TechStuff Classic: The Wonderful World of Audio Animatronics

It might be a small world after all, but how did Disney imagineers create the first audio animatronics and how do they work? Find out in the Tiki Tiki Tiki Tiki Tiki Room.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host job and Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the
tech are you?

Speaker 2 (00:20):
It is Friday.

Speaker 1 (00:21):
It's time for a classic episode of tech Stuff. This
one originally published back on June twenty third, twenty seventeen.
It is called the Wonderful world of Audio Animatronics, a
topic that is near and dear to my heart. I've
talked about it more than once on this show. Audio
animatrics have popped up a few times in different episodes.

(00:43):
This one is dedicated to the technology enjoy I am
an enormous Disney fanatic. I consider myself a Disney fan
of film, of television, of their theme parks. Probably not
necessarily in that or maybe film first then theme parks
than television, but I'm a huge fan of Disney stuff.

(01:05):
And recently, when I was on a trip to Los
Angeles to attend E three, I found myself with a
day with nothing to do. I had hoped to book
some meetings that did not happen, so instead of just
sitting around my hotel room feeling sorry for myself, in
a city where I really didn't know anybody.

Speaker 2 (01:25):
I decided to hop on down to.

Speaker 1 (01:27):
Orange County, California, that is the home of Disneyland, and
to go to the happiest place on Earth. It was
not my first time at Disneyland, but this was the
first time I'd ever gone to Disneyland completely on my own,
and I was a little worried about that, like, how
am I going to have fun just by myself. Turns out,
Disneyland did most of the work for me. I didn't

(01:48):
have to worry so much and had a great time.
But it also reminded me of how much I love
the technology and innovation that goes behind Disneyland. And honestly,
I could do maybe a dozen episodes about different technologies
that were pioneered or perfected at the Disney theme parks,
because there are a ton of them that Disney either

(02:10):
directly had a hand in developing or tweaked it in
a way to elevate it beyond what it used to be.

Speaker 2 (02:18):
There are plenty of examples of that.

Speaker 1 (02:20):
Today, we're specifically going to focus on audio animatronics. And
for those who have not heard what this term is
or have any idea what it means this was a
system that Walt Disney's company pioneered to create animated, physical,
three dimensional figures. So in a way, it's kind of

(02:41):
similar to puppetry, right with a puppet, typically you're manipulating
some sort of three dimensional figure. Beyond shadow puppets and
that sort of puppet tree, which is amazing all on
its own, I'm talking about your traditional hand puppets, rod puppets,
and marionettes. That involves manipulating and inanimate object in a

(03:01):
way to make it seem like it has life, that
has anima, and that you are using some sort of system,
whether it's rods or the puppet is essentially a glove puppet,
or you're using strings with a marionette to create this
illusion of movement. Well, Disney wanted to create something similar,
only these would run on a mechanical system that would

(03:25):
be painstakingly programmed rather than being under the direct control
of a human being. Those figures, when they're working properly,
would replicate those same motions and have the same performance
every single time. So the one hundredth time the character
is doing a show, it's exactly the way it was

(03:46):
the first time. So once you perfect a show, and
you program that into these these figures, you then have
the perfect show every single time you run it, assuming
everything's working properly. Now, anyone who has been to Disney
and times knows that's a big assumption to make.

Speaker 2 (04:02):
Sometimes things just don't do not work really well.

Speaker 1 (04:06):
I'll tell you about one of those times that I
experienced firsthand later on in this show. But the technology
itself is phenomenal, and even when it isn't working properly,
that does not take away from how amazing this tech
really is, especially when you consider what people had to
work with back in the fifties and early sixties when

(04:29):
they were first developing these systems. It is pretty amazing stuff. Now,
the reason why Disney wanted this in the first place
is he really loved the idea of creating a real,
three dimensional experience, similar to what you would get with
an animated film. Animated films can be perfected right, you

(04:49):
can sit there and sketch it out and get it
just right before you release it as a movie. He
wanted to have that same sort of experience, but in
the real physical world. He was a stickler for perfection,
had very, very very high standards and the people who
worked for him. They also would end up having very
high standards. Everyone wanted to make sure that they met

(05:12):
Disney's expectations. Now you can find animatronic figures in lots
of Disney attractions, including the Enchanted Tiki Room, Pirates of
the Caribbean, the Haunted Mansion, Great Moments with Mister Lincoln,
the Hall of Presidents which would be over at the
Magic Kingdom, and Disney World, and tons more. There are
lots of examples. There are also some attractions that had

(05:35):
moving figures that didn't use the audio animatronic system. So,
for example, the Jungle Cruise ride has animated animal figures.
As you ride through, you see hippopotamuses and crocodiles and elephants,
but these were running on a very simple mechanical loop system.

(05:55):
They were not specifically audio animatronic.

Speaker 2 (05:58):
They worked on something that was a little.

Speaker 1 (06:00):
Less sophisticated than what would follow. So you have both
at Disney Parks. And I'm also sad that I can't
have Holly on this episode. Holly, who's one of the
co hosts of Stuff You Missed in History Class. Apart
from being a brilliant podcaster and an avid historian. She

(06:22):
is an enormous fan of all things Disney, and she
doesn't just give me a run for my money, she
leaves me in the dust. I love Disney, I have
been to the Disney parks dozens of times, but Holly
is a step beyond even my own obsession. So I

(06:43):
am sad that I can't have her here because I
am absolutely certain that she would be here dropping nuggets
of knowledge and trivia about these various Disney attractions that
I have yet to uncover.

Speaker 2 (06:55):
So maybe someday I will be.

Speaker 1 (06:57):
Able to have Holly on this show, and we'll do
it Disney oriented episode about some other type of tech.
In the meantime, there are some other podcasts we've done
that relate to Disney. I did one about the Pepper's
Ghost effect, which is used extensively.

Speaker 2 (07:15):
In the Haunted Mansion ride.

Speaker 1 (07:18):
Pepper's Ghost involves reflective surfaces and using lighting in a
way so that you can create the illusion of a
ghostly figure appearing before you, but what you're actually looking
at is a reflection of a physical figure that's just
lit in a very bright space, whereas you're in a
very dark space. The famous ballroom sequence in The Haunted

(07:41):
Mansion ride is a big example of Pepper's Ghost. So
you can go and check out those episodes of tech stuff.
If this is not enough Disney for you, all right,
let's talk specifically about what I wanted to concentrate on today.
To do that, we have to mention Walt Disney because
he's central to our story. He's kind of our main

(08:01):
character if this were a narrative. His full name was
Walter Elias Disney. He was born in nineteen oh one
in Illinois. He grew up in Missouri and attended high
school in Chicago. He was studying art primarily. When he
was sixteen, he dropped out to join the army, but
they rejected him because he was too young. He then

(08:24):
joined the Red Cross and was shipped over to Europe
and drove ambulances during World War One in France. Once
is his work with the Red Cross was done over there,
he moved back to the United States and he began
to work for an ad company. He was making film
and animations. Then he would go on to create his

(08:46):
own studio, which saw some modest success, but then it
ran into some hard times. Eventually he had to declare bankruptcy.
Under his first studio, but that he didn't give up.
He decided to make a go at it again, and
he and his brother Roy were able to co found

(09:07):
the Walt Disney Company, and from that moment forward, his
influence on tech has been considerable, from actual innovations and
technology to how creators can protect their intellectual property. Now,
not all of those influences have been met with enthusiasm.
Disney is one of the reasons why the United States
has such incredibly extensive intellectual property protection laws, stuff like

(09:33):
copyright and trademark laws that protect well beyond the lifetime
of the creator. A lot of that has to do
with Disney, as a corporate entity, lobbying to extend those parameters.
So Disney's impact on technology has been enormous in both

(09:54):
very specific ways that relate to particular technologies to the
way that the those technologies are protected under intellectual property law.
So Disney's use of sound with animation was a huge
leap forward in the nineteen twenties, Steamboat Willie being the
first cartoon with sound, and Disney himself voiced the iconic

(10:16):
character of Mickey Mouse, who struck a chord with viewers
and propelled Disney into enormous success. Over the following decades,
he would see a lot more success, including going into
feature link animation, which had not been done before, and
he was able to succeed with Snow White and the
Seven Dwarfs, and he also continued to see success with

(10:39):
short form stuff. Now, depending upon the account you read,
because there are a couple different versions of the story,
we actually begin either in France or the French Quarter
in New Orleans. The story goes that Disney was on
vacation with his family, and as he was on vacation,

(11:00):
and he decided to look into some antique shops and
he came across some various clockwork toys, wind up birds,
and that sort of thing. One specific toy he came
across in an antique shop was a bird cage that
had a mechanical bird inside of it that would chirp

(11:20):
and sing, and it would make little motions that you
could describe as being somewhat robotic. They were pretty primitive motions,
but you know, close enough to being an actual bird
that you knew what it was. It wasn't like it
looked like a monstrosity or anything like that. He thought
it was absolutely charming, and he felt that there was

(11:41):
a lot of potential there that he could use to
create three dimensional, physical animated figurines, potentially in a theme park.
That was one of the things he had been considering
around this time, although Disneyland had not yet become a reality.
So he brought the antique bird cage with the mechanical

(12:02):
bird inside of it back to his company, and he
went to some of his top thinkers over at the
Walt Disney Company and said, figure out how this thing works.
So they took it apart, and they took a look
at it, and they began to formulate ideas of how
they could create their own technology that would also allow

(12:24):
for animation of this type sort of this automated puppetry
that I was talking about now. Disney was really excited
about this prospect of having fully realized, three dimensional characters
capable of delivering a performance consistently. And Jack Gladish, who
was one of the engineers who would work on developing
audio animatronic technology, one of many, as it turns out,

(12:47):
would say that Disney once joked to him, I'm tired
of finicky actors. I want to develop a fully animated,
articulated human being to use in place of motion picture
actors and actresses. So this was Disney having a bit
of fun saying that, Hey, the real reason why I
want to develop this technology is because then I can
get rid of all these pesky humans that keep on

(13:09):
asking questions or having issues, whereas the animatronic ones will
just do what we tell them to do. And it's
kind of funny because there's another famous director who said
something very similar about Disney's cast. That famous director was
Alfred Hitchcock, who of course made incredible films of thriller

(13:33):
and psychological horror genres, things like The Birds and Psycho,
that sort of stuff. Alfred Hitchcock reportedly once said Disney
has the best casting. If he doesn't like an actor,
he just tears him up. So Hitchcock's joke and Disney's
joke were very similar in that respect, this idea of

(13:54):
the frustrated director who has to contend with the delicate
sensibilities of actors and actress. But in truth, Disney just
thought this was a really cool technology and he saw
a lot of potential in it, and he was always
looking at new ways to make use of the immense
talent he had attracted to the Walt Disney Company. Whereas

(14:14):
a lot of these people started off in the animation
department where they were working on various films and shorts
for Disney, they would eventually move into very different departments
and develop stuff like the actual Disneyland theme park disney
World later on, as well as visual effects and props
and sets and things of that nature for the various

(14:37):
live action films that Disney was getting into as well.
So you had people who started off as animators kind
of specializing in different areas. This was the dawn of
the imagineering age. There was no such thing as an
imagineer yet, no one had called it that, but eventually
Disney would end up referring to people who worked in

(15:01):
this sort of field as imagineers. They were thinking outside
the box, using engineering and creativity married together to create
really interesting experiences that you could not find anywhere else.
That was the value that Disney wanted to create to
justify charging people admission to come and.

Speaker 2 (15:21):
Check it out.

Speaker 1 (15:23):
So he was really excited about this potential opportunity, and
he had a lot of potential ways of using this
technology already at this time.

Speaker 2 (15:34):
He was thinking ahead.

Speaker 1 (15:36):
One of those was the fact that he wanted to
open up an amusement park that would eventually become Disneyland.
He thought, well, I need to have attractions for people
to come and experience at this park, and he thought
this technology could potentially provide some of those experiences.

Speaker 2 (15:53):
He also had.

Speaker 1 (15:54):
An ability to contribute to a massive event that would
happened in the mid nineteen sixties, That is, the nineteen
sixty four World's Fair in New York that was going
to end up requiring a lot of work on Disney's part.
Years in advance, he knew that he was going to
be providing four attractions for this World's Fair, and he

(16:19):
knew that the entire attention of the world was going
to be on New York for this event. So he
wanted to make absolutely certain that the attractions that his
company designed were phenomenal and unlike anything anyone had ever experienced,
and for that he needed to pioneer a new technology.
So all he had to do from that point forward

(16:42):
was just invent it. No big shakes, right, So to start.
One of the earliest experiments with this idea of animating
a three dimensional figure was what would eventually be called
the Day Dancing Man or the Little Man project. This

(17:05):
would be of a figure that measured about nine inches
tall and was meant to dance based upon this automated
system or mechanical system at least if not fully automated.
The story goes that Walt Disney approached the artist Ken Anderson,
who was working for Disney. Anderson would become instrumental for

(17:25):
the design and implementation of various elements in Disneyland, and
he said, you know what, You're working on a lot
of stuff, but I want to pay you out of
my own pocket for a project that I really believe
in that's not really a company project yet. I want
to create scenes that evoke the American way of life,

(17:48):
and Disney had a very idyllic sense of what that meant.
That small town feel that you get when you walk
down Main Street, USA, if you're ever at Disneyland or
disney World and you're walking down Main Street, especially if
you're doing it at a time when there's not a
huge crowd there, it evokes the sense of a small

(18:09):
town maybe early nineteen hundreds, around the time when Walt
Disney himself would have been growing up, where if things
appeared to be simple and elegant. That's what Disney wanted
to create, and so he talked to Anderson, said, I
want to have this idea of building this kind of
experience in miniature where people can look at the different

(18:30):
miniatures we design and different elements of it actually come
to life. So at first he wanted to get some paintings,
some sketches of this. So Anderson got to work and
one of the first things he created was a Norman
Rockwell esque scene of a soft shoe dancer performing on.

Speaker 2 (18:50):
A stage, a small stage.

Speaker 1 (18:53):
So something that you might see in an old Vaudevillian theater,
and Disney immediately connected to it. He thought, that's exactly
what I wanted to see. And he felt that this
was a figure that if they could create a three
dimensional version of it and build it in a miniature
set and it could move around and do its little

(19:14):
dance routine for people, that would be phenomenal. So he
took Anderson's design and he then decided to work with
a couple of other folks over at Disney. He went
to a sculptor who was working for the company at
the time. The sculptor's name was Charles Clarence Cristadoro, and

(19:37):
Cristadoro's dad was a famous agricultural scientist and farmer who
had written extensively about agriculture. Cristadora himself had become a
notable sculptor, working both in the public spaces, designing statues
that were shown in San Diego and other areas of California,

(19:58):
and also working in the movie industry. He had worked
for Disney once during the nineteen thirties, left the company,
and then came back in the early nineteen fifties. He
was given the sketch and told to make a physical
model of the dancer, which he did. He sculpted a
physical model based upon the Ken Anderson painting and gave

(20:20):
that to Disney. Disney then took the model over to
the machine shop, and he also brought in the animation department. Now,
right now seems like it would be a good time
to summarize all the areas that came together to make
audio animatronics even possible. And I realized I haven't even
gotten to what audio animatronics can do and how they
do it. But it's important to understand the different departments

(20:41):
to kind of get a grip on why it was
so complicated and why it called for a multidisciplinary approach
because that's exactly what audio animatronics were. It required people
of vastly different disciplines and knowledge base in order to
make this happen.

Speaker 2 (20:58):
So, in no.

Speaker 1 (21:00):
Particular order, here are some of the departments at Disney
that worked on pioneering audio animatronics. First, there was the
Sound Department. Now it might seem weird that I'm starting
with the Sound department instead of the Mechanical Shop or animation,
but the reason for that is the Sound department was

(21:21):
in charge of the audio animatronic projects because those depended
so heavily on that audio component. I'll explain more about
how and a little bit. The sound department was ultimately
the one that was holding onto the project, the project
leader that was the head of development. This would end

(21:44):
up actually causing some issues later on. There'd be some
disagreements between the Sound department and some other departments, and
they were run by different unions, which also meant that
they would run into these weird problems. There was a
story in one of the articles I read about how
the mechanical department, the Mechanical Shop, they might be working

(22:08):
on an audio animatronic figure, and they would need to
disconnect it so that they can make an adjustment before
reconnecting it. But they weren't allowed to actually disconnect the
figure because that was a union job that one of
the sound department guys would have to do. So they'd
have to go and get someone from the sound department
to come over to the machine shop, disconnect a tube,

(22:31):
wait until the mechanical shop people had made their adjustments,
reconnect the tube, and then they could proceed. By union rules,
the machine shop folks were not allowed to do that
on their own, so it got very frustrating at times.
Then you've got the animation Department Disney, of course, famous
for animation. This was the group of artists who had

(22:52):
studied movement extensively. If you're going to animate movement, you
have to understand how movement works, or else you can't
replicate it properly and it's not going to look right
when you watch an animated film. And more importantly, they
had been studying animated movement in film itself. As it
turns out, film or at least magnetic tape, would become

(23:13):
incredibly important with audio animatronics. They leveraged their expertise to
help design not just the physical objects that would be
animated and the actual motions those objects would make, but
also the very technique for programming the objects, and i'll
explain more about that in a little bit.

Speaker 2 (23:32):
Then you had the modeling department.

Speaker 1 (23:34):
These were the people who would make three dimensional models
and sculptures of the various components that you wanted so
that other departments could use that as a reference. And
then you had the machine shop. The machine department had
to fabricate all the physical pieces that would be used
in these various figures, and then you also had props
and costumes that would end up outfitting these different figures.

(23:58):
So there were a lot of different moving parts, both
metaphorically and literally, as it turns out when you get
to audio animatronics, in order to make it possible, and
all of those groups had their own leaders and their
own priorities, but the fact that they were able to
collaborate and create a system as intricate as audio animatronics

(24:19):
is pretty amazing all on its own. And we haven't
even gotten to the technology yet. So I want to
get to that technology, and I will in just a moment.
But first let's take a quick break and thank our sponsor.

Speaker 2 (24:41):
All right.

Speaker 1 (24:41):
So you've got the machine shop and they were creating
the Dancing Man or the Little Man, and Disney decided
that he needed to have someone in charge of figuring
out the animation for this, like figuring out what moves
would need to be animated, so he tapped a guy
named Wathel Rogers to work on the animation for it Now.
Rogers was born in Stratton, Colorado, in nineteen nineteen, and

(25:05):
he was a sculptor and engineer. He attended an art
institute in Los Angeles and was recruited directly out of
school to the Walt Disney Studios in nineteen thirty nine.
He worked as an animator on films like Pinocchio and Bambi.
During World War Two, he took leave of the Disney
Company and served in the United States Marine Corps as

(25:25):
a staff sergeant in the photographics section. And when he
wasn't animating, he was tinkering. He was creating toys and
model trains, and Walt Disney was also a model train fanatic.
He loved model trains, including trains large enough to ride on,
and he had a couple at his property. He had

(25:46):
a private little railroad track because he just loved trains.
He loved that romantic image of travel by train. A
lot of the things that Disney worked on, he worked
on while he was traveling via train, So he and
Rogers had a lot of common ground there, and Disney

(26:07):
thought that Rogers had a lot of potential to work
on actual physical implementations, not just animation, so he began
to rely on Rogers to sculpt objects for live action pictures,
and in nineteen fifty four he tapped Rogers to help
design buildings for Disneyland, so Rogers went from animator to

(26:28):
almost like an architect. Rogers would also become a chief
contributor to this audio animatronics project. In fact, some would
argue that he was, essentially, when you got down to it,
the lead audio animatronic engineer. He is also immortalized by
the way at Disney's Haunted Mansion attraction. You can find

(26:48):
his tombstone there. One of the tombstones has a name
that is an homage to him, has created while he
was still alive. The tombstone reads, here rests Wothel r Bender.
He rode to glory on a fender peaceful rest. So

(27:09):
while his actual name was Rogers, not Bender. That's in
honor of him now as a reference, Disney decided to
bring in an actor to actually perform a soft shoe routine,
and they were going to shoot this actor with film
film cameras, not actually shoot the actor, even Disney would
not do something so brazen as that, but rather to

(27:30):
film the actor as he was doing the soft shoe
routine against a background that was a grid, so that
the animators could review the footage, use the grid as
reference points, watch every little motion and try and figure
out how they were going to translate that into animation
when they built this system that they were working on.

(27:51):
The actor that they got, by the way, was Buddy Epsen,
who was originally going to play the role of the
Tin Man in the nineteen thirty nine With of Oz Masterpiece.
But Ebsen ended up having a massive allergic reaction to
the aluminum makeup that was used for the ten Woodsman,
and so he would end up being replaced by Jack Haley. However,

(28:13):
you can actually still hear Ebsen's voice in the Wizard
of Oz. It's his voice in the song We're off
to see the Wizard that Dorothy Scarecrow and the Tin
Woodsman sing after they've rescued the Tin Woodsman. So that
bit where they're skipping off into the distance, the voice
you hear is not Jack Hayley's, it's Buddy Ebsen. He also,

(28:36):
by the way, played Jed Clampet in The Beverly Hillbillies,
so if you ever watched that television series, he was
Jed Clampitt. Ebsen was a song and dance man back
in the day, so it was a natural choice for.

Speaker 2 (28:47):
Disney to bring him on.

Speaker 1 (28:48):
He would end up working on several Disney initiatives, including
Davy Crockett, but for this he just got up. He
did a soft shoe route. They took several takes of it,
and they used that to be their reference that the
animators could use and that the machine shop could use
to make sure that the pieces they designed would be

(29:10):
capable of replicating all the different motions that would be necessary. Now,
ideally you would be able to create pieces that did
exactly what you needed and nothing else. Because if you
design a figure to do moves that it doesn't need
to replicate, that's time you wasted on that effort. Because
no one's ever going to see it, so ideally you

(29:32):
figure out exactly what you need and you design for
that specifically. Now, one of the mechanical engineers who was
working on this project was Roger Edward Broggie technically Roger E.
Broggy Senior. His son was also working for Disney and
would become an imagineer. Broggy had moved to California from

(29:54):
Chicago in the late nineteen twenties with experience in machine
shop training. He joined Disney in nineteen thirty nine, so
he was originally working on some of their live action films.
He helped design special effects for twenty thousand Leagues under
the Sea. He also helped Walt Disney build some of
those model trains for his personal collection, and Broggy was

(30:14):
one of the engineers working on this Dancing Man project.
He would later say that was a huge challenge in
part because Ebsen, when he did his soft shoe routine
for the cameras, never repeated movements in the routine, so
all the movements he did were original and not patterned.

(30:34):
They weren't repetition, and that's difficult if you're an animator.
You would like to have that repetition because you can
design it once and then essentially cut and paste it
and use it again. But if everything is new, then
you have to design it from scratch all the way through.
It made their job more difficult. Ultimately, they produced this

(30:57):
nine inch tall figure, and they used cables to attach
to various points on the figure, and this was controlled
by external machinery, so you would have what amounts to
a very complex gearbox that used cams and cables in
order to control the figure. Now, a cam in case
you don't know what that term is, it's a rotating

(31:18):
or sliding piece of machinery, particularly used to transform rotary
motion into linear motion or vice versa. So in other words,
you can turn a rotational motion into a back and
forth or up and down motion a linear one using these,
or you can use a linear motion to.

Speaker 2 (31:37):
Create a rotational motion.

Speaker 1 (31:39):
If you have heard the term camshaft in vehicles, that's
what a camshaft does. This was not yet an example
of audio animatronics.

Speaker 2 (31:48):
This figure.

Speaker 1 (31:49):
It didn't quite work on a full audio animatronic system,
but it did help plot the course for the next innovation,
and Disney, not satisfied with creating this nine inched figure,
wanted to create something more complicated. His next thought was
a barbershop quartet, a little mechanical barbershop quartet that could
move and dance and sing. He wanted to sing sweet Autline.

(32:14):
But the system that the machine shop had created wasn't
really sufficient because the dancing figure couldn't make very subtle movements.
It was all all or nothing really. With each of
the movements this thing made, it jerked around a lot,
and it wasn't really a lifelike representation. The mechanism that
controlled the figure had to be within a couple of

(32:35):
feet of it, so this gearbox essentially had to be
really close to the dancing figure, which meant that you
had spatial issues you had to take into account. So
Disney's original thought was this could be an attraction where
maybe you walk up to a cabinet, you plunk a
quarter in, a little curtain draws back, and you see

(32:56):
this dancing figure dance for a quarter, and then once
it's done, the curtain draws closed and you move on.
But the mechanics said, well, here's the problem. The amount
of money it took to develop this and the amount
of money it will take to maintain it, you will
never recapture by going a quarter of you, twenty five

(33:18):
cents of you is not going to cut it, and
you can't really go more expensive than that because at
the time, twenty five cents was a not insignificant amount
of money.

Speaker 2 (33:28):
And keep in mind, this is the nineteen fifties.

Speaker 1 (33:31):
All right, We're going to interrupt this classic episode about
audio animatronics in order for us to take a quick
break to thank our sponsors. So these initial attempts to
create an animated figure in real life had kind of

(33:52):
stalled out, but plans for Disneyland were continuing at the
same time. The park opened in July nineteen fifty five,
but the first attraction to use audio animatronics would follow
in five years. That was a ride called the Mind
Train through Nature's Wonderland, which opened in May nineteen sixty.

(34:12):
And this was able to take advantage of something that
some of the engineers had noticed. They said, you know,
these small figures, they require all these cams and cables
and everything has to be external. We have to build
the actual power system outside of the figure. So you've
always got to figure out how to mask all the
cables that are running up to the figure. If we

(34:33):
make the figures larger life size. Then we can store
a lot of these mechanical components inside the figures themselves.
It won't have to be externally controlled. You could actually
build these figures that they have the internal parts, and
thus you have a lot more freedom to stage them
the way you want to. And this really appealed to Disney,

(34:54):
so one of the first implementations they had was this
Mind Train through Nature's Wonderland. Now that ride might sound
unfamiliar to you if you've been to Disneyland and you're
wondering where the Mine Train through Nature's Wonderland ride is.

Speaker 2 (35:09):
Well, it used to be where Big.

Speaker 1 (35:11):
Thunder Mountain is now, so Big Thunder Mountain is a
totally different kind of train ride. The Mine Train through
Nature's Wonderland was a slow moving ride that puts you
through various scenes that were inspired by the Western United
States of America. It was kind of the western version
of Jungle Cruise. So if you've ever been on the

(35:31):
Jungle Cruise, that's a boat ride where you go through
areas that have been inspired by India and Africa. The
Nature's Wonderland was similar, except it was a train ride
through the Western US inspired areas. Included things like bears
playing around in a pond. Now, that was the first
attraction to feature audio animatronics. And I guess now as

(35:56):
good a time as any as to explain what audio
animatronics are. Audio animatronics take on these mechanical figures that
you can power in various ways, and they pair it
with a system that is programmable that uses audio as
its method of transmitting information and taking the information and

(36:17):
turning it into action. So everything is based off sound,
which is kind of weird to think about it, but
you would store the information on these massive cassettes, these
magnetic tapes. Really they're magnetic reels. They weren't really cassettes.
So you take magnetic reels of tape and you would
encode information in sound on the tape, and when you

(36:39):
played it back, that's what would create the well, it's
what would allow circuits to be completed to create the movement.
You see now, how that all works, It requires a
bit more of a deeper dive. First of all, the
earliest audio animatronic systems were digital. Now by that I

(37:01):
don't mean they were computer systems. This is purely mechanical approach.
It's not electronic it's not you know, there's no microprocessors
or transistors. It's all mechanical elements. But it is digital
in the sense that it's binary in that you have
two positions, you have on and off. That meant that

(37:21):
any motion you wanted to make had only two outcomes,
a rest position, which would be whatever it started off as.

Speaker 2 (37:32):
So let's take let's say that it's.

Speaker 1 (37:33):
A human figure that you're trying to animate, and one
of your animations is your human figure needs to turn
her head to the left, so in the off position,
in the rest position, she's just staring straight forward and
isn't moving. When you activate a circuit, then she moves

(37:55):
her head to the left, but she can't halfway move
her head to the left. She can't move it a
quarter of the way. It's either all the way to
the left as far as her freedom of movement allows,
or it's in that rest position. That's it, those two
positions on or off, zero or one. That's why we

(38:15):
call it digital. This was a little primitive. It limited
what the animators could do. They could not put in
subtle movements, so it was good for certain types of
audio animatronics early on, but it had limited use. It
also was limited in how much force it could use.

(38:36):
These original audio animatronics used one of two different systems
to create movement. Either it was using pneumatics or it
was using solenoids. A pneumatic system uses compressed air. Compressed
air is what creates the force that translates into mechanical
motion in your system. So you would have tubes, pneumatic

(39:00):
tubes that would move through this figure. You would have them,
you know, wherever they needed to be, and you would
have valves that when they're closed, do not allow air
to move through. When you would complete a circuit, it
would make the valve open, which would allow air to
move through, which would then create the mechanical force necessary

(39:22):
to make the figure move in whichever way you wanted
it to. So, let's say it's a bird in the
enchanted Tiki Room, which was one of the earliest audio
animatronic attractions outside of Nature's Wonderland and it still exists
to this day. The pneumatics would allow the mouth to open.

(39:43):
The closed position would be the rest position, and it
would allow the mouth to open up. And when you
do a lot of opening and closing, it gives the
illusion that the bird is actually talking when you pair
it with the appropriate sound. That was one way of
creating motion, but the solenoids were a different way that

(40:04):
was also being used in this digital system. Solenoids are
a variation on electromagnets. So those of you who have
listened to me talk endlessly about electromagnetism, get ready for
some more so. Your basic electromagnet consists of a coil
of conductive material. Often it is insulated copper wire. You
run a current through this coil and that generates a

(40:28):
magnetic field.

Speaker 2 (40:30):
The magnetic field.

Speaker 1 (40:31):
Can then be used to attract any sort of ferromagnetic material.
That's the case of a solenoid, where you have a
core that can act kind of like a piston. So
when it's in its rest position, the core is outside
of the cylinder. Maybe it's positioned right at the very end.
So the cylinder is big enough so that the core

(40:53):
can fit completely inside the cylinder. And when you run
a current through the coil, it generates a magnetic field
which attracts the ferromagnetic core into the cylinder, pulls it in.
And if you connect something to the other end of
that little core, like a cable, that then attaches to

(41:13):
a piece on a larger animatronic figure, like let's say
a mouth of a character. Whenever the circuit activates, it'll
pull the solenoid in the core into the solenoid, which
in turn pulls on the wire or cable which is
attached to whatever body part the mouth let's say, of

(41:36):
mister Lincoln, and pulls it down, pulls it open, and
then by turning off the electricity to this coil, it
negates that magnetic field. It returns to rest position, and
Lincoln shuts this trap. And thus, by controlling the flow
of electricity through this solenoid, you can open and close

(41:58):
the mouth of one of the greatest presidents of United
States history, and thus magnificence is born. I mean, this
was an enormous use of technology, a very innovative use
of technology at the time. So that was the basics
for the movement. But that we saw them and talked
about the audio part, that's kind of more the animatronic part,

(42:21):
the idea of this animated physical being.

Speaker 2 (42:26):
But whether it was a bird or a.

Speaker 1 (42:29):
President, or a hippopotamus or whatever it might be that
was using audio animatronics, the secret sauce was in that audio.

Speaker 2 (42:42):
They found that what they could do.

Speaker 1 (42:43):
Is create a tone on a cassette or on a
magnetic real I should say, they could create a tone,
and they used these little metal reeds that would connect
to circuits. When the reeds would vibrate, it would close
the circuit and allow a current to pass through. So

(43:03):
if you made the reads vibrate, it would create a
physical circuit that would end up making the pneumatic or
solenoid system activate and thus be either on or off.
Well on really, and once it stopped activating, it would
be off. You could have your character open his or
her mouth or move his or her head.

Speaker 2 (43:23):
Or whatever the action needed to be.

Speaker 1 (43:26):
And the reason the way they would make it vibrate
is they would use a resonant frequency. So resonant frequencies
are the natural vibrating frequency of any given material. If
you have a glass and you tap the glass and
it makes a little ringing noise, that is its resonant frequency,
And if you are able to replicate that resonant frequency,

(43:46):
then you will make the glass vibrate just by exposing
it to that frequency. So if you create a sound
that is of the same pitch as an object's resonant frequency,
it will naturally begin to vibrate, and if you then
amplify that signal, In other words, if you increase the volume,
you will increase the amount of vibration that you're creating

(44:09):
in that material. So again with the example of a glass,
if you have a crystal glass, then it generates a
particular tone when you strike it. If you replicate that
tone and you amplify the signal enough, you can make
the glass vibrate enough so that it shatters.

Speaker 2 (44:25):
This is what we see.

Speaker 1 (44:26):
When opera singers replicate a particular note and they try
and shatter a glass. Some people can do it, but
it all depends on the glass. It all depends on
the person's range and how pitch perfect they are in
creating that particular frequency.

Speaker 2 (44:39):
It has to be close enough. There's actually a small.

Speaker 1 (44:42):
Range where it'll work, but you need to be as
close as possible to really get the maximum effect. It's
much easier to do with amplification than it is unamplified.
But that's the basis for audio animatronics. They had these
little metallic reads that would be connected to the various circuitry,
and each one would have its own specific resonant frequency.

(45:03):
When you played the magnetic tape back, it would play
tones at that resonant frequency for whichever particular action it needed.
That specific metallic read would start to vibrate. Close that
specific circuit, and then you get the motion. So if
it's a figure that has several motions associated with it,

(45:23):
let's say it's a bird that can turn its head,
flap its wings, or open its mouth. That's three different motions.
That means you would have three different circuits, with three
different metallic reads, with three different resonant frequencies. So that
way you could produce different tones and make the specific
outcome that you wanted. Otherwise, every time you generated a tone,

(45:44):
everything would go off and you would have chaos. More
on that in a little bit. Again, this is a
digital system, so there's no variation here. You could not
have the bird turn its head halfway. It's always going
to turn it as far as the animatronic is allowed.
Whatever its freedom of movement is, that's where it's going
to go to. So it still had limitations. However, by

(46:09):
creating a specific circuit for every single motion, you could make.

Speaker 2 (46:12):
A pretty sophisticated figure.

Speaker 1 (46:15):
The individual motions were pretty primitive, but collectively it could
be very sophisticated. It did require a lot of work,
and it required a lot of.

Speaker 2 (46:28):
Cheating, I guess is the right way of putting it.

Speaker 1 (46:30):
So, for example, one of the figures that Disney was
working on for the New York World's Fair was Abraham Lincoln,
and in order to make all the different motions of
the face the way they wanted to, they had to
put in more components than could fit within the constraint

(46:51):
of a human head, and they weren't. They didn't really
have the option of scaling it up. They couldn't build
Lincoln larger than human size and get the effect they wanted.
They wanted to keep Lincoln at the dimensions that they
felt were important for him to get the feeling across
that they wanted to make. So they had to figure out, well,

(47:11):
how can we fit all these components inside a human
head when they're larger than what the space can contain.
And eventually they were able to make a head that
had kind of a bulge in the back of it,
and they were able to fake it with the wig
that they put on mister Lincoln. Although apparently, and at
least some of the wigs that they designed.

Speaker 2 (47:30):
For the character.

Speaker 1 (47:33):
The bulge in the back of the head was noticeable, So,
considering Lincoln's fate, that might have been viewed as being tasteless,
but they were working within the constraints of a very
new technology. Now, I mentioned that this approach had its
limitations that you could only be on or off, and

(47:53):
that they needed to have something with a little bit
more of a spectrum of outcomes in order to get
the effect that they really wanted. That approach required them
to switch from pneumatic and solenoid systems to hydraulic systems.
A hydraulic system uses liquid. Typically it's just water as

(48:14):
its means of creating that same sort of mechanical force.
You can't really compress water, as it turns out, so
if you just put force behind water, it will push
against whatever constraints you have it in. So if you
put a good amount of water pressure in and you
use valves to control where that water can go by
opening and closing those valves, you can allow for some

(48:37):
pretty powerful movements, including stuff that's strong enough to do
something like lift and arm. Because the various pieces of
machinery that Disney engineers were creating they weighed a good
amount of they had a good amount of weight to them,
a good amount of mass to them, and numatic ability
on numatic systems weren't strong enough to move them, especially

(48:59):
not smoothly. If you want to build a compressed air
system that can move a significant amount of weight, chances
are you're going to end up with an air catapult,
which was not exactly what Disney was hoping for when
he was thinking of these different designs. So imagineers switched
to these hydraulic systems, and it also meant that they
wanted to create more gradations of movement. They didn't want

(49:22):
to just be on and off. They didn't just want
to be open and closed, or left or right. They
wanted to have some different abilities. They wanted to create
a lot of different potential movements within the limbs of characters.
One of the exhibits that they were working on for
the New York World's Fair was the Carousel of Progress,

(49:44):
which you can still see in certain Disney parks. The
Carousel Progress features multiple scenes of a family through different
eras of human history, including near future, where you get
to see the innovation of progress, how systems have improved
over time, to make our lives more convenient and enjoyable.

(50:09):
And all of these various exhibits at New York had
different sponsors, so Disney was partnering with other companies that
had a vested interest in the public seeing this stuff.
So there were branded materials inside Carousel Progress so that
people would say, oh, you know what, I need to

(50:29):
buy X kind of refrigerator because I want my life
to be as convenient as it was for those robots
we just saw. So in order to make this look convincing,
they wanted the human characters to have very lifelike motions. Well,
you can't do that with just the digital system, so
they needed to go with an analog system. Analog means

(50:54):
that you can have a variable element. It's not just
on or off. That's what digital is. Either the signals
going or it's not. Variable means you can actually create variations,
and you do this through voltage. By changing the amount
of voltage in a system and by increasing it or
decreasing it, you could create different ranges of motion within

(51:18):
a properly designed system. So that's what the imagineers started
working on with both Lincoln and the Caresel Progress. They
wanted to create more sophisticated systems that would allow for
this sort of realistic motion, and by pairing the hydraulic
systems with this analog voltage system, they could then create

(51:42):
a more.

Speaker 2 (51:44):
Natural movement.

Speaker 1 (51:45):
Now, in order to encode that, they had to use
varying tones on this magnetic tape, and to do that,
they ended up having to use multiple tracks on a
single piece of magnetic tape in order to conserve space,
because otherwise you would have to have a reel for
every single component that is controlled by some sort of

(52:11):
hydraulic system, and that's just not feasible. So they ended
up creating multi track systems where they could record I
think up to twenty four eventually different tracks. But not
all of those tracks were for the actual animatronic figure.
Some of them were for theatrical elements like lighting cues,

(52:33):
or whether or not certain products would open, like the
refrigerator door might open, a drawer might slide out, an
element in the fridge might tilt so people can get
a better look at it. All of those were their
own separate little circuits, and they all needed to be
programmed into the audio animatronic reels, which again we're still

(52:57):
using tones, So the sound department was still heavily involved
in this. As you can imagine this complicated thing significantly
once they got to the part where it was time
to program the Carousel of Progress and the Great Moments
with mister Lincoln, and I'll explain how some of that
turned out in just a minute, but first let's take

(53:18):
another quick break and thank our sponsor. So when we
talk about programming this system where you've got all these
different tracks that control these different elements within an animatronic system,

(53:42):
keep in mind that depending on how many figures you have,
and how many points of articulation they have and what
they need to do, these could be incredibly complicated. From
a macro standpoint, each individual figure might be fairly simple,
but taken as a whole, it gets to be enormously complex.
One of the earliest ways that they experimented with programming

(54:07):
was using silver paint. They used these old movieola movie
editors that were designed to edit film, but instead of that,
what they did was they took this tape and they
would paint silver lines on it to create a circuit,
and whenever the reading head would pass over the silver

(54:29):
it would create an electrical circuit that then would send
out as a command for the various action to happen.
So let's say again that it's a parrot opening its beak,
and you would use a little line of silver paint
along the length of this tape to indicate this is

(54:50):
where the beak needs to be opened. Because they were
using animators to design the system, in part, the animators
loved it. They were using it very similar to the
way they would edit animation reels. With animation, you think
of the work in terms of feet, not necessarily in seconds.

Speaker 2 (55:11):
So instead of saying.

Speaker 1 (55:12):
Oh, I need this mouth to be open for two seconds,
you might say, oh, I need this to happen for
two feet of film. So you would literally mark out
the spot on the tape where the action needed to start,
and you would mark out the spot on the tape
where the action needed to stop, and you would just
connect those two points with some silver paint, and then

(55:33):
when it would read through the system, it would play
back that way. When it would hit that point in
the tape, the action would happen.

Speaker 2 (55:41):
So as long as you either.

Speaker 1 (55:42):
Had all of your tracks on one tape, and they
could do up to six tracks on this method.

Speaker 2 (55:50):
This was just the prototype method.

Speaker 1 (55:52):
If you had six different sets of actions all on
their each individual lines, you had six contacts that could
create the different circuits, then you could program up to
six different components of your audio animatronic scene using one
reel of tape, and they'd all be synchronized because you
would just measure it out on the physical tape and

(56:13):
draw where you needed the elements to happen. So maybe
you'd say, all right, well, in three seconds in I
need the bird to flap its wings, and at second
number four I needed to start talking. But by second
number five I needed to stop flapping its wings. But
it keeps talking on and off until second number ten. Well,
that's how you would mark it out on your magnetic tape,

(56:36):
and you would just draw one line to be the
control for the beak and another line to be the
control for the wings, and as it would move through
the Moviola editor and the contacts that the engineers that
essentially added into this Moviola editor, it would play it
back the same way every time. Now, this was not
the system that Disney decided to use for everything. They

(56:58):
again switched to an audio tone format instead of using
lines of silver paint, the reason being that you could
only play the tape so many times before the silver
paint started to flake off, and once it started to
flake off, then you no longer had a strong signal.
You never didn't necessarily have the circuit completing anymore, and
so you would get jitter emotions or sometimes enough paint

(57:22):
would peel off where you wouldn't even get the result
you wanted at all. So it wasn't a permanent solution,
but it was an interesting step toward what they needed.
When they went with the tones, they found that that
was a better approach. But as they started programming the
Great Moments with mister Lincoln, they started to run into
some serious issues. The way they did this is they

(57:46):
had editing machines and they had playback machines. The playback
machines all they could do was play the magnetic tape
back again. And this was they would call these machines dummies,
because that's all they could do is just play something back.
So they had more dummies than they had editing machines.
Where they could write to magnetic tape, they would record

(58:09):
to magnetic tape, both the tones that would control the
various animatronic actions, the lighting of the theater, any other
elements that needed to happen within the theater, they would
all be encoded on this magnetic tape as well, and
they would also have the audio for the actual presentation.
So in the case of Great Moments with mister Lincoln,

(58:32):
the various speeches that mister Lincoln delivers had to be
on that magnetic tape as well. You would first produce
an individual tape for every single one of those, and
then you would end up combining those onto a master tape. Eventually,
there's actually a step in between, called a submaster, but
we're going to simplify for the purposes of this podcast,

(58:55):
so that ultimately you would end up with a master
tape that would have everything you needed on it. You
might imagine that having one master tape that has multiple
tracks numbering in more than two dozen in some cases,
that you could run into some interference, and you would
be right. It turned out that some of these, because

(59:15):
of the different volumes that they recorded at, the tones
would sometimes mask one another, and or other times they
would activate more than one element and you'd end up
with chaos.

Speaker 2 (59:27):
So mister Lincoln might end up.

Speaker 1 (59:29):
Having a bit of a freak out on stage while
delivering the Gettysburg address, and that just doesn't convey the
stately nature that you want when you're trying to reenact
one of the most iconic moments in American history that
there is. Having Abraham Lincoln's eyebrows go crazy all over

(59:50):
his face while he's talking might be a little distracting,
so it required a painstaking process of editing. They would
get the magnetic TI, they would run it through the
system using one of these dummies. They would take notes,
copious notes about everything that was going on with the
performance of the audio animatronic show, in this case Great

(01:00:15):
Moments with mister Lincoln, and anything that went wrong. They
had to make note of whether it was a hand
motion or an eyebrow, or the mouth wasn't moving in
sync with the sound, or maybe the sound itself was
at the wrong volume. Whatever the problem was, they had
to make note of it, and then they had to
take that same magnetic tape back and figure out how

(01:00:36):
they could fix it. Sometimes they could fix it by
making a couple of tweaks. Sometimes it required re recording
an entire section, so it might be that you're recording
a brand new section just to control the fingers on
the left hand. That's how exacting this had to be.
And again you had to make sure that you were
synchronizing it with everything else, and it may be that

(01:00:58):
you would find that one element slightly out of sync
of everything else. You had planned it out, you plotted it,
you recorded it. When you laid down the tracks, you
didn't realize that they didn't quite line up the way
you wanted them to, and that might require you to
cut out one of the tracks and then splice it
back in by hand cranking the system to the right

(01:01:18):
starting point and adjusting it that way. So maybe you'd say,
all right, well, the track for the left hand needs
to start at second number two point four, and unfortunately
it's starting at two point eight, and because of that,
the left hand is making gestures zero point four seconds
after it's supposed to, and it looks ridiculous. You would
have to go back and try and hand crank it

(01:01:40):
to the spot where it needs to start and splice
it back in that section that track back into the master.
Worst case scenario scenario, you'd have to re record the
master and just make sure everything is lined up in
its new orientation based upon the notes you made To
make matters even more complicated, they were using a sound
studio that was busy during the day, so the only

(01:02:02):
time the engineers could actually work on this project, which
had to be done before the World's Fair opened, was
at night. They would go to this recording studio at
night that had its equipment on different floors, so they
actually had to run cabling systems to go up and
down floors so that they could connect the various parts
that they were using in order to make these minute changes.

(01:02:26):
It was an incredibly painstaking process to get the performance
that they wanted, all using this combination of pneumatics, hydraulics,
and solenoids to see if they can get the right
sequence of movements to match the pre recorded audio and
give the experience that they intended to their audience.

Speaker 2 (01:02:50):
Programming this way took a lot of work.

Speaker 1 (01:02:53):
If you watch there's a Wonderful World of Color episode
where they talk about the Disneyland presence at the World's
Fair and the way the audio animatronics work. There's a
point where Walt Disney walks up to one of his
imagineers who's wearing this weird harness that is a control system.

(01:03:14):
It's directly connected to the father character of Carousel of Progress.
So when the guy makes a big motion with his arm,
you see the Carousel of Progress character make that same motion,
and Disney refers to that as programming, but that's not
actually how they programmed it. They programmed it more granularly

(01:03:35):
than that. They could control a character directly using this method,
but that was only really good for one on one
digital puppetry, as in, you have a human controller actually
manipulating the character at that very moment. If you wanted
it automated, you had to go through this other, very
painstaking process. And this is pretty much how they used

(01:03:58):
audio animatronics. For the next several years, they would develop
lots of different rides that used audio animatronic figures. Pirates
of the Caribbean, the Haunted Mansion, rides like that, where
you had some sophisticated movement, something a little more advanced
than just a static character turning. A lot of the
dark rides in Fantasy Land are more primitive and don't

(01:04:21):
need to be audio animatronic because there's no real articulation
with the characters.

Speaker 2 (01:04:25):
They're kind of.

Speaker 1 (01:04:26):
Static and they can move up and down or turn
left and right, but they don't have any facial motion,
or their limbs don't really move in any meaningful way,
as opposed to characters that say Pirates or Haunted Mansion,
some of those have much more sophisticated movements and needed
the audio animatronic system in order to do it. To me,

(01:04:47):
it's fascinating that they were able to do all of
this using tones, whether it was to just create that
binary system or the analog system where you had the
variable voltage that could create different types of movement. And
I'm also fascinated by all the different people who worked
on these systems. There were a ton of them who

(01:05:10):
all contributed, and without them, these just wouldn't even be
a reality today. They were able to make a huge
impact at the New York World's Fair, and this really
did cement Disney as being an innovative company, not just
in movies and animation, but also in theme parks and experiences.

(01:05:33):
It set them apart from their competitors. And it wasn't
just the theming, which has always been one of Disney's
strong suits, but the technology itself, the fact that the
company was willing to be a pioneer in those spaces.
So I find it one of the most interesting stories.
And I love the fact that it also gives me
the opportunity to touch on other elements of the mechanical

(01:05:56):
and technological worlds, stuff like pneumatic systems, hydraulic system the
concept of cams, the concept of solenoids. All of these
elements are obviously components of the audio animatronic systems, but
also it's fun to have that opportunity to just touch
on those in this episode and to tell you, guys,
you know what those were and how they were incorporated

(01:06:18):
into this audio animatronic system. So the next time you
ride one of these rides, think about all the technology
that went into it and the fact that it's just
magnetic tape that's giving all the instructions and not through
any sort of computer program, but literally through sound.

Speaker 2 (01:06:36):
That the sound.

Speaker 1 (01:06:37):
Itself is what allows the circuits to complete, and it
varies that voltage, and it allows mister Lincoln to stand
up as he addresses you. And here's where we get
to my story of a funny little Disney World fail.
This was at disney World, not at Disneyland, and it
was the first time my wife had ever been to

(01:07:01):
disney World, and I was so excited because if you've
been to Disney World several times, after a while, you
know what to expect. And while it is still an
amazing achievement to have built an amusement park so immersive
and with such detail, and to then staff it with

(01:07:24):
people who have some of the best customer service points
in the world, that alone is amazing. But if you
go with someone who has never been before, and you've
been several times, there's a special kind of joy there
because you can almost experience Disney World for the first
time by vicariously experiencing it through your friend who had

(01:07:44):
not been there before.

Speaker 2 (01:07:46):
In this case, it was my wife.

Speaker 1 (01:07:47):
She had never been to Disney World, so I was
having this wonderful experience of taking her to different rides
and she gets to see them for the first time,
and she's blown away, and I remember how special it is,
because again I've written most of these rides dozens of times,
so for me, while I enjoy them, the special part
had kind of worn off. Seeing it through her eyes

(01:08:08):
brought it all back, and it was amazing. Then we
go to the Hall of Presidents, and at the Hall
of President's the curtains open, and if you've never been
to the Hall of President's at Disney World. There's a
point where curtains open up and you see all of
the presidents of the United States. They're all there, Every

(01:08:29):
single one who's ever sat as president is there, animated
this audio animatronic and they all do little weird things,
like they fidget, they look around. Some of them appear
to be a little bored with what's going on. Some
of them seem really engaged. It's kind of it's kind
of charming. They introduce them one at a time. Well,

(01:08:49):
mister Lincoln sits in a chair and then when it's
his turn to actually address the audience, because he first,
they introduce everybody, and everyone does a little gesture. They
might nod or wave a hand, but ultimately Lincoln stands
up and then delivers a speech to the audience. When
the curtains open, Lincoln was already standing. He was not

(01:09:12):
seated as he normally would be, which tells me that
the hydraulic system for his legs had already activated. However,
he was not standing tall. He was bent at the waist.
So he's standing up bent down as if he's tying
his shoes, and his two arms are dangling at his sides,
but they're still animated, so you still see them fidget

(01:09:35):
and gesture. When he's announced and the spotlight hits his chair,
which he was not sitting in, so the spotlight's actually
hitting behind where he was, his hand made a little motion.
It was at that point that I expected someone from Disney,
one of the cast members to come down and hit
the stop on the show, but they had not yet

(01:09:55):
noticed the problem, and so I was starting to get
the giggle a little bit. My wife was definitely getting
the giggles, and my dad was encouraging it. My dad
is the ultimate dad joke dad, and I love him dearly.
But I hear my dad just say I beg them
not to make an animatronic John Wilkes booth completely inappropriate

(01:10:18):
and hilarious and tragic and hilarious. So we're watching as
Lincoln continues to gesticulate while bent over, staring at the floor,
and then it gets to his speech and the music
swells and he starts to speak and move his arms
more expressively, still bent at the waist, he does not

(01:10:39):
stand up. It's at that point that a Disney cast
member takes notice and rushes down and hits the stop
button which closes the curtains, and says, mister Lincoln is
not feeling very well, please check back again later today.
And as we walk out, I know, we start making
other jokes like is that my face on that penny,
little jokes about Lincoln bent over for some reason. And

(01:11:01):
it's unfortunate because that's my wife's first and first impression
of the Hall of Presidents. That's her, that's the memory
she associates with it. And I know for a fact
that I can never take her to the Hall of
Presidents ever again and have her take it seriously at all.

Speaker 2 (01:11:19):
Whenever it gets.

Speaker 1 (01:11:20):
The Lincoln, she's gonna get the giggles, and she's going
to expect him to stand up and bend over at
the waist and just stare at the floor for the
rest of the day. So these animatronics didn't always work perfectly.
Sometimes some part of the system or other would fail,
and once that happens, then you get these sort of

(01:11:42):
experiences where maybe part of the animation just isn't working.
It could be something as simple as an arm is
not animating the way it's supposed to, or it could
be something a little more noticeable like a character is
bent over and slumped down because they don't have the
proper pressure to stand up.

Speaker 2 (01:12:01):
It probably was.

Speaker 1 (01:12:02):
Just a valve that had failed to open, so there
was probably some circuit where it no longer was completing,
and therefore the hydraulic system could not actually activate through
the upper half of mister Lincoln, so he couldn't stand
up tall. That's my guess as a armchair technologist taking

(01:12:25):
a look at what happened.

Speaker 2 (01:12:28):
So that's it.

Speaker 1 (01:12:29):
That's how audio animatronics work. It is a really interesting system.
I love the fact that it predates computer systems for
theme parks. These days, you're going to find much more
complicated programming.

Speaker 2 (01:12:42):
There's going to be microprocessors and characters.

Speaker 1 (01:12:45):
I don't know for a fact that the characters they
added to the parts of the Caribbean Ride, for example,
are more advanced versions. Like there's a Johnny Depp character
that shows up three times in the new parts of
the Caribbean Ride. There's a Barbosa character. Jeffrey Rush's character
from the movies is also in that. I suspect that

(01:13:06):
those are updated systems that are not running on the
old audio animatronic system.

Speaker 2 (01:13:12):
But that's just a guess. I do not know that
for a fact.

Speaker 1 (01:13:15):
They are certainly much more sophisticated than the original Pirates
of the Caribbean characters were. I hope you enjoyed that
classic episode The Wonderful World of Audio Animatronics. When I'm
recording these intros, I'm actually getting ready to head down
to Disney World in about a month. By the time

(01:13:36):
you hear this, that will have already happened. But I
always love experiencing the attractions that have audio animatronics or
the variations of animatronics on them. I think it's an
amazing combination of art and technology, and I just find
it endlessly entertaining and fascinating and just I'm always so

(01:13:58):
impressed with the technological innovations that made it possible to
have sort of automated real world puppetry that can repeat itself,
you know, indefinitely, although you do have to do repairs
and maintenance obviously. It's just really one of those things
that when you stop and really think about what's happening

(01:14:19):
and what's going on, it gets really impressive, at least
to me.

Speaker 2 (01:14:23):
I hope you.

Speaker 1 (01:14:23):
Enjoyed this classic episode of tech stuff. I hope you
are all well, and I will talk to you again
really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.