Rerun: TechStuff Moments with Mr. Lincoln

I love all things tech. And it is Monday, May Memorial Day, which means it's holiday here in the United States, and because of that, I am actually taking the day off, and so rather than having a new episode for you, this is an episode that originally aired on a different holiday, the fourth of July, back in two thousand eighteen, and it is titled tech Stuff Moments with Mr Lincoln because I think of Memorial Days being like the beginning of

the summer season, and for me, summers were often coupled with trips to Disney World because I lived in Georgia, Florida was not that away, and my sister and I were fanatics. So sit back, enjoy this episode, and on Wednesday, We're going to continue our story about the very complicated evolution of Warner Medium, and I'll chat with you a little bit at the end of the episode. This episode is to publish on the fourth of July two thousand eighteen, and here in the United States that date is treated

with some reverence as we consider it Independence Day. And back in seventeen seventy six, the Continental Congress representing the thirteen colonies of the America's declared those colonies a new nation called the United States of America. But that actually happened on July two, seventeen seventy six. John Adams was convinced that that was going to be the day we

all celebrated. As it turned out, we decided to do it on July four, because that was the day the Declaration of Independence, that famous document outlining America's arguments for seceding on the British Empire was dated, was dated on July four, seventy six. Also, um, despite what popular musical numbers would have you believe, it's mostly likely that that most of the representatives did not sign the Declaration of Independence that day. They probably did it on August two,

seventeen seventy six. But never mind all that, The fourth of July is when the US celebrates Independence Day. Whenever it happened doesn't matter. It just matters when we celebrate it. And in the past on tech stuff, I've tried to time vaguely related topics to that date. Whenever we've published

on or around the fourth of July. We've talked about the tech of say Independence Day, the movie, or like Fireworks, and today I want to talk about a Disneyland attraction called Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln, because I feel that's sort of quintessentially American, even though Lincoln was our sixteenth president and governed in the nineteenth century, not the eighteenth century, but never America, right, And you know, they're talking about Disneyland,

something that is truly a piece of Americana, and Great Moments with Mr Lincoln is located on Main Street, USA. That was Walt Disney's monument to the classic Americana, a small town almost like an America that never was an idealized America. So I figured it was a good topic to cover in this episode. Now I have done an episode about audio animatronics in the past, and I'm going

to be covering some of that ground again here. But we're specifically looking at the development of the Mr. Lincoln attraction in this episode, so I'm not going to focus too much on the other stuff. I'll have some stuff to say about some of the predecessors, because that's important to understand in order to figure out how Mr Lincoln worked. So if you're unfamiliar with the attraction Great Moments with

Mr Lincoln, here's kind of how it goes. You would go into a building, it's the Ground and Opera House on Main Street, USA and Disneyland, and you would see a little pre show piece before going into a theater, and you'd sit down. You get another little film, and then a screen would lift up and you would see seated center stage, the audio animatronic figure of Abraham Lincoln, and then Abraham Lincoln stands up out of his chair

and speaks to the crowd. And the content and the technology of the attraction have changed several times throughout the years. In fact, these days you wouldn't call it audio animatronics at all. It's the only reason anyone would refer to it that way is just because that's what the technology had been called for years and years and years. But the current incarnation at Disneyland isn't really audio animatronic. It's

not working on that same system. Now, before I talk about how it works, let's go into the history of audio animatronics and the development of this attraction in particular, because I think it's pretty fascinating to learn about not just the technology side, but the business side of this. So first we got to go back to nineteen That's when Walt Disney took his family on a vacation in Europe, and on that trip, Disney got enamored with some clockwork

mechanical toys, including a mechanical little bird. You would wind it up and it with tweet and flap its wings and would move in a pretty convincing way. And he was inspired by that to take these toys back to his his folks over at Walt Disney Studios and say, you know, we've we've animated stuff on film. We've taken cells and we've drawn pictures on them, and we've taken photographs of that and turned it into a film where

it looks like the inanimate is moving around. What if we did something similar, but we did it in the real world. We brought it into the three dimensions around us, and make make this idea sort of a grander scale. We're gonna take these little mechanical elements that I've seen here and make it something much bigger. So he returned to California, he brought ideas to his team of developers

that we now today would call imagineers. That's a portmanteau of imagination and engineer, And he said, what if we were to make something like this but bigger? So in nineteen fifty one he gave an assignment to two of his employees, Roger Braggy and Wattle Rogers Uh. Roger Braggy was born in nineteen o eight in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and he attended a vocational school and trained in machine shop work. He would relocate to Los Angeles and he found a

lot of work in the film industry. He even developed technologies like a rear projection system for major movie studios, and in nineteen thirty nine he got an invitation to join the Walt Disney Studio as a precision machinist. One of his first jobs he had was to install the

multiplane animation camera in the studio's brand new Burbank location. Now, this was a camera that consisted of not just a film camera, but also a massive frame, and that frame could hold multiple layers or planes of an animated cell.

So you might have a foreground image, you might have a main image, you might have a couple of background images, and they would all be held at different heights relative to this camera lens, and then by moving the frames either closer to or further away from the camera, you can make elements within that animated scene appear to move at different speeds and give this illusion of depth. So it's almost like you're zooming in through an animated scene.

And that was something that was really really innovative. Well, also, I should mention that Disney did not necessarily invent that one of his former employees more or less invented this approach of eyeworks, but that's a different story. Disney made extensive use of that technology when his studio made snow White in the Seven Dwarfs. By nine, Broggy had been promoted to the head of the studio machine shot, and when Walt started thinking about building a theme park, Braggy

was one of his go to engineers for attractions. Rogers, meanwhile, was born in nineteen nineteen in Stratton, Colorado, and he studied art at an institute in Los Angeles. He became proficient in lots of different areas of art, including sculpting, so he joined the Walt Disney studio also in nineteen thirty nine, along with Braggy and Early on, he worked primarily as an animator on films like Pinocchio, Bambi, Cinderella,

and Peter Pan. He also created props and managers for the studio's live action films, and like Braggy, he would be invited by Disney to work on attractions for the upcoming Disneyland theme park. So Walt Disney comes up to these two guys and he says, I want you to build me a figure approximately nine inches tall of a man that can move around like a human can, so sort of like a puppet, but not puppeteered by any

person in real time. It would be an entire mechanical system that would be able to do this, and it was called Project little Man, so as to build a nine inch human figure that could move and and move its mouth as if it's talking, and be able to synchronize that with an actual voice track. And essentially he just wanted to bring that concept of animation into the

real world. Buddy Ebsen, the actor who would become Jed Clampett in The Beverly Hillbillies, would come into the studio and he did this whole song and dance routine in front of a screen that was just a bunch of grid lines so that the animators had a reference they

could work from. And Buddy would later say of Disney, quote, he took me to a room where there were these seven little guys with aprons and thick glasses working on a contrivance that pulled wires, and a little mechanical man that moved his arms, legs, head, and mouth end quote.

So the two engineers lead this team. They used cables and cams and hinged limbs to create sort of a rudimentary muscle and skeletal system for this little figure, and the machinery would end up being underneath this little figures stage, so the whole thing was actually quite large. The figure was only nine inches tall, but the whole system was really big, and it wasn't really that dissimilar to a puppet, except again, the puppeteer was mechanical, not a human, and

it was it was. It kind of worked, but it wasn't practical. Later, when it came time to look into making audio animatronics for theme park attractions, Broggy would actually go to All Disney and say that we should really create larger life sized figures. It would actually make it easier because you could fit a lot of the elements inside the figure itself instead of having to find places in the environment to hide all the mechanisms that would

make the figure move. So this would serve as the genesis for a new field of innovation in Disney, which was audio and animatronics. The term is defined as being or consisting of a lifelike electro mechanical figure of a person or animal that has synchronized movement and sound. Although to be fair with the audio animatronics, it's synchronized to sound and it's not the sound you hear. Ha ha. So Walt Disney has this idea. He says, you know,

we've got Disneyland. We're opening that up. What have we created a restaurant. Let's make a Chinese restaurant. And in the lobby of this Chinese restaurant is a figure of a little, old wise Chinese man who will dispense words of wisdom like Confucius. But it's not an actor. It's actually gonna be a mechanical man. And the team got to work designing that kind of a figure. And according to Rogers, he said, quote you could always tell who was working on the job because they never looked at

your eyes when you were talking to them. They were always looking at your mouth end quote. They did eventually build a mock up of a head for this figure, but they didn't get much further than that. Disney had decided to drop that idea for something else, and that idea would eventually be the Enchanted Teaking Room, which we will come back to in just a minute now. Disneyland open on July sev In nineteen fifty nine, Walt Disney was working on the design of a new land that

would go in Disneyland. He was already thinking about how to build it out more and originally this was going to be called Liberty Street. It would run parallel to Main Street and would feature an attraction called One Nation Under God. In this attraction, the audience would be treated to a view of audio animatronic figures of every single president up on stage. Every president would be life sized,

would have lifelike motions, and would be animated. So he tasked his engineers to get to work on that concept, and they had to start somewhere. So the team chose Abraham Lincoln as their first figure, and they were able to get a copy of a life mask that Lincoln had made back before he was president. They got a copy of this, and a sculptor named Blaine Gibson, who would go on to create most of the faces for Disney Animatronics, would use that as a guide to create

the mask for the Lincoln animatronic. By nineteen sixty one, they had an early build of the Abraham Lincoln figure, and it had some limited mobility and expressions. It could be controlled or manipulated if you prefer, live, by an actual UH engineer, so it wasn't automated yet. So it was not the finished product, but it was apparently quite impressive even early on, because in nineteen sixty two the team received a visit from a guy named Robert Moses.

Robert Moses was a public official from New York City who held numerous positions, none of them publicly elected, and had become incredibly influential. He was responsible for massive projects in New York and some of them were controversial, and he was in charge of getting New York City ready for a World's Fair to be held there in nineteen sixty four. So Disney introduced Moses to the audio animatronic

Abraham Lincoln. An engineer controlled Lincoln to make him stand up and reach out his arm to shake Moses hand, and Moses was so impressed they declared the World's Fair would absolutely have to feature this technology, which would require the team to step up their work if they were to meet that particular deadline. How did they do it, Well, I'll tell you in just a moment, but first let's

take a quick break to thank our sponsor. So the team had a goal get a show featuring an audio animatronic Abraham Lincoln ready to go for the New York World's Fair in nineteen sixty four, that was thirteen months away. A few other components outside the technology fell into place to make this possible. Because the tech part was just one aspect, another part was where is the money going to come from? So part of that piece of the

puzzle was from the Illinois Commission. They had decided that the theme for the Illinois pavilion at the World's Fair would be the Land of Lincoln. The provisional chairman for this commission was a guy named Fairfax Cone. So Moses tells Cone, you gotta go and see what Walt Disney is working on out in California. It's gonna make you flip your lid. And Cone goes out there and ends up meeting with Disney. He sees the Lincoln figure for himself,

he too, is really impressed. He would then recommend to the Permanent Commission chairman, who was a Lincoln historian named Ralph Newman, that he incorporate the Abraham Lincoln figure in the Illinois Pavilion. So Newman would end up going out and meeting with Walt Disney and he would see the Abraham Lincoln figure and he too was blown away, and

he said, yes, we have absolutely need this. So the next step was convincing the Governor of Illinois, Otto Kerner, that this, in fact was something that the state should sponsor in order to get that out to the New York World's Fair. So Otto Kerner met with Walt Disney and he was convinced that the Lincoln figure would be a great addition to the Illinois Pavilion. But the expense

of the project was pretty high. Originally Disney said a million dollars and that was kind of a figure that was out of nowhere, but that was the point the starting point for negotiations. Eventually, the Disney company would say we can go as low as six hundred thousand dollars, and we could divide that up over two years, so the first year would be three fifty thousand dollars and the second year would be two hundred fifty thou dollars. But that was kind of putting Illinois in a tough position.

Kerner was having to negotiate not just with Walt Disney, but with Moses as well in the World's Fair, because Moses was demanding that any exhibitor at the World's Fair had to go through him and his departments for things like power and set up and tear down and all these other things that had fees associated with them. So the state was going to have to pay two different groups an enormous amount of money in order for this

to happen. But Newman knew that Moses was really impressed by this Lincoln figure, and Newman and Disney together met with Moses talked to him about this stuff. They were trying to convince him to uh to lower some of the World's Fair requirements in order to make this happen.

And Newman in fact even let it slip that he was going off to meet with some people over the United Nations to make it sound like things were super important on his end, and eventually Moses decided to renegotiate, and so they gave several concessions to the state of Illinois, said,

you're not gonna have to pay these fees. These fees, you're going to have a maximum amount of five thousand dollars for something that could have cost you ten times as much, and even agreed to a two hundred fifty thousand dollars stipend to help fund the Lincoln attraction, because that's how impressed Moses was of it. So Disney had cut that deal where the nineteen sixty four rental fee for Lincoln would be three fifty thousand dollars, and then there was the option for the state to extend that

through nineteen six two hundred fifty thousand dollars. After Illinois got that two d fifty thousand dollars stipend from the fair, that men they got Lincoln for the low low price of a hundred grand for that first year, and it also marked the one and only time in the World's Fair history that the fair subsidized and exhibit. The state gave Disney the official news in August nineteen sixty three, so nineteen four World's Fair was right around the corner.

It was super fast for them to get this turned around. Meanwhile, the team was really hard at work to try and put the show together. Much of the groundwork for audio animatronics had already been laid by an electrician named Lee Adams, who created the giant squid featured in the film twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. A lot of people point at that as being the first true animatronic figure under Disney, although of course that wasn't used as an attraction. It

was used in a movie. The tentacles of the massive squid in that film were actually kind of like balloons, so you would use a pneumatic system to pump air into the tentacles. That would cause them to unfold, and allowing the air to escape would cause the tentacles to curl back up, so controlling the airflow would allow you to puppeteer this giant squid. Disney Imagineers had also already created a theme park attraction used audio animatronic technology at

that point. The Enchanted Tiki Room, which I mentioned earlier, was the first attraction to feature audio animatronics, and it opened at Disneyland in nineteen sixty three. It was originally going to be that Chinese restaurant, then they decided to change it to a Polynesian themed restaurant, and then they decided to eventually drop the restaurant angle entirely and just making an attraction. So how does it actually work well? With the Tiki birds, everything was pretty much binary. Every

single element, every moving element had a neutral position. So let's say that we're looking at one of the four hosts that are macaus, and you're looking at the beaks of those macaus. The neutral position would be a closed beak. So if nothing is going to the the that particular bird,

it's beak should be closed. A pneumatic system, which is one that uses compressed air to do work, would activate a solenoid would actually act fate and allow compressed air to move through to force the mouth to an open position. So if you were to do that manually, you would pull a trigger and that would open up a valve and that would cause air to flow through the system to the appropriate element, causing the beak to open. But how was this done automatically, not with an actual human

operating the thing? Well, the secret was an ultrasonic tones recorded onto magnetic tape, like like the kind of tape you would use in a real too real tape machine or even a cassette player. Disney used tape that was an inch wide when it was first doing this, and that inch wide tape that they used in in the Enchantiqui room had fourteen tracks that you could lay on that one inch of tape, and you could put up

to sixteen signals on a single track. So you would record these ultrasonic frequencies on the tape and when played back, they would cause metallic reads to vibrate in various relays. When the reds vibrated, they would close a circuit. That circuit would send an electric current to a solenoid valve that would allow air to flow to the appropriate feature like that mccause beak, causing it to open. And because the system worked off these audio cues, Disney called the

tech audio animatronics. Even though the audio in question is inaudible to humans, right, we don't hear in those ultrasonic frequencies, So you could record an audible track that's within human hearing on that same tape, and that way you synchronize the ultrasonic frequencies that give the commands to the various elements in the animatronic figure with the audio track, and that way you can have the birds sort of. I was gonna say lip sync, but I guess it's more

like beak sinc to the audio track you recorded. Some of the audio animatronic technology Mr. Lincoln dependent upon was similar. They had the pneumatic switches for certain parts of the Lincoln animatronic, but only for the smaller features, because pneumatics would not supply the power needed to move some of the larger elements, like arms. A person's arms are pretty big and the the air would not be sufficiently powered

to move them. Also, if you did use air and you did use enough compression to make the arms move, they would shoot around like like like Lincoln was some sort of crazy karate monster. That would not work very well for the attraction. So instead they put hydraulic systems in place for some of the larger elements. Hydraulics use liquids and they use pressure to move the liquids around, and the liquids act as a source of mechanical force. So it's similar to pneumatics, but With hydraulics, you can

do a lot more. You can move much heavier things, and you can do so in a controlled way with the right amount of pressure. So in theory, Mr Lincoln would move according to the ultrasonic recordings on that magnetic tape, and the playback would cause the reeds to vibrate, completing circuits and forcing either air or liquid through the relevant tubes to make Lincoln move in the appropriate way in theory. Oh and um, let's talk about solenoids really quickly. I

mentioned it before. A solenoid valve. A solenoid is a cylindrical coil of conductive wire, and when you pass a current through the wire, it generates a magnetic field. You know, this is a basic principle of electromagnetism. A solenoid valve has a solenoid with a movable ferromagnetic core in the center of this coil, so the core can move uh laterally through this coil. The core is typically called a plunger, so when there's no current running through the coil, the

plunger is in a rest position. Typically that means it's closing off an opening that's otherwise inside this valve. So the valve is closed. When you run a current through the coil, it creates a magnetic field that pulls the core out of its rest position. It lifts the plunger, it opens the valve, so the solenoid valve acts as

the switch for the pneumatic and hydraulic elements. In addition, the team began to develop a technology to make movements more smooth and natural and less just on off or jerky. You know, you didn't want your your positions to all be one or two. You wanted to have a range, especially once you started to get too larger figures, human sized figures. So to do that, they need to create systems that could respond to variable voltage. Increasing or decreasing

the voltage would activate the complex movements. So instead of going from one to two, you could adjust the voltage slightly, make it move from one to one point three or one point seven, and you're not going all the way to your final possible position. And that ended up creating

a much greater range of movements. Performers would use either a potentiometer joystick for every single joint to send varying voltages to the control system for that joint, or later on they created harnesses, and the harnesses were able to capture more complicated, coordinated movements by measuring voltage changes at

all of the different various joints. Otherwise, doing something seemingly as simple as making the figure lifting arm and point with its hand would be incredibly difficult because every single joint needed its own control system under the potentiometer joystick approach, and you had to coordinate all of that correctly, right. You couldn't just have one person move the arm and then rewind it back, and then try and move the wrist and then try and move the hand. All of

that was really complicated. So once you rehearse all this, whether it was with the potentiometer joysticks or with the harness, you would then record this in the form of audio tones overlaid on thirty five millimeter film stock, and each joint would take up a real film and then all the reels would be recorded to a master tape. Lincoln would use both the potentiometer approach and the harness approach. They got an actor named Royal Dano to provide the

voice for Abraham Lincoln. That would actually get some criticism later on, where people said that his voice was not appropriate for President Lincoln because Lincoln's voice was said to have kind of a high tenor pitch to it and Royal Dano's voice had a lower pitch to it. But you know, some people argue that that was a show stopper, and other people say it wasn't such a big deal. Near mileage berries. One story does say that during an early trial run of the show, one of the hydraulic

hoses inside the Lincoln figure ruptured. The valve itself actually broke, and that red hydraulic fluid began to leak out and staying Lincoln's shirt, prompting one of the guests to joke that perhaps they were commemorating Lincoln's assassination, which did not may Walt Disney laugh. He then told his team to switch to clear hydraulic fluid, which they did from that point forward. Then there were times when the valves didn't

operate properly. They would cause the figure to jerk around unpredictably, which put more pressure on the rest of the system. The technical issues forced the team to delay the opening of the Lincoln exhibit at the New York World's Fair for about two weeks while they worked out all the bugs. But when it did open, it was so convincing that some people were certain that the figure was a human

actor in a costume and not an audio animatronic figure. Now, when we come back, I'll tell the rest of this story as well as what has happened since Mr Lincoln debut at Disneyland. But first let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. So while the World's Fair was

going on, Disneyland prepared its own identical attraction. The Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln attraction would open in the park on July eighth, nineteen sixty six, and it would use pretty much an exact copy of the World's Fair exhibit. Both would operate around at the same time for a while, so you had the same show happening on both coasts. And the Disneyland version was sponsored originally by Lincoln Savings and Loan, not the state of Illinois. It was housed

in the Opera House on Main Street, USA. Disneyland never built Liberty Street, but they did decide to repurpose the Opera House that was one of the first, if not the very first building constructed for Disneyland, and during the construction phase for the park, it had served as sort of a carpentry shop and workshop. Back in those days, Disneyland attractions were divided up into various categories related to

how elaborate the attraction was. And this is where you get terms like a ticket or a ticket attraction, and that just referred to the level, uh that that attraction belonged to. A ticket attractions were simple attractions, little bitty things you you know, weren't weren't huge crowd pleasers. Maybe it's a simple ride on Main Street, like a trolley ride. But if you wanted to write something a little more advanced, then you needed to be ticket or see ticket and

the really big ticket items were e tickets. Great Moments with Mr Lincoln was different. It was absolutely free once you got into the Disneyland park. Ticket books did often contain a coupon for the attraction, but that was just meant to help encourage people to go see it. There was no need to actually have a coupon in order to see it. You could just walk right in. The original script for Great Moments with Mr Lincoln included snippets

from various speeches Lincoln gave throughout his life. The general theme was freedom Liberty and Independence, and it would stay that way until January one, nineteen seventy three. At that point, Disneyland closed the attraction to convert it into a new exhibit called The Walt Disney Story that was to honor the life of Walt Disney himself, as he had passed

away several years earlier from lung cancer. The Walt Disney Story was a twenty eight minute film about the life of Disney and his work, but guests were upset at the removal of Mr Lincoln, and so in nineteen seventy five, the attraction was revised as The Walt Disney Story featuring Great Moments with Mr Lincoln, and it became a combined exhibit. The pre show area was dedicated to Disney's life, and

the theater was back to the Lincoln Show. In the late nineteen sixties, Disney Imagineers developed the Digital Animation Control System, also known as DAX D A c S. This system could record control commands onto a disk rather than on magnetic tape. That meant that programming could be done from a control board with various buttons, switches, and dials, rather

than with a harness or a potentiometer. Joystick, and elements could easily be deleted or overwritten, so you didn't have to worry about doing endless takes to get just the right performance. You could just fix any mistakes you made as you went along. In the nineteen eighties, imagineers introduced in another system called compliance. Compliance was meant to reduce the wear and tear on animatronics as well as to

make them more show worthy. If an animatronic has to do a quick move, let's say it's waving and it's moving its arm from left to right. Once it reached the end of its movement, it would frequently caused the entire figure to vibrate. Usually get that little robotic vibration at the end of a movement. If you ever see anyone dance the robot, you know what I'm talking about.

There's that little jerky motion when you get to the end. Well, Compliance would allow limbs to move just a little past their normal end location, and that was in order to

be a shock absorber. So think about where your wave would end and the the animatronic would start to slow down, but it would continue to allow itself to move past that point for just a little bit, so that it had more of a gradual slowing instead of just a sudden stop, and you wouldn't get that robotic shake great moments with this or Lincoln underwent a refurbishment and there was a new animatronic Lincoln installed that used more of this technology. It also had updated artificial skin, It had

a new costume, it had more advanced digital electronics. But that one closed in two thousand for another refurbishment, and two thousand one it reopened and Lincoln now delivered the Gettysburg Address instead of this sort of sort of grouping of various clips from various speeches, so now he gave the Gettysburg Address, And that version closed again in two thousand five because Disneyland was celebrating its fiftieth anniversary and the theater was given over to a special attraction about

the history of the park itself. That kept on going until two thousand nine, and then Lincoln came back again. The newest version is an electric animatronic figure. The speech Lincoln gives is more or less the original one from the nineteen sixty four World's Fair. Does have a few edits to it. It's not quite as long as the original speech was, so it's more like the version, though

not exactly the same. In two thousand thirteen, Disney would shut down its internal division called MAPO M A p O. Some people say that stands for Mary Poppins because it was formed after the success of the movie Mary Poppins O. They say, no, it's manufacturing and production. That was where the name came from. But anyway, whether whatever its name came from, that was the division that was responsible for producing audio animatronics and then later electronic version of animatronics.

All of them came out from there for the most part, and toward the end of its run, more and more of those projects we're getting outsourced to other companies. So in twenty thirteen the company decided, you know, we're just gonna go with this contract approach. We're not going to build them in house anymore. And the company that's mostly in charge of developing animatronics for Disney is Garner Holt Productions.

That company is located out of California. It also makes animatronics for lots of other clients, not just Disney, but that's the company that's mostly responsible for them and has had incredible demonstrations of really complicated, sophisticated animatronic figures that are eerily realistic, like we're talking Uncanny Valley style realistic, including an Abraham Lincoln bust that makes faces that I

would say start to lean toward the scary. But you have to see the videos to to understand what I'm talking about. Anyway, that wraps up the great moments with Mr Lincoln's story. It's fascinating to me to see how an idea could go from just hypothesis to an actual, working attraction. How do you go from I want this

thing to exist to making it so. Walt Disney's imagineers have a reputation for doing that time and time again, and the attractions that Disney are are evidence of that fact, And as a lifelong Disney fan, I have a great appreciation for that, although I have seen comparable work at other parks. I mean, there are plenty of other places that have used that same philosophy to great effect, like Universal's Islands of Adventure, for example. But that wraps up

this fourth of July episode. If you have any suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, let me know. Why don't you send me an email The addresses tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com. Or drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter. The handle of both of those is tech Stuff hs W. Don't forget to follow us on Instagram, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Well, I hope you enjoyed that Classic episode. I guess Classic is a little much right, came out in two thousand eighteen.

I hope you enjoyed that episode from three years ago. And uh, I look forward chatting with you guys later this week about tech News and about Warner because that story continues to go into really interesting and weird places. A lot of different players involved in that Warner story. And if you thought the first two parts were complicated, well just wait to have part number three. And with that, I'm going to head off and enjoy the rest of

the day. I hope you do too, whether you are in the United States and you know, observing Memorial Day or wherever in the world you may be. May you have a safe and pleasant day, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite jows