TechStuff ReRun: The Wonderful World of Audio Animatronics

Jonathan is about to head to Walt Disney World (he'll be back by the time this publishes). But he doesn't want to leave you without an episode, so here's one about Disney's audio animatronics from the archive!

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tex Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios,
How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
How Stuff Works and I Heart Radio and a lot
of all things tech, and today I'm going to be
bringing you a classic episode of tech Stuff. Yes, I

(00:26):
know it is not a Friday when we normally run
classic episodes. But behind the curtain, guys, I'm currently getting
ready to go on a vacation to Disney World, which
is awesome. I'm gonna be there with my family. I'm
really looking forward to it. But it meant that I
had a limited amount of time and not enough time
to create a whole new episode. But I didn't want

(00:47):
to leave you guys without any episode, so instead I'm
bringing you one from the fairly recent past that I
think thematically ties into my vacation. This episode is titled
The Wonderful World of Audio Animatronics and originally aired on
June twenty three, two thousand seventeen. And audio Animatronics is

(01:09):
you know. It's the technology that Disney has used to
bring to life lots of different characters on its various
rides and attractions, So this definitely ties in to what
I am about to embark upon, and I am very
hopeful that my little five year old niece ends up
being just as captivated with audio animatronics as I was

(01:29):
when I was her age. So sit back, relax, and
enjoy this classic episode. 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 order,
maybe film first, then theme parks, then television, but I'm

(01:51):
a huge fan of Disney stuff. 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

(02:12):
know anybody, I decided to hop on down to 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

(02:33):
did most of the work for me. I didn't 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

(02:54):
there are a ton of them that Disney either directly
had a hand in developing or tweaked it in a
way to elevate it beyond what it used to be.
There are plenty of examples of that. Today, we're specifically
going to focus on audio animatronics, And for those who
have not heard what this term is or have any

(03:16):
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 similar to puppetry,
right with a puppet, typically you're manipulating some sort of
three dimensional figure beyond shadow puppets and that sort of puppetry,

(03:38):
which is amazing all on its own. I'm talking about
your traditional hand puppets, rod puppets, and marionettes. That involves
manipulating an inanimate object in a 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 you know, the puppet is essentially a glove puppet,

(04:01):
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
be painstakingly programmed rather than being under the direct control
of a human being. Those figures, when they're working properly,

(04:22):
would replicate those same motions and have the same performance
every single time. So the time the character is doing
a show, it's exactly the way it was 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 is working properly. Now,

(04:45):
anyone who has been to Disney enough times knows that's
a big assumption to make. Sometimes things just don't do
not work really well. 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

(05:07):
amazing this tech really is, especially when you consider what
people had to work with back in the fifties and
early sixties when 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

(05:31):
what you would get with an animated film. Animated films
can be perfected right. You 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,

(05:51):
and and the people who worked for him they also
would end up having very high standards. Everyone wanted to
make sure that they met 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,

(06:11):
Great Moments with Mr 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 moving figures that didn't use
the audio animatronics system. So, for example, the Jungle Cruise
ride has animated animal figures. As you ride through, you

(06:33):
see hippopotamuses and crocodiles and elephants, but these were running
on a very simple mechanical loop system. They were not
specifically audio animatronic. They they worked on something that was
a little less sophisticated than what would follow. So you
have both at Disney Parks. And I'm also sad that

(06:57):
I can't have Holly on this up. So 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 is an enormous fan of all things
Disney and uh and she doesn't just give me a

(07:17):
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 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

(07:39):
these various Disney attractions that I have yet to uncover.
So maybe someday I will be able to have Holly
on this show and we'll do a 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 peppers Ghost effect, which is

(08:01):
used extensively in the Haunted Mansion Ride. 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

(08:21):
very bright space, whereas you're in a very dark space. Uh.
The famous ballroom sequence in the Haunted 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

(08:42):
do that, we have to mention Walt Disney because he's
central to our story. He's kind of our main character
if this were a narrative. His full name was Walter
Elias Disney. He was born in nineteen o one in Illinois.
He grew up in Missouri and attended high school in Chicago.
He was studying art primarily. When he was sixteen, he

(09:06):
dropped out to join the army, but they rejected him
because he was too young. He then joined the Red
Cross and was shipped over to Europe and drove ambulances
during World War One in France. Once he is his
work with the Red Cross was done over there, he
moved back to the United States and he began to

(09:27):
work for an ad company. He was making film and animations.
Uh then he would go on to create his own studio,
which saw some modest success, but then it ran into
some hard times and eventually he had to declare bankruptcy
under his first studio. But despite that, he didn't give up.

(09:48):
He decided to make a go at it again, and
he and his brother Roy were able to co found
the Walt Disney Company, and from that moment forward, his
influence on tech is 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.

(10:10):
Disney is one of the reasons why the United States
has such incredibly extensive intellectual property protection laws, stuff like
copyright and trademark laws that protect well beyond the lifetime
of the creator. UH. A lot of that has to
do with Disney, as a corporate entity, lobbying to extend

(10:34):
those parameters. So Disney's impact on technology has been enormous
in both very specific ways that relate to particular technologies
to the way that those technologies are protected under intellectual
property law. So Disney's use of sound with animation was

(10:55):
a huge leap forward in the nineteen twenties, Steamboat Willie
being the first cartoun was sound, and Disney himself voiced
the iconic 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

(11:15):
going into feature length animation, which had not been done before,
and he was able to UH succeed with Snow White
and the Seven Dwarves. And he also continued to see
success with short form stuff. Now, depending upon the account
you read because there are a couple of different versions
of the story. We actually begin either in France or

(11:38):
the French Quarter in New Orleans. The story goes that
Disney was on vacation with his family, and as he
was on vacation, he decided to look into some uh,
some antique shops, and he came across some various clockwork toys,
like wind up birds and that sort of thing. One

(12:00):
specific toy he came across in an antique shop was
a bird cage that had a mechanical bird inside of
it that would chirp 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 was. It wasn't like it looked like a a

(12:23):
monstrosity or anything like that. He thought it was absolutely charming,
and he felt that there was a lot of potential
there that he could use to create three dimensional physical
animated figurines potentially and 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

(12:46):
brought the antique bird cage with the mechanical bird inside
of it back to his company, and he went to
some of his uh 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

(13:08):
they could create their own technology that would also allow
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

(13:28):
was one of the engineers who would work on developing
audio animatronic technology, one of many, as it turns out,
would say that Disney wants 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

(13:49):
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
asking questions or having issue 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

(14:14):
Alfred Hitchcock, who of course made incredible films of thriller
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

(14:38):
joke were very similar in that respect, this idea of
the frustrated director who has to contend with the delicate
sensibilities of actors and actresses. 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 A. Walt Disney Company.

(15:01):
Whereas 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

(15:24):
various 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

(15:44):
Disney would end up referring to people who worked in
this sort of field as imagineers. They were thinking outside
the box, using engineering and creativity married together to create
really interesting experience is that you could not find anywhere else.
That was the value that Disney wanted to create to

(16:05):
justify charging people admission to come and check it out.
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. He was he was thinking ahead.
One of those was the fact that he wanted to

(16:26):
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. He
also had an ability to contribute to a massive event

(16:47):
that would happen 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 knew that the entire attention of the world

(17:09):
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 it was just invented, No big shakes, right,

(17:36):
So to start. One of the earliest experiments with this
idea of animating a three dimensional figure was what would
eventually be called the Dancing Man or the Little Man project.
This would be of a figure that measured about nine
inches tall and was meant to dance based upon this

(18:00):
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
the design and implementation of various elements in Disneyland, and

(18:20):
he said, you know, you know what, You're working on
a lot of stuff, but I wanna 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. And Disney had a very idyllic
sense of what that meant. That small town feel that

(18:42):
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 town maybe early nineteen hundreds,
around the time when Walt Disney himself would have been
growing up, where things appeared to be simple and elegant.

(19:08):
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 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

(19:30):
he created was a Norman Rockwell esque scene of a
soft shoe dancer performing on a stage, a small stage,
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

(19:52):
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 of around do its little
dance routine for people, that would be phenomenal. So he
took Anderson's design and he then decided to UH to
work with a couple of other folks over at Disney.

(20:14):
He UH went to a sculptor who was working for
the company at the time. As the sculptor's name was
Charles Clarence Christodoro, and Christodorro's dad was a famous agricultural
scientist and farmer who had written extensively about agriculture. Christodorro
himself had become a notable sculptor, working both in the

(20:38):
public spaces, designing statues that were shown in San Diego
and other areas of California, 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

(21:00):
he did. He sculpted a physical model based upon the
the Ken Anderson painting and gave 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

(21:21):
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 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.

(21:46):
So in no 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 owned department instead of
the mechanical shop or animation, but the reason for that

(22:07):
is the Sound department was in charge of the audio
animatronic projects because those depended so heavily on that audio component.
I'll explain more about how in 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.

(22:31):
This would end up actually causing some issues later on.
There would 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

(22:54):
might be working on an audio animatronic figure and they
would need to disconnect it so that they can 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

(23:17):
a tube, 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

(23:39):
artists who had 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,

(23:59):
would be come incredibly important with audio animatronics. They leverage
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.

(24:20):
Then you had the Modeling department. 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

(24:42):
end up outfitting these different figures. So there are 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

(25:04):
system as intricate as audio animatronics 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. All right,

(25:27):
So you 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 Waffle Rogers to work on the animation for it Now.
Rogers was born in Stratton, Colorado, in nineteen nineteen, and

(25:51):
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

(26:11):
a staff sergeant in the photographic 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 at his property,
like he had a private little railroad track because he

(26:35):
just loved trains and he loved that romantic image of
travel by train. Um 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 thought that Rogers had a
lot of potential to work on actual physical implementations, not

(27:00):
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 kind of almost like
an architect. Rogers would also become a chief contributor to
this audio animatronics project. In fact, some would argue that

(27:21):
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 his
tombstone there. One of the tombstones has a name that
is a and homage to him. It was created while

(27:42):
he was still alive. Uh. The tombstone reads, here rests Wattle,
our Bender. He rode to Glory on a fender, peaceful rest.
So what 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

(28:05):
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 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

(28:26):
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. The actor that they got, by the way,
was Buddy Epson, who was originally going to play the
role of the Tin Man in the nineteen thirty nine
Wizard of Oz masterpiece, but Ebson ended up having a

(28:49):
massive allergic reaction to the aluminum makeup that was used
for the Tin Woodsman, and so he would end up
being replaced by Jack Haley. However, you can actual we
still hear Ebsen's voice in the Wizard of Oz. Uh.
It's his voice in the song We're off to see
the Wizard that Dorothy Scarecrow and the Tin Woodsman sing

(29:11):
after they've rescued the Tin Woodsman, so that that bit
where there skipping off into the distance. The voice you
hear is not Jack Hayley's it's Buddy Ebsen. UH. He also,
by the way, played Jed clamp It in The Beverly Hillbillies,
so if you ever watched that television series, he was
Jed clamp It. Ebsen was a song and dance man
back in the day, so it was a natural choice

(29:33):
for Disney to bring him on. He would end up
working on several Disney UH initiatives, including UH Davy Crockett,
But for this he just got up. He did a
soft shoe routine. 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 capable

(29:57):
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

(30:18):
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 Braggy technically Rogert E. Braggy, Sr.
His son was also working for Disney and we become
an imagineer. Braggy had moved to California from Chicago in

(30:40):
the late nineteen twenties with experience in machine shop training.
He joined Disney in nineteen 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 Braggy was one of

(31:00):
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. They weren't repetition,

(31:22):
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 nine inch tall

(31:44):
figure and they used cables to attach to various points
on the figure, and this was controlled by external machinery.
So you would have one amounts to a very complex
gearbox that used cams and cables in order to control
the figure. Year Now, a cam in case you don't
know what that term is, it's a rotating or sliding

(32:04):
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 create a
rotational motion. If you have heard the term camshaft in vehicles,

(32:28):
that's what a camshaft does. Uh. This was not yet
an example of audio animatronics. This figure, 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 inch tall figure, wanted
to create something more complicated. His next thought was a

(32:51):
barbershop quartet, a little mechanical barbershop quartet that can move
and dance and sing. He wanted to sing sweet add
a line. 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 because all or nothing. Really.

(33:13):
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 feet of it, so this gearbox essentially
had to be really close to the dancing figure, uh,
which meant that you had spatial issues you had to
take into account. So Disney's original thought was this could

(33:34):
be an attraction where maybe you walk up to a cabinet,
you plunk a quarter in, a little curtain draws back,
and you see this dancing figure dance for a quarter,
and then once it's done, the curtain draws close and
you move on. But the mechanics said, well, here's the problem.

(33:55):
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
cents of you is not going to cut it. And
you can't really go more expensive than that because at
the time cents was, you know, not insignificant amount of money.
And keep in mind this is the nineteen fifties, so

(34:18):
these initial attempts to create an animated figure in real life,
it kind of stalled out. The plans for Disneyland were
continuing at the same time. The park opened in July
nineteen 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

(34:40):
nineteen sixty. 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.

(35:02):
If we 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 that's you have a lot more freedom to stage
them the way you want to. And this really appealed

(35:23):
to Disney, 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 Mind Trained through Nature's Wonderland
ride is. Well, it used to be where Big Thunder
Mountain is now, so Big Thunder Mountain is a totally

(35:43):
different kind of train ride. The Mind 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 Crews. So if you've ever been on the Jungle Cruise,
that's a boat ride where you go through areas have

(36:04):
been inspired by India and Africa. The Nature's Wonderland was similar,
except it was a train ride through the Western US
inspired areas and included things like bears playing around in
a pond. Now, that was the first attraction to feature
audio animatronics, and I guess now as good a time

(36:25):
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 turning it into action.

(36:49):
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 played it back, that's

(37:10):
what would create the uh 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 don't mean they

(37:30):
were computer systems. This is purely mechanical approach. It's not electronic,
it's not uh you know, there's no microprocessors or transistors.
It's all mechanical elements. But it is digital in the
sense that it's binary and that you have two positions,
you have on and off. That meant that any motion

(37:51):
you wanted to make had only two outcomes. Arrest, position,
which would be whatever it started off as. So let's
take let's say that it's 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.

(38:13):
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 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

(38:35):
her freedom of movement allows, or it's in the that
rest position. That's it. Those two positions on or off,
zero or one. That's why we 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

(38:57):
it had limited use. It also was limited in how
much force it could use. Uh that these original audio
animatronics used one of two different systems to create movement.
Either it was using pneumatics or it was using solenoids.

(39:17):
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 tubes that would move
through this figure. You would have them, you know, wherever
they needed to be, and you would have valves that

(39:38):
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 to make the
figure move in whichever way you wanted it to. So
let's say it's a a bird in the enchanted Tiki room,

(39:59):
which one of the earliest audio animatronic attractions outside of
Nature's Wonderland and still exists to this day. The pneumatics
would allow the mouth to open. The closed position would
be the rest position, and it would allow the mouth
to open up. And when you do a lot of

(40:20):
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 was also being used in
this digital system. Solenoids are a variation on electro magnets.
So those of you who have listened to me talk

(40:42):
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 magnetic field. The magnetic
field can then be used to attract any sort of

(41:02):
faro magnetic material. That's the case of a solenoid, where
you have a core that connect kind of like a piston.
So when it's in his rest position, the core is
outside of the cylinder. May his positioned right at the
very end, so the cylinder is big enough so that
the core can fit completely inside the cylinder. And when

(41:25):
you run a current through the coil, it generates a
magnetic field which attracts the faro magnetic 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 a piece on a larger animatronic figure,

(41:47):
like let's say a mouth of the 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,
but just attached to whatever body part the mouth let's say,
of Mr. Lincoln, and pull pulls it down, pulls it open,

(42:10):
and then by turning off the electricity to this coil,
it negates that magnetic field. It returns to rest position,
and Lincoln shuts his trap. And thus, by controlling the
the flow of electricity through the solenoid, you can open
and close the mouth of one of the greatest presidents

(42:31):
of United States history, and thus magnificence is born. I mean,
this was a 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 still haven't
talked about the audio part. That's kind of more the
animatronic part, the idea of this animated physical being. But

(42:55):
whether it was a bird or a president, or or
a hippopotamus or whatever it might be that was using
audio animatronics, the secret sauce was in that audio. They
found that what they could do is create a tone
on a cassette or on a magnetic reel, I should say,

(43:19):
they could create a tone, and they used these little
metal reads that would connect to circuits. When the reds
would vibrate, it would close the circuit and allow a
current to pass through. So if you made the reds vibrate,
it would create a physical circuit that would end up
making the pneumatic or solenoid system activate and thus be

(43:42):
either on or off. You know, 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, or whatever the action needed to be.
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

(44:06):
you have a glass and you tap the glass and
it makes a little ringing noise, that is its resonant frequency,
and if you're able to replicate that resonant frequency, 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,

(44:27):
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
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

(44:48):
tone and you amplify the signal enough, you can make
the glass vibrate enough so that it shatters. This is
what we see 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 how pitch
perfect they are and creating that particular frequency. It has
to be close enough. There's actually a small range where

(45:12):
it will work, but you need to be as close
as possible to really get the maximum effect. It's a
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.
When you played the magnetic tape back, it would play

(45:35):
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,
Let's say it's a bird that can turn its head,

(45:55):
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,
everything would go off and you would have chaos. More

(46:17):
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 it's freedom of movement is, that's where it's going
to go to. So it's still had limitations. However, by

(46:38):
creating a specific circuit for every single motion, you could
make a pretty sophisticated figure. 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 cheating,
I guess is the right way of putting it. So,

(47:00):
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 UH, they had
to put in more components than could fit within the
constraint of a human head, and they weren't They didn't

(47:23):
really have the option of scaling it up. They couldn't
build Lincoln larger than human sized 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, how can we fit all these
components inside a human head when they're larger than what

(47:45):
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 Mr. Lincoln,
although apparently, and at least some of the wigs that
they designed for the character UH, the bulge in the
back of the head was noticeable, so, considering Lincoln's fate,

(48:08):
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 that they needed
to have something with a little bit more of a
spectrum of outcomes in order to get the effect that

(48:31):
they really wanted. That approach required them to switch from
pneumatic and solenoid systems to hydraulic systems. Hydraulic system uses liquid.
Typically it's just water as 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

(48:51):
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 pretty powerful movements, including stuff
that's strong enough to do something like lift and arm.

(49:12):
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 him, a good amount of
mass to them, and pneumatic ability on pneumatic systems weren't
strong enough to move them, especially not smoothly. If you
want to build a compressed air system that can move

(49:32):
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 UH,
and it also meant that they wanted to create more
gradations of movement. They didn't want to just be on

(49:52):
and off then 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 UH exhibits
that they were working on for the New York World's
Fair was the Carousel of Progress, which you can still

(50:14):
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

(50:34):
our lives more convenient and enjoyable, and all of these
various exhibits. A 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 of Progress so that people would say, oh,

(50:58):
you know what, I need to 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

(51:19):
to go with an analog system. Analog means 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

(51:39):
a system, and by increasing it or decreasing it, you
could create different ranges of motion within a properly designed system.
So that's what the imagineers started working on with both
Lincoln and the Carousel Progress. They wanted to create more
sophisticated systems that would allow for this sort of realistic motion,

(52:02):
and by pairing the hydraulic systems with this analog voltage system,
they could then create a more natural movement. Now, in
order to encode that they had to use varying tones
on this magnetic tape, and to do that, they ended

(52:24):
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 real for every single
component that is controlled by some sort of hydraulic system,
and that's just not feasible. So they ended up creating

(52:47):
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 figures. Some of
them were for theat coal elements like lighting queues, or
whether or not certain uh like products would open, like

(53:07):
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 using tones, So the sound department was still heavily

(53:28):
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 Mr Lincoln and I'll explain how some of
that turned out in just a minute, but first let's
take another quick break and thank our sponsor. So when

(53:57):
we talk about programming this this stone where you've got
all these different tracks that control these different elements within
an animatronic UH system, 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

(54:21):
figure might be fairly simple, but taken as a as
a whole, it gets to be enormously complex. One of
the earliest ways that they experimented with programming was using
silver paint. They use these old movieola movie editors that
were designed to edit film, but instead of that, what

(54:41):
they did was they took this this tape and they
would paint silver lines on it to create a circuit,
and whenever the reading head would pass over the silver
it would create UH an electrical circuit that in would
send out as a command for the various action to happen.

(55:06):
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
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

(55:27):
way they would edit animation reels. With animation, you think
of the work in terms of feet, not necessarily in seconds.
So instead of saying, oh, I need this mouth to
be open for two seconds, you might say, oh, I
need this to happen for two ft of film. So
you would literally mark out the spot on the tape

(55:50):
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 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. So as long as you either had all

(56:10):
of your tracks on one tape, and they could do
up to six tracks on this method. This was just
the prototype method. 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 can
program up to six different components of your audio animatronic

(56:33):
scene using one reel of tape, and they'd all be
synchronized because you would just measure it out on the
physical tape and 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 and needed to stop flapping its wings.

(56:55):
But it keeps talking on and off until second number ten. Well,
that's how you would mark it out on your magnetic tape,
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

(57:18):
back the same way every time. Now, this was not
the system that Disney decided to use for everything. They
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.

(57:40):
You never didn't necessarily have the circuit completing anymore, and
so you would get jitter emotions, or sometimes enough paint
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 towards what they needed.
When they went with tones, they found that that was

(58:03):
a better approach. But as they started programming the Great
Moments with Mr. Lincoln, they started to run into some
serious issues. The way they did this is they had
editing machines and 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

(58:26):
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
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

(58:47):
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 Mr Lincoln,
the various speeches that Mr 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

(59:10):
then you would end up combining those onto a master tape. Eventually,
there's actually a step in between, called a sub master,
but we're gonna simplify for the purposes of this podcast,
so that if 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

(59:31):
multiple tracks numbering and 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
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

(59:53):
with chaos. So Mr Lincoln might end up having a
bit of a freak out on stage while deliver the
Getty's Brig 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.

(01:00:14):
Having Abraham Lincoln's eyebrows go crazy all over his face
while he's talking might be a little distracting, so it
required a painstaking process of editing. They would get the
magnetic tape, 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

(01:00:38):
the audio animatronic show, in this case Great Moments with
Mr 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

(01:01:00):
same magnetic tape back and figure out how they could
fix it. Sometimes they could fix it by making a
couple of tweaks. Sometimes it require 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

(01:01:20):
had to make sure that you were synchronizing it with
everything else. And it may be that you would find
that one element is 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

(01:01:43):
cranking the system to the right starting point and adjusting
it that way. So maybe you would 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 just years point four seconds after it's supposed to,
and it looks ridiculous. You would have to go back

(01:02:06):
and try and hand crank it 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 rerecord 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

(01:02:28):
the day, so the only 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

(01:02:50):
order to make these minute changes. It was an incredibly
painstaking process to get the 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 prerecorded audio and give the experience that

(01:03:14):
they intended to their audience. Programming this way took a
lot of work. 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

(01:03:35):
of his imagineers who's wearing this weird harness. Uh, there's
a control system. It's directly connected to the father character
of carousela 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.

(01:03:58):
They programmed it more more granularly 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

(01:04:18):
to go through this other, very painstaking process. And this
is pretty much how they used 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 movements,
something a little more advanced than just a static character turning.

(01:04:43):
A lot of the dark rides in fantasy Land are
more primitive and don't need to be audio animatronic because
there's no real articulation with the characters. They're kind of
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

(01:05:04):
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,
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 UH analog system where you had

(01:05:25):
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 all contributed, and without them, these just wouldn't even
be a reality today. UH. They were able to make

(01:05:46):
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. UH set them apart from their competitors.
And it wasn't just the theming, which has always been

(01:06:06):
one of disney 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 and technological worlds. Stuff like pneumatic systems,
hydraulic systems, the concept of cams, the concept of solenoids.

(01:06:31):
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 into this audio animatronic system. So the
next time you ride one of these rides, think about

(01:06:53):
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. That the sound itself is what allows those
circuits to complete, and it varies that voltage, and it
allows Mr Lincoln to stand up as he addresses you.

(01:07:13):
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 disney World. And I was
so excited because if you've been to disney World several times,

(01:07:35):
after a while, you know what to expect. And while
it is still an amazing achievement to have built an
amusement park so uh immersive and with such detail, and
to then staff it with people who have some of
the best customer service points in the world. That alone

(01:07:57):
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 not been there before. In
this case, it was my wife. She had never been
to Disney World, so I was having this wonderful experience

(01:08:18):
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
ridden most of these rides dozens of times, so for me,
while I enjoyed them, the special part it kind of
worn off. Seeing it through her eyes brought it all
back and it was amazing. Then we go to the

(01:08:38):
Hall of Presidents, and at the Hall of Presidents, uh,
the curtains open and if you've never been to the
Hall of Presidents at Disney World, there's a point where
curtains open up and you see all of the presidence
of the United States they're all there, every single one
who's ever sat as president is there, animated this audio

(01:09:01):
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
introduced them one at a time. Well, Mr Lincoln uh
sits in a chair and then when it's his turn
to actually address the audience, because he first, they introduce everybody,

(01:09:26):
and everyone does a little gesture. They might not 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 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

(01:09:52):
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 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.

(01:10:13):
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
noticed the problem, and so I was starting to get
the giggles a little bit. My wife was definitely getting
the giggles, and my dad was encouraging it. My dad

(01:10:33):
is the ultimate dad joke dad, and I love him dearly.
But I hear my dad just say I begged them
not to make an animatronic John Wilkes booth completely inappropriate
and hilarious and tragic and hilarious. So we're watching as
Lincoln continues to gesticulate while bent over, staring at the floor. Ah,

(01:10:57):
And then it gets to his speech and music swells
and he starts to speak and move his arms more expressively,
still bent at the waist, he does not 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, Mr Lincoln is not feeling
very well, please check back again later today. And as

(01:11:18):
we walk out I you know, we start making other
jokes like is that my face on that penny, little
jokes about Lincoln bent over for some reason. And Uh,
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

(01:11:39):
that I can never take her to the Hall of
Presidents ever again and have her take it seriously at all.
Whenever it gets to Lincoln, she's gonna get the giggles,
and she's gonna 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

(01:11:59):
always is work perfectly. Sometimes some part of the system
or other would fail, and once that happens, then you
get these sort of 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

(01:12:20):
a character is bent over and slumped down because they
don't have the proper pressure to stand up. Uh, it
probably was 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

(01:12:40):
activate through the upper half of Mr. Lincoln, so he
couldn't stand up tall. That's that's my guess as a
you know, armchair technologist taking a look at what happened.
So that's it. That's how audio animatronics work. It is
a really interesting system. I love the fact that it

(01:13:02):
predates computer systems. For theme parks. These days, you're going
to find much more complicated programming. There's gonna be microprocessors
and characters. I don't know for a fact that the
characters they added to the Pirates of the Caribbean Ride,
for example, are more advanced versions, like there's a Johnny
Depp character that shows up three times and the new

(01:13:24):
Pirates of the Caribbean Ride. Uh, there's Barbosa character. Jeffrey
Rush's character from the movies is also in that. I
suspect that those are updated systems that are not running
on the old audio animatronic system, but that's just a guess.
I do not know that for a fact. They are
certainly much more sophisticated than the original Pirates of the

(01:13:46):
Caribbean characters were. Now there's a lot more stuff I
could talk about, Like I could talk about how Disney
had to work on building a new type of material
for these human figures called d reflex. It's not the
same thing that you find in cars that have d
reflex bumpers, but they had to create d reflex because
latex was too delicate to work over and over, especially

(01:14:08):
in an environment that had lots of oil and moving parts.
Uh sod reflex was the thing that they had to
create in order to keep a realistic skin looking texture.
But I figured that's for another episode further down the line. Well,
I hope you enjoyed that classic episode, and please forgive me.
It was not something I entered into lightly to do

(01:14:31):
a classic episode instead of a normal one. But honestly,
I ran out of time and I and rather than
give you a haphazard, you know, jerky kind of tech
stuff episode that clearly I did not put my full
effort and attention into would not have met my standards.
So it was a tough call. But I think this

(01:14:51):
is probably the best option. But I'm very curious about
you guys out there, if you have any favorite technology
that relates to things like amusement part or attractions like that.
Let me know because I would love to really do
another dive into this kind of topic. I love amusement parks,
So let me know what you would like. Send me

(01:15:11):
an email the addresses text stuff at how stuff works
dot com or pop on over to our website that's
text stuff podcast dot com. You'll find an archive of
all of our past episodes. You'll find links to where
we are on social media. You can always reach out there,
and you'll find a link to our online store where
every purchasing make goes to help the show and greatly
appreciate it, and I'll talk to you again really soon.

(01:15:37):
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