and I'm going
to be covering some of that ground again here. But
we're specifically looking at the development of the Mr. Lincoln
attraction in this episode, so I'm not going to focus
(03:43):
too much on the other stuff. I'll have some stuff
to say about some of the predecessors, because that's important
to understand in order to figure out how Mr Lincoln worked.
So if you're unfamiliar with the attraction Great Moments with
Mr Lincoln, here's kind of how it goes. You would
go into a building, it's the Ground and Opera House
on Main Street, USA and Disneyland, and you would see
(04:04):
a little pre show piece before going into a theater,
and you'd sit down. You get another little film, and
then a screen would lift up and you would see
seated center stage, the audio animatronic figure of Abraham Lincoln,
and then Abraham Lincoln stands up out of his chair
and speaks to the crowd. And the content and the
(04:26):
technology of the attraction have changed several times throughout the years.
In fact, these days you wouldn't call it audio animatronics
at all. It's the only reason anyone would refer to
it that way is just because that's what the technology
had been called for years and years and years. But
the current incarnation at Disneyland isn't really audio animatronic. It's
(04:47):
not working on that same system. Now, before I talk
about how it works, let's go into the history of
audio animatronics and the development of this attraction in particular,
because I think it's pretty fascinating to learn about not
just the technology side, but the business side of this.
So first we got to go back to nineteen That's
when Walt Disney took his family on a vacation in Europe,
(05:09):
and on that trip, Disney got enamored with some clockwork
mechanical toys, including a mechanical little bird. You would wind
it up and it with tweet and flap its wings
and would move in a pretty convincing way. And he
was inspired by that to take these toys back to
his his folks over at Walt Disney Studios and say,
(05:30):
you know, we've we've animated stuff on film. We've taken
cells and we've drawn pictures on them, and we've taken
photographs of that and turned it into a film where
it looks like the inanimate is moving around. What if
we did something similar, but we did it in the
real world. We brought it into the three dimensions around us,
and make make this idea sort of a grander scale.
(05:53):
We're gonna take these little mechanical elements that I've seen
here and make it something much bigger. So he returned
to California, he brought ideas to his team of developers
that we now today would call imagineers. That's a portmanteau
of imagination and engineer, And he said, what if we
were to make something like this but bigger? So in
nineteen fifty one he gave an assignment to two of
(06:15):
his employees, Roger Braggy and Wattle Rogers Uh. Roger Braggy
was born in nineteen o eight in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and
he attended a vocational school and trained in machine shop work.
He would relocate to Los Angeles and he found a
lot of work in the film industry. He even developed
technologies like a rear projection system for major movie studios,
(06:39):
and in nineteen thirty nine he got an invitation to
join the Walt Disney Studio as a precision machinist. One
of his first jobs he had was to install the
multiplane animation camera in the studio's brand new Burbank location. Now,
this was a camera that consisted of not just a
film camera, but also a massive frame, and that frame
(07:00):
could hold multiple layers or planes of an animated cell.
So you might have a foreground image, you might have
a main image, you might have a couple of background images,
and they would all be held at different heights relative
to this camera lens, and then by moving the frames
either closer to or further away from the camera, you
(07:21):
can make elements within that animated scene appear to move
at different speeds and give this illusion of depth. So
it's almost like you're zooming in through an animated scene.
And that was something that was really really innovative. Well, also,
I should mention that Disney did not necessarily invent that
one of his former employees more or less invented this
(07:43):
approach of eyeworks, but that's a different story. Disney made
extensive use of that technology when his studio made snow
White in the Seven Dwarfs. By nine, Broggy had been
promoted to the head of the studio machine shot, and
when Walt started thinking about building a theme park, Braggy
was one of his go to engineers for attractions. Rogers, meanwhile,
(08:06):
was born in nineteen nineteen in Stratton, Colorado, and he
studied art at an institute in Los Angeles. He became
proficient in lots of different areas of art, including sculpting,
so he joined the Walt Disney studio also in nineteen
thirty nine, along with Braggy and Early on, he worked
primarily as an animator on films like Pinocchio, Bambi, Cinderella,
(08:29):
and Peter Pan. He also created props and managers for
the studio's live action films, and like Braggy, he would
be invited by Disney to work on attractions for the
upcoming Disneyland theme park. So Walt Disney comes up to
these two guys and he says, I want you to
build me a figure approximately nine inches tall of a
man that can move around like a human can, so
(08:53):
sort of like a puppet, but not puppeteered by any
person in real time. It would be an entire mechanical
system that would be able to do this, and it
was called Project little Man, so as to build a
nine inch human figure that could move and and move
its mouth as if it's talking, and be able to
synchronize that with an actual voice track. And essentially he
(09:17):
just wanted to bring that concept of animation into the
real world. Buddy Ebsen, the actor who would become Jed
Clampett in The Beverly Hillbillies, would come into the studio
and he did this whole song and dance routine in
front of a screen that was just a bunch of
grid lines so that the animators had a reference they
could work from. And Buddy would later say of Disney, quote,
(09:38):
he took me to a room where there were these
seven little guys with aprons and thick glasses working on
a contrivance that pulled wires, and a little mechanical man
that moved his arms, legs, head, and mouth end quote.
So the two engineers lead this team. They used cables
and cams and hinged limbs to create sort of a
rudimentary muscle and skeletal system for this little figure, and
(10:01):
the machinery would end up being underneath this little figures stage,
so the whole thing was actually quite large. The figure
was only nine inches tall, but the whole system was
really big, and it wasn't really that dissimilar to a puppet,
except again, the puppeteer was mechanical, not a human, and
it was it was. It kind of worked, but it
(10:24):
wasn't practical. Later, when it came time to look into
making audio animatronics for theme park attractions, Broggy would actually
go to All Disney and say that we should really
create larger life sized figures. It would actually make it
easier because you could fit a lot of the elements
inside the figure itself instead of having to find places
in the environment to hide all the mechanisms that would
(10:48):
make the figure move. So this would serve as the
genesis for a new field of innovation in Disney, which
was audio and animatronics. The term is defined as being
or consisting of a lifelike electro mechanical figure of a
person or animal that has synchronized movement and sound. Although
to be fair with the audio animatronics, it's synchronized to
(11:11):
sound and it's not the sound you hear. Ha ha.
So Walt Disney has this idea. He says, you know,
we've got Disneyland. We're opening that up. What have we
created a restaurant. Let's make a Chinese restaurant. And in
the lobby of this Chinese restaurant is a figure of
a little, old wise Chinese man who will dispense words
(11:32):
of wisdom like Confucius. But it's not an actor. It's
actually gonna be a mechanical man. And the team got
to work designing that kind of a figure. And according
to Rogers, he said, quote you could always tell who
was working on the job because they never looked at
your eyes when you were talking to them. They were
always looking at your mouth end quote. They did eventually
build a mock up of a head for this figure,
(11:54):
but they didn't get much further than that. Disney had
decided to drop that idea for something else, and that
idea would eventually be the Enchanted Teaking Room, which we
will come back to in just a minute now. Disneyland
open on July sev In nineteen fifty nine, Walt Disney
was working on the design of a new land that
(12:14):
would go in Disneyland. He was already thinking about how
to build it out more and originally this was going
to be called Liberty Street. It would run parallel to
Main Street and would feature an attraction called One Nation
Under God. In this attraction, the audience would be treated
to a view of audio animatronic figures of every single
president up on stage. Every president would be life sized,
(12:38):
would have lifelike motions, and would be animated. So he
tasked his engineers to get to work on that concept,
and they had to start somewhere. So the team chose
Abraham Lincoln as their first figure, and they were able
to get a copy of a life mask that Lincoln
had made back before he was president. They got a
copy of this, and a sculptor named Blaine Gibson, who
(13:01):
would go on to create most of the faces for
Disney Animatronics, would use that as a guide to create
the mask for the Lincoln animatronic. By nineteen sixty one,
they had an early build of the Abraham Lincoln figure,
and it had some limited mobility and expressions. It could
be controlled or manipulated if you prefer, live, by an
(13:22):
actual UH engineer, so it wasn't automated yet. So it
was not the finished product, but it was apparently quite
impressive even early on, because in nineteen sixty two the
team received a visit from a guy named Robert Moses.
Robert Moses was a public official from New York City
who held numerous positions, none of them publicly elected, and
(13:44):
had become incredibly influential. He was responsible for massive projects
in New York and some of them were controversial, and
he was in charge of getting New York City ready
for a World's Fair to be held there in nineteen
sixty four. So Disney introduced Moses to the audio animatronic
(14:05):
Abraham Lincoln. An engineer controlled Lincoln to make him stand
up and reach out his arm to shake Moses hand,
and Moses was so impressed they declared the World's Fair
would absolutely have to feature this technology, which would require
the team to step up their work if they were
to meet that particular deadline. How did they do it, Well,
(14:25):
I'll tell you in just a moment, but first let's
take a quick break to thank our sponsor. So the
team had a goal get a show featuring an audio
animatronic Abraham Lincoln ready to go for the New York
(14:48):
World's Fair in nineteen sixty four, that was thirteen months away.
A few other components outside the technology fell into place
to make this possible. Because the tech part was just
one aspect, another part was where is the money going
to come from? So part of that piece of the
puzzle was from the Illinois Commission. They had decided that
(15:11):
the theme for the Illinois pavilion at the World's Fair
would be the Land of Lincoln. The provisional chairman for
this commission was a guy named Fairfax Cone. So Moses
tells Cone, you gotta go and see what Walt Disney
is working on out in California. It's gonna make you
flip your lid. And Cone goes out there and ends
(15:34):
up meeting with Disney. He sees the Lincoln figure for himself,
he too, is really impressed. He would then recommend to
the Permanent Commission chairman, who was a Lincoln historian named
Ralph Newman, that he incorporate the Abraham Lincoln figure in
the Illinois Pavilion. So Newman would end up going out
and meeting with Walt Disney and he would see the
(15:56):
Abraham Lincoln figure and he too was blown away, and
he said, yes, we have absolutely need this. So the
next step was convincing the Governor of Illinois, Otto Kerner,
that this, in fact was something that the state should
sponsor in order to get that out to the New
York World's Fair. So Otto Kerner met with Walt Disney
and he was convinced that the Lincoln figure would be
(16:18):
a great addition to the Illinois Pavilion. But the expense
of the project was pretty high. Originally Disney said a
million dollars and that was kind of a figure that
was out of nowhere, but that was the point the
starting point for negotiations. Eventually, the Disney company would say
we can go as low as six hundred thousand dollars,
(16:40):
and we could divide that up over two years, so
the first year would be three fifty thousand dollars and
the second year would be two hundred fifty thou dollars.
But that was kind of putting Illinois in a tough position.
Kerner was having to negotiate not just with Walt Disney,
but with Moses as well in the World's Fair, because
(17:03):
Moses was demanding that any exhibitor at the World's Fair
had to go through him and his departments for things
like power and set up and tear down and all
these other things that had fees associated with them. So
the state was going to have to pay two different
groups an enormous amount of money in order for this
(17:24):
to happen. But Newman knew that Moses was really impressed
by this Lincoln figure, and Newman and Disney together met
with Moses talked to him about this stuff. They were
trying to convince him to uh to lower some of
the World's Fair requirements in order to make this happen.
And Newman in fact even let it slip that he
(17:48):
was going off to meet with some people over the
United Nations to make it sound like things were super
important on his end, and eventually Moses decided to renegotiate,
and so they gave several concessions to the state of Illinois, said,
you're not gonna have to pay these fees. These fees,
you're going to have a maximum amount of five thousand
dollars for something that could have cost you ten times
(18:10):
as much, and even agreed to a two hundred fifty
thousand dollars stipend to help fund the Lincoln attraction, because
that's how impressed Moses was of it. So Disney had
cut that deal where the nineteen sixty four rental fee
for Lincoln would be three fifty thousand dollars, and then
(18:31):
there was the option for the state to extend that
through nineteen six two hundred fifty thousand dollars. After Illinois
got that two d fifty thousand dollars stipend from the fair,
that men they got Lincoln for the low low price
of a hundred grand for that first year, and it
also marked the one and only time in the World's
(18:51):
Fair history that the fair subsidized and exhibit. The state
gave Disney the official news in August nineteen sixty three,
so nineteen four World's Fair was right around the corner.
It was super fast for them to get this turned around. Meanwhile,
the team was really hard at work to try and
put the show together. Much of the groundwork for audio
(19:14):
animatronics had already been laid by an electrician named Lee Adams,
who created the giant squid featured in the film twenty
Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. A lot of people point
at that as being the first true animatronic figure under Disney,
although of course that wasn't used as an attraction. It
was used in a movie. The tentacles of the massive
(19:35):
squid in that film were actually kind of like balloons,
so you would use a pneumatic system to pump air
into the tentacles. That would cause them to unfold, and
allowing the air to escape would cause the tentacles to
curl back up, so controlling the airflow would allow you
to puppeteer this giant squid. Disney Imagineers had also already
(19:57):
created a theme park attraction used audio animatronic technology at
that point. The Enchanted Tiki Room, which I mentioned earlier,
was the first attraction to feature audio animatronics, and it
opened at Disneyland in nineteen sixty three. It was originally
going to be that Chinese restaurant, then they decided to
change it to a Polynesian themed restaurant, and then they
(20:20):
decided to eventually drop the restaurant angle entirely and just
making an attraction. So how does it actually work well?
With the Tiki birds, everything was pretty much binary. Every
single element, every moving element had a neutral position. So
let's say that we're looking at one of the four
hosts that are macaus, and you're looking at the beaks
(20:41):
of those macaus. The neutral position would be a closed beak.
So if nothing is going to the the that particular bird,
it's beak should be closed. A pneumatic system, which is
one that uses compressed air to do work, would activate
a solenoid would actually act fate and allow compressed air
to move through to force the mouth to an open position.
(21:04):
So if you were to do that manually, you would
pull a trigger and that would open up a valve
and that would cause air to flow through the system
to the appropriate element, causing the beak to open. But
how was this done automatically, not with an actual human
operating the thing? Well, the secret was an ultrasonic tones
recorded onto magnetic tape, like like the kind of tape
(21:27):
you would use in a real too real tape machine
or even a cassette player. Disney used tape that was
an inch wide when it was first doing this, and
that inch wide tape that they used in in the
Enchantiqui room had fourteen tracks that you could lay on
that one inch of tape, and you could put up
to sixteen signals on a single track. So you would
(21:49):
record these ultrasonic frequencies on the tape and when played back,
they would cause metallic reads to vibrate in various relays.
When the reds vibrated, they would close a circuit. That
circuit would send an electric current to a solenoid valve
that would allow air to flow to the appropriate feature
(22:11):
like that mccause beak, causing it to open. And because
the system worked off these audio cues, Disney called the
tech audio animatronics. Even though the audio in question is
inaudible to humans, right, we don't hear in those ultrasonic frequencies,
So you could record an audible track that's within human
hearing on that same tape, and that way you synchronize
(22:35):
the ultrasonic frequencies that give the commands to the various
elements in the animatronic figure with the audio track, and
that way you can have the birds sort of. I
was gonna say lip sync, but I guess it's more
like beak sinc to the audio track you recorded. Some
of the audio animatronic technology Mr. Lincoln dependent upon was similar.
(22:59):
They had the pneumatic switches for certain parts of the
Lincoln animatronic, but only for the smaller features, because pneumatics
would not supply the power needed to move some of
the larger elements, like arms. A person's arms are pretty
big and the the air would not be sufficiently powered
to move them. Also, if you did use air and
(23:21):
you did use enough compression to make the arms move,
they would shoot around like like like Lincoln was some
sort of crazy karate monster. That would not work very
well for the attraction. So instead they put hydraulic systems
in place for some of the larger elements. Hydraulics use
liquids and they use pressure to move the liquids around,
(23:42):
and the liquids act as a source of mechanical force.
So it's similar to pneumatics, but With hydraulics, you can
do a lot more. You can move much heavier things,
and you can do so in a controlled way with
the right amount of pressure. So in theory, Mr Lincoln
would move according to the ultrasonic recordings on that magnetic tape,
and the playback would cause the reeds to vibrate, completing
(24:04):
circuits and forcing either air or liquid through the relevant
tubes to make Lincoln move in the appropriate way in theory.
Oh and um, let's talk about solenoids really quickly. I
mentioned it before. A solenoid valve. A solenoid is a
cylindrical coil of conductive wire, and when you pass a
current through the wire, it generates a magnetic field. You know,
(24:25):
this is a basic principle of electromagnetism. A solenoid valve
has a solenoid with a movable ferromagnetic core in the
center of this coil, so the core can move uh
laterally through this coil. The core is typically called a plunger,
so when there's no current running through the coil, the
(24:45):
plunger is in a rest position. Typically that means it's
closing off an opening that's otherwise inside this valve. So
the valve is closed. When you run a current through
the coil, it creates a magnetic field that pulls the
core out of its rest position. It lifts the plunger,
it opens the valve, so the solenoid valve acts as
the switch for the pneumatic and hydraulic elements. In addition,
(25:09):
the team began to develop a technology to make movements
more smooth and natural and less just on off or jerky.
You know, you didn't want your your positions to all
be one or two. You wanted to have a range,
especially once you started to get too larger figures, human
sized figures. So to do that, they need to create
systems that could respond to variable voltage. Increasing or decreasing
(25:33):
the voltage would activate the complex movements. So instead of
going from one to two, you could adjust the voltage slightly,
make it move from one to one point three or
one point seven, and you're not going all the way
to your final possible position. And that ended up creating
(25:53):
a much greater range of movements. Performers would use either
a potentiometer joystick for every single joint to send varying
voltages to the control system for that joint, or later
on they created harnesses, and the harnesses were able to
capture more complicated, coordinated movements by measuring voltage changes at
(26:14):
all of the different various joints. Otherwise, doing something seemingly
as simple as making the figure lifting arm and point
with its hand would be incredibly difficult because every single
joint needed its own control system under the potentiometer joystick approach,
and you had to coordinate all of that correctly, right.
You couldn't just have one person move the arm and
(26:37):
then rewind it back, and then try and move the
wrist and then try and move the hand. All of
that was really complicated. So once you rehearse all this,
whether it was with the potentiometer joysticks or with the harness,
you would then record this in the form of audio
tones overlaid on thirty five millimeter film stock, and each
joint would take up a real film and then all
(27:00):
the reels would be recorded to a master tape. Lincoln
would use both the potentiometer approach and the harness approach.
They got an actor named Royal Dano to provide the
voice for Abraham Lincoln. That would actually get some criticism
later on, where people said that his voice was not
appropriate for President Lincoln because Lincoln's voice was said to
have kind of a high tenor pitch to it and
(27:24):
Royal Dano's voice had a lower pitch to it. But
you know, some people argue that that was a show stopper,
and other people say it wasn't such a big deal.
Near mileage berries. One story does say that during an
early trial run of the show, one of the hydraulic
hoses inside the Lincoln figure ruptured. The valve itself actually broke,
(27:48):
and that red hydraulic fluid began to leak out and
staying Lincoln's shirt, prompting one of the guests to joke
that perhaps they were commemorating Lincoln's assassination, which did not
may Walt Disney laugh. He then told his team to
switch to clear hydraulic fluid, which they did from that
point forward. Then there were times when the valves didn't
(28:08):
operate properly. They would cause the figure to jerk around unpredictably,
which put more pressure on the rest of the system.
The technical issues forced the team to delay the opening
of the Lincoln exhibit at the New York World's Fair
for about two weeks while they worked out all the bugs.
But when it did open, it was so convincing that
some people were certain that the figure was a human
actor in a costume and not an audio animatronic figure. Now,
(28:33):
when we come back, I'll tell the rest of this
story as well as what has happened since Mr Lincoln
debut at Disneyland. But first let's take another quick break
to thank our sponsor. So while the World's Fair was
going on, Disneyland prepared its own identical attraction. The Great
(28:57):
Moments with Mr. Lincoln attraction would open in the park
on July eighth, nineteen sixty six, and it would use
pretty much an exact copy of the World's Fair exhibit.
Both would operate around at the same time for a while,
so you had the same show happening on both coasts.
And the Disneyland version was sponsored originally by Lincoln Savings
and Loan, not the state of Illinois. It was housed
(29:20):
in the Opera House on Main Street, USA. Disneyland never
built Liberty Street, but they did decide to repurpose the
Opera House that was one of the first, if not
the very first building constructed for Disneyland, and during the
construction phase for the park, it had served as sort
of a carpentry shop and workshop. Back in those days,
Disneyland attractions were divided up into various categories related to
(29:43):
how elaborate the attraction was. And this is where you
get terms like a ticket or a ticket attraction, and
that just referred to the level, uh that that attraction
belonged to. A ticket attractions were simple attractions, little bitty
things you you know, weren't weren't huge crowd pleasers. Maybe
(30:05):
it's a simple ride on Main Street, like a trolley ride.
But if you wanted to write something a little more advanced,
then you needed to be ticket or see ticket and
the really big ticket items were e tickets. Great Moments
with Mr Lincoln was different. It was absolutely free once
you got into the Disneyland park. Ticket books did often
contain a coupon for the attraction, but that was just
(30:26):
meant to help encourage people to go see it. There
was no need to actually have a coupon in order
to see it. You could just walk right in. The
original script for Great Moments with Mr Lincoln included snippets
from various speeches Lincoln gave throughout his life. The general
theme was freedom Liberty and Independence, and it would stay
that way until January one, nineteen seventy three. At that point,
(30:48):
Disneyland closed the attraction to convert it into a new
exhibit called The Walt Disney Story that was to honor
the life of Walt Disney himself, as he had passed
away several years earlier from lung cancer. The Walt Disney
Story was a twenty eight minute film about the life
of Disney and his work, but guests were upset at
the removal of Mr Lincoln, and so in nineteen seventy five,
(31:09):
the attraction was revised as The Walt Disney Story featuring
Great Moments with Mr Lincoln, and it became a combined exhibit.
The pre show area was dedicated to Disney's life, and
the theater was back to the Lincoln Show. In the
late nineteen sixties, Disney Imagineers developed the Digital Animation Control System,
also known as DAX D A c S. This system
(31:31):
could record control commands onto a disk rather than on
magnetic tape. That meant that programming could be done from
a control board with various buttons, switches, and dials, rather
than with a harness or a potentiometer. Joystick, and elements
could easily be deleted or overwritten, so you didn't have
to worry about doing endless takes to get just the
(31:53):
right performance. You could just fix any mistakes you made
as you went along. In the nineteen eighties, imagineers introduced
in another system called compliance. Compliance was meant to reduce
the wear and tear on animatronics as well as to
make them more show worthy. If an animatronic has to
do a quick move, let's say it's waving and it's
(32:13):
moving its arm from left to right. Once it reached
the end of its movement, it would frequently caused the
entire figure to vibrate. Usually get that little robotic vibration
at the end of a movement. If you ever see
anyone dance the robot, you know what I'm talking about.
There's that little jerky motion when you get to the end. Well,
Compliance would allow limbs to move just a little past
(32:33):
their normal end location, and that was in order to
be a shock absorber. So think about where your wave
would end and the the animatronic would start to slow down,
but it would continue to allow itself to move past
that point for just a little bit, so that it
had more of a gradual slowing instead of just a
(32:54):
sudden stop, and you wouldn't get that robotic shake great
moments with this or Lincoln underwent a refurbishment and there
was a new animatronic Lincoln installed that used more of
this technology. It also had updated artificial skin, It had
a new costume, it had more advanced digital electronics. But
that one closed in two thousand for another refurbishment, and
(33:17):
two thousand one it reopened and Lincoln now delivered the
Gettysburg Address instead of this sort of sort of grouping
of various clips from various speeches, so now he gave
the Gettysburg Address, And that version closed again in two
thousand five because Disneyland was celebrating its fiftieth anniversary and
the theater was given over to a special attraction about
(33:40):
the history of the park itself. That kept on going
until two thousand nine, and then Lincoln came back again.
The newest version is an electric animatronic figure. The speech
Lincoln gives is more or less the original one from
the nineteen sixty four World's Fair. Does have a few
edits to it. It's not quite as long as the
original speech was, so it's more like the version, though
(34:03):
not exactly the same. In two thousand thirteen, Disney would
shut down its internal division called MAPO M A p O.
Some people say that stands for Mary Poppins because it
was formed after the success of the movie Mary Poppins O.
They say, no, it's manufacturing and production. That was where
the name came from. But anyway, whether whatever its name
(34:25):
came from, that was the division that was responsible for
producing audio animatronics and then later electronic version of animatronics.
All of them came out from there for the most part,
and toward the end of its run, more and more
of those projects we're getting outsourced to other companies. So
in twenty thirteen the company decided, you know, we're just
(34:48):
gonna go with this contract approach. We're not going to
build them in house anymore. And the company that's mostly
in charge of developing animatronics for Disney is Garner Holt Productions.
That company is located out of California. It also makes
animatronics for lots of other clients, not just Disney, but
(35:10):
that's the company that's mostly responsible for them and has
had incredible demonstrations of really complicated, sophisticated animatronic figures that
are eerily realistic, like we're talking Uncanny Valley style realistic,
including an Abraham Lincoln bust that makes faces that I
(35:32):
would say start to lean toward the scary. But you
have to see the videos to to understand what I'm
talking about. Anyway, that wraps up the great moments with
Mr Lincoln's story. It's fascinating to me to see how
an idea could go from just hypothesis to an actual,
(35:54):
working attraction. How do you go from I want this
thing to exist to making it so. Walt Disney's imagineers
have a reputation for doing that time and time again,
and the attractions that Disney are are evidence of that fact,
(36:14):
And as a lifelong Disney fan, I have a great
appreciation for that, although I have seen comparable work at
other parks. I mean, there are plenty of other places
that have used that same philosophy to great effect, like
Universal's Islands of Adventure, for example. But that wraps up
this fourth of July episode. If you have any suggestions
(36:34):
for future episodes of tech Stuff, let me know. Why
don't you send me an email The addresses tech Stuff
at how stuff works dot com. Or drop me a
line on Facebook or Twitter. The handle of both of
those is tech Stuff hs W. Don't forget to follow
us on Instagram, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Well,
(36:55):
I hope you enjoyed that Classic episode. I guess Classic
is a little much right, came out in two thousand eighteen.
I hope you enjoyed that episode from three years ago.
And uh, I look forward chatting with you guys later
this week about tech News and about Warner because that
story continues to go into really interesting and weird places.
(37:16):
A lot of different players involved in that Warner story.
And if you thought the first two parts were complicated,
well just wait to have part number three. And with that,
I'm going to head off and enjoy the rest of
the day. I hope you do too, whether you are
in the United States and you know, observing Memorial Day
(37:38):
or wherever in the world you may be. May you
have a safe and pleasant day, and I'll talk to
you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart
Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit
the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
(37:59):
listen to your favorite jows
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
Popular Podcasts
United States of Kennedy
United States of Kennedy is a podcast about our cultural fascination with the Kennedy dynasty. Every week, hosts Lyra Smith and George Civeris go into one aspect of the Kennedy story.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com