TechStuff Classic: The Wonderful World of Audio Animatronics

of film, of television, of their theme parks. Probably not necessarily in that or maybe film first then theme parks than television, but I'm a huge fan of Disney stuff. And recently, when I was on a trip to Los Angeles to attend E three, I found myself with a day with nothing to do. I had hoped to book some meetings that did not happen, so instead of just sitting around my hotel room feeling sorry for myself, in a city where I really didn't know anybody.

the technology and innovation that goes behind Disneyland. And honestly, I could do maybe a dozen episodes about different technologies that were pioneered or perfected at the Disney theme parks, because there are a ton of them that Disney either directly had a hand in developing or tweaked it in a way to elevate it beyond what it used to be.

some sort of three dimensional figure. Beyond shadow puppets and that sort of puppet tree, which is amazing all on its own, I'm talking about your traditional hand puppets, rod puppets, and marionettes. That involves manipulating and inanimate object in a way to make it seem like it has life, that has anima, and that you are using some sort of system, whether it's rods or the puppet is essentially a glove puppet, or you're using strings with a marionette to create this

illusion of movement. Well, Disney wanted to create something similar, only these would run on a mechanical system that would be painstakingly programmed rather than being under the direct control of a human being. Those figures, when they're working properly, would replicate those same motions and have the same performance every single time. So the one hundredth time the character is doing a show, it's exactly the way it was

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

they were first developing these systems. It is pretty amazing stuff. Now, the reason why Disney wanted this in the first place is he really loved the idea of creating a real, three dimensional experience, similar to what you would get with an animated film. Animated films can be perfected right, you can sit there and sketch it out and get it just right before you release it as a movie. He wanted to have that same sort of experience, but in

the real physical world. He was a stickler for perfection, had very, very very high standards and the people who worked for him. They also would end up having very high standards. Everyone wanted to make sure that they met Disney's expectations. Now you can find animatronic figures in lots of Disney attractions, including the Enchanted Tiki Room, Pirates of the Caribbean, the Haunted Mansion, Great Moments with Mister Lincoln, the Hall of Presidents which would be over at the

Magic Kingdom, and Disney World, and tons more. There are lots of examples. There are also some attractions that had moving figures that didn't use the audio animatronic system. So, for example, the Jungle Cruise ride has animated animal figures. As you ride through, you see hippopotamuses and crocodiles and elephants, but these were running on a very simple mechanical loop system. They were not specifically audio animatronic.

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 these various Disney attractions that I have yet to uncover.

If this is not enough Disney for you, all right, let's talk specifically about what I wanted to concentrate on today. To do that, we have to mention Walt Disney because he's central to our story. He's kind of our main character if this were a narrative. His full name was Walter Elias Disney. He was born in nineteen oh one in Illinois. He grew up in Missouri and attended high school in Chicago. He was studying art primarily. When he was sixteen, he dropped out to join the army, but

they rejected him because he was too young. He then joined the Red Cross and was shipped over to Europe and drove ambulances during World War One in France. Once is his work with the Red Cross was done over there, he moved back to the United States and he began to work for an ad company. He was making film and animations. Then he would go on to create his own studio, which saw some modest success, but then it ran into some hard times. Eventually he had to declare bankruptcy.

Under his first studio, but that he didn't give up. He decided to make a go at it again, and he and his brother Roy were able to co found the Walt Disney Company, and from that moment forward, his influence on tech has been considerable, from actual innovations and technology to how creators can protect their intellectual property. Now, not all of those influences have been met with enthusiasm.

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

So Disney's impact on technology has been enormous in both very specific ways that relate to particular technologies to the way that the those technologies are protected under intellectual property law. So Disney's use of sound with animation was a huge leap forward in the nineteen twenties, Steamboat Willie being the first cartoon with sound, and Disney himself voiced the iconic character of Mickey Mouse, who struck a chord with viewers

and propelled Disney into enormous success. Over the following decades, he would see a lot more success, including going into feature link animation, which had not been done before, and he was able to succeed with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and he also continued to see success with short form stuff. Now, depending upon the account you read, because there are a couple different versions of the story, we actually begin either in France or the French Quarter

in New Orleans. The story goes that Disney was on vacation with his family, and as he was on vacation, and he decided to look into some antique shops and he came across some various clockwork toys, wind up birds, and that sort of thing. One specific toy he came across in an antique shop was a bird cage that had a mechanical bird inside of it that would chirp and sing, and it would make little motions that you

could describe as being somewhat robotic. They were pretty primitive motions, but you know, close enough to being an actual bird that you knew what it was. It wasn't like it looked like a monstrosity or anything like that. He thought it was absolutely charming, and he felt that there was a lot of potential there that he could use to create three dimensional, physical animated figurines, potentially in a theme park.

That was one of the things he had been considering around this time, although Disneyland had not yet become a reality. So he brought the antique bird cage with the mechanical bird inside of it back to his company, and he went to some of his top thinkers over at the Walt Disney Company and said, figure out how this thing works.

So they took it apart, and they took a look at it, and they began to formulate ideas of how they could create their own technology that would also allow for animation of this type sort of this automated puppetry that I was talking about now. Disney was really excited about this prospect of having fully realized, three dimensional characters

capable of delivering a performance consistently. And Jack Gladish, who was one of the engineers who would work on developing audio animatronic technology, one of many, as it turns out, would say that Disney once joked to him, I'm tired of finicky actors. I want to develop a fully animated, articulated human being to use in place of motion picture

actors and actresses. So this was Disney having a bit of fun saying that, Hey, the real reason why I want to develop this technology is because then I can get rid of all these pesky humans that keep on asking questions or having issues, whereas the animatronic ones will just do what we tell them to do. And it's kind of funny because there's another famous director who said

something very similar about Disney's cast. That famous director was Alfred Hitchcock, who of course made incredible films of thriller and psychological horror genres, things like The Birds and Psycho, that sort of stuff. Alfred Hitchcock reportedly once said Disney has the best casting. If he doesn't like an actor, he just tears him up. So Hitchcock's joke and Disney's joke were very similar in that respect, this idea of the frustrated director who has to contend with the delicate

sensibilities of actors and actress. But in truth, Disney just thought this was a really cool technology and he saw a lot of potential in it, and he was always looking at new ways to make use of the immense

talent he had attracted to the Walt Disney Company. Whereas a lot of these people started off in the animation department where they were working on various films and shorts for Disney, they would eventually move into very different departments and develop stuff like the actual Disneyland theme park disney World later on, as well as visual effects and props and sets and things of that nature for the various live action films that Disney was getting into as well.

So you had people who started off as animators kind of specializing in different areas. This was the dawn of the imagineering age. There was no such thing as an imagineer yet, no one had called it that, but eventually Disney would end up referring to people who worked in this sort of field as imagineers. They were thinking outside the box, using engineering and creativity married together to create really interesting experiences that you could not find anywhere else.

That was the value that Disney wanted to create to justify charging people admission to come and.

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 was just invent it. No big shakes, right, So to start. One of the earliest experiments with this idea of animating a three dimensional figure was what would eventually be called

the Day Dancing Man or the Little Man project. This would be of a figure that measured about nine inches tall and was meant to dance based upon this automated system or mechanical system at least if not fully automated. The story goes that Walt Disney approached the artist Ken Anderson,

who was working for Disney. Anderson would become instrumental for the design and implementation of various elements in Disneyland, and he said, you know what, You're working on a lot of stuff, but I want to pay you out of my own pocket for a project that I really believe in that's not really a company project yet. I want to create scenes that evoke the American way of life, and Disney had a very idyllic sense of what that meant.

That small town feel that you get when you walk down Main Street, USA, if you're ever at Disneyland or disney World and you're walking down Main Street, especially if you're doing it at a time when there's not a huge crowd there, it evokes the sense of a small town maybe early nineteen hundreds, around the time when Walt Disney himself would have been growing up, where if things

appeared to be simple and elegant. That's what Disney wanted to create, and so he talked to Anderson, said, I want to have this idea of building this kind of experience in miniature where people can look at the different miniatures we design and different elements of it actually come to life. So at first he wanted to get some paintings, some sketches of this. So Anderson got to work and one of the first things he created was a Norman Rockwell esque scene of a soft shoe dancer performing on.

a couple of other folks over at Disney. He went to a sculptor who was working for the company at the time. The sculptor's name was Charles Clarence Cristadoro, and Cristadoro's dad was a famous agricultural scientist and farmer who had written extensively about agriculture. Cristadora himself had become a notable sculptor, working both in the public spaces, designing statues that were shown in San Diego and other areas of California,

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

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

how and a little bit. The sound department was ultimately the one that was holding onto the project, the project leader that was the head of development. This would end up actually causing some issues later on. There'd be some disagreements between the Sound department and some other departments, and they were run by different unions, which also meant that

they would run into these weird problems. There was a story in one of the articles I read about how the mechanical department, the Mechanical Shop, they might be working on an audio animatronic figure, and they would need to disconnect it so that they can make an adjustment before reconnecting it. But they weren't allowed to actually disconnect the figure because that was a union job that one of

the sound department guys would have to do. So they'd have to go and get someone from the sound department to come over to the machine shop, disconnect a tube, wait until the mechanical shop people had made their adjustments, reconnect the tube, and then they could proceed. By union rules, the machine shop folks were not allowed to do that on their own, so it got very frustrating at times. Then you've got the animation Department Disney, of course, famous

for animation. This was the group of artists who had studied movement extensively. If you're going to animate movement, you have to understand how movement works, or else you can't replicate it properly and it's not going to look right when you watch an animated film. And more importantly, they had been studying animated movement in film itself. As it turns out, film or at least magnetic tape, would become

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

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

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 a staff sergeant in the photographics section. And when he

wasn't animating, he was tinkering. He was creating toys and model trains, and Walt Disney was also a model train fanatic. He loved model trains, including trains large enough to ride on, and he had a couple at his property. He had a private little railroad track because he just loved trains.

He loved that romantic image of travel by train. A lot of the things that Disney worked on, he worked on while he was traveling via train, So he and Rogers had a lot of common ground there, and Disney thought that Rogers had a lot of potential to work on actual physical implementations, not just animation, so he began to rely on Rogers to sculpt objects for live action pictures, and in nineteen fifty four he tapped Rogers to help design buildings for Disneyland, so Rogers went from animator to

almost like an architect. Rogers would also become a chief contributor to this audio animatronics project. In fact, some would argue that he was, essentially, when you got down to it, the lead audio animatronic engineer. He is also immortalized by the way at Disney's Haunted Mansion attraction. You can find his tombstone there. One of the tombstones has a name that is an homage to him, has created while he was still alive. The tombstone reads, here rests Wothel r Bender.

He rode to glory on a fender peaceful rest. So

while his actual name was Rogers, not Bender. That's in honor of him now as a reference, Disney decided to bring in an actor to actually perform a soft shoe routine, and they were going to shoot this actor with film film cameras, not actually shoot the actor, even Disney would not do something so brazen as that, but rather to film the actor as he was doing the soft shoe routine against a background that was a grid, so that the animators could review the footage, use the grid as

reference points, watch every little motion and try and figure out how they were going to translate that into animation when they built this system that they were working on. The actor that they got, by the way, was Buddy Epsen, who was originally going to play the role of the Tin Man in the nineteen thirty nine With of Oz Masterpiece. But Ebsen ended up having a massive allergic reaction to the aluminum makeup that was used for the ten Woodsman,

and so he would end up being replaced by Jack Haley. However, you can actually still hear Ebsen's voice in the Wizard of Oz. It's his voice in the song We're off to see the Wizard that Dorothy Scarecrow and the Tin Woodsman sing after they've rescued the Tin Woodsman. So that bit where they're skipping off into the distance, the voice

you hear is not Jack Hayley's, it's Buddy Ebsen. He also, by the way, played Jed Clampet in The Beverly Hillbillies, so if you ever watched that television series, he was Jed Clampitt. Ebsen was a song and dance man back in the day, so it was a natural choice for.

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 figure out exactly what you need and you design for that specifically. Now, one of the mechanical engineers who was working on this project was Roger Edward Broggie technically Roger E. Broggy Senior. His son was also working for Disney and

would become an imagineer. Broggy had moved to California from Chicago in the late nineteen twenties with experience in machine shop training. He joined Disney in nineteen thirty nine, so he was originally working on some of their live action films. He helped design special effects for twenty thousand Leagues under the Sea. He also helped Walt Disney build some of those model trains for his personal collection, and Broggy was one of the engineers working on this Dancing Man project.

He would later say that was a huge challenge in part because Ebsen, when he did his soft shoe routine for the cameras, never repeated movements in the routine, so all the movements he did were original and not patterned. They weren't repetition, and that's difficult if you're an animator. You would like to have that repetition because you can design it once and then essentially cut and paste it

and use it again. But if everything is new, then you have to design it from scratch all the way through. It made their job more difficult. Ultimately, they produced this nine inch tall figure, and they used cables to attach to various points on the figure, and this was controlled by external machinery, so you would have what amounts to a very complex gearbox that used cams and cables in

order to control the figure. Now, a cam in case you don't know what that term is, it's a rotating or sliding piece of machinery, particularly used to transform rotary motion into linear motion or vice versa. So in other words, you can turn a rotational motion into a back and forth or up and down motion a linear one using these, or you can use a linear motion to.

But the system that the machine shop had created wasn't really sufficient because the dancing figure couldn't make very subtle movements. It was all all or nothing really. With each of the movements this thing made, it jerked around a lot, and it wasn't really a lifelike representation. The mechanism that controlled the figure had to be within a couple of feet of it, so this gearbox essentially had to be really close to the dancing figure, which meant that you

had spatial issues you had to take into account. So Disney's original thought was this could be an attraction where maybe you walk up to a cabinet, you plunk a quarter in, a little curtain draws back, and you see this dancing figure dance for a quarter, and then once it's done, the curtain draws closed and you move on.

But the mechanics said, well, here's the problem. The amount of money it took to develop this and the amount of money it will take to maintain it, you will never recapture by going a quarter of you, twenty five cents of you is not going to cut it, and you can't really go more expensive than that because at the time, twenty five cents was a not insignificant amount of money.

in five years. That was a ride called the Mind Train through Nature's Wonderland, which opened in May 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. 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 thus you have a lot more freedom to stage them the way you want to. And this really appealed 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 Mine Train through Nature's Wonderland ride is.

areas that have been inspired by India and Africa. The Nature's Wonderland was similar, except it was a train ride through the Western US inspired areas. Included things like bears playing around in a pond. Now, that was the first attraction to feature audio animatronics. And I guess now as good a time as any as to explain what audio

animatronics are. Audio animatronics take on these mechanical figures that you can power in various ways, and they pair it with a system that is programmable that uses audio as its method of transmitting information and taking the information and turning it into action. So everything is based off sound, which is kind of weird to think about it, but you would store the information on these massive cassettes, these magnetic tapes. Really they're magnetic reels. They weren't really cassettes.

So you take magnetic reels of tape and you would encode information in sound on the tape, and when you played it back, that's what would create the well, it's what would allow circuits to be completed to create the movement. You see now, how that all works, It requires a bit more of a deeper dive. First of all, the earliest audio animatronic systems were digital. Now by that I don't mean they were computer systems. This is purely mechanical approach.

It's not electronic it's not you know, there's no microprocessors or transistors. It's all mechanical elements. But it is digital in the sense that it's binary in that you have two positions, you have on and off. That meant that any motion you wanted to make had only two outcomes, a rest position, which would be whatever it started off as.

or it's in 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 it had limited use. It also was limited in how much force it could use. These original audio animatronics used one of two different systems to create movement. Either it was using pneumatics or it

was using solenoids. A pneumatic system uses compressed air. Compressed air is what creates the force that translates into mechanical motion in your system. So you would have tubes, pneumatic tubes that would move through this figure. You would have them, you know, wherever they needed to be, and you would have valves that when they're closed, do not allow air

to move through. When you would complete a circuit, it would make the valve open, which would allow air to move through, which would then create the mechanical force necessary to make the figure move in whichever way you wanted it to. So, let's say it's a bird in the enchanted Tiki Room, which was one of the earliest audio animatronic attractions outside of Nature's Wonderland and it still exists to this day. The pneumatics would allow the mouth to open.

The closed position would be the rest position, and it would allow the mouth to open up. And when you do a lot of opening and closing, it gives the illusion that the bird is actually talking when you pair it with the appropriate sound. That was one way of creating motion, but the solenoids were a different way that was also being used in this digital system. Solenoids are a variation on electromagnets. So those of you who have listened to me talk endlessly about electromagnetism, get ready for

some more so. Your basic electromagnet consists of a coil of conductive material. Often it is insulated copper wire. You run a current through this coil and that generates a magnetic field.

can fit completely inside the cylinder. And when you run a current through the coil, it generates a magnetic field which attracts the ferromagnetic core into the cylinder, pulls it in. And if you connect something to the other end of that little core, like a cable, that then attaches to a piece on a larger animatronic figure, like let's say

a mouth of a character. Whenever the circuit activates, it'll pull the solenoid in the core into the solenoid, which in turn pulls on the wire or cable which is attached to whatever body part the mouth let's say, of mister Lincoln, and pulls it down, pulls it open, and then by turning off the electricity to this coil, it negates that magnetic field. It returns to rest position, and

Lincoln shuts this trap. And thus, by controlling the flow of electricity through this solenoid, you can open and close the mouth of one of the greatest presidents of United States history, and thus magnificence is born. I mean, this was an enormous use of technology, a very innovative use of technology at the time. So that was the basics for the movement. But that we saw them and talked about the audio part, that's kind of more the animatronic part, the idea of this animated physical being.

be off. You could have your character open his or her mouth or move his or her head.

it to that frequency. So if you create a sound that is of the same pitch as an object's resonant frequency, it will naturally begin to vibrate, and if you then amplify that signal, In other words, if you increase the volume, you will increase the amount of vibration that you're creating in that material. So again with the example of a glass, if you have a crystal glass, then it generates a

particular tone when you strike it. If you replicate that tone and you amplify the signal enough, you can make the glass vibrate enough so that it shatters.

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, 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 on that in a little bit. Again, this is a digital system, so there's no variation here. You could not have the bird turn its head halfway. It's always going to turn it as far as the animatronic is allowed. Whatever its freedom of movement is, that's where it's going

to go to. So it still had limitations. However, by creating a specific circuit for every single motion, you could make.

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 the space can contain. And eventually they were able to make a head that had kind of a bulge in the back of it, and they were able to fake it with the wig

that they put on mister Lincoln. Although apparently, and at least some of the wigs that they designed.

the effect that they really wanted. That approach required them to switch from pneumatic and solenoid systems to hydraulic systems. A hydraulic system uses liquid. Typically it's just water as its means of creating that same sort of mechanical force. You can't really compress water, as it turns out, so if you just put force behind water, it will push

against whatever constraints you have it in. So if you put a good amount of water pressure in and you use valves to control where that water can go by opening and closing those valves, you can allow for some pretty powerful movements, including stuff that's strong enough to do

something like lift and arm. Because the various pieces of machinery that Disney engineers were creating they weighed a good amount of they had a good amount of weight to them, a good amount of mass to them, and numatic ability on numatic systems weren't strong enough to move them, especially

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

wanted to have some different abilities. They wanted to create a lot of different potential movements within the limbs of characters. One of the exhibits that they were working on for the New York World's Fair was the Carousel of Progress,

which you can still see in certain Disney parks. The Carousel Progress features multiple scenes of a family through different eras of human history, including near future, where you get to see the innovation of progress, how systems have improved over time, to make our lives more convenient and enjoyable. And all of these various exhibits at New York had different sponsors, so Disney was partnering with other companies that had a vested interest in the public seeing this stuff.

So there were branded materials inside Carousel Progress so that people would say, oh, you know what, I need to buy X kind of refrigerator because I want my life to be as convenient as it was for those robots we just saw. So in order to make this look convincing, they wanted the human characters to have very lifelike motions. Well, you can't do that with just the digital system, so they needed to go with an analog system. Analog means that you can have a variable element. It's not just

on or off. That's what digital is. Either the signals going or it's not. Variable means you can actually create variations, and you do this through voltage. By changing the amount of voltage in a system and by increasing it or decreasing it, you could create different ranges of motion within a properly designed system. So that's what the imagineers started

working on with both Lincoln and the Caresel Progress. They wanted to create more sophisticated systems that would allow for this sort of realistic motion, and by pairing the hydraulic systems with this analog voltage system, they could then create a more.

think up to twenty four eventually different tracks. But not all of those tracks were for the actual animatronic figure. Some of them were for theatrical elements like lighting cues, or whether or not certain products would open, like the refrigerator door might open, a drawer might slide out, an element in the fridge might tilt so people can get

a better look at it. All of those were their own separate little circuits, and they all needed to be programmed into the audio animatronic reels, which again we're still using tones, So the sound department was still heavily involved

in this. As you can imagine this complicated thing significantly once they got to the part where it was time to program the Carousel of Progress and the Great Moments with mister Lincoln, and I'll explain how some of that turned out in just a minute, but first let's take

another quick break and thank our sponsor. So when we talk about programming this system where you've got all these different tracks that control these different elements within an animatronic system, keep in mind that depending on how many figures you have, and how many points of articulation they have and what they need to do, these could be incredibly complicated. From a macro standpoint, each individual figure might be fairly simple, but taken as a whole, it gets to be enormously complex.

One of the earliest ways that they experimented with programming was using silver paint. They used these old movieola movie editors that were designed to edit film, but instead of that, what they did was they took this tape and they would paint silver lines on it to create a circuit, and whenever the reading head would pass over the silver it would create an electrical circuit that then would send out as a command for the various action to happen.

So let's say again that it's a parrot opening its beak, and you would use a little line of silver paint along the length of this tape to indicate this is where the beak needs to be opened. Because they were using animators to design the system, in part, the animators loved it. They were using it very similar to the way they would edit animation reels. With animation, you think of the work in terms of feet, not necessarily in seconds.

number four I needed to start talking. But by second number five I needed to stop flapping its wings. But it keeps talking on and off until second number ten. Well, that's how you would mark it out on your magnetic tape, and you would just draw one line to be the control for the beak and another line to be the control for the wings, and as it would move through the Moviola editor and the contacts that the engineers that essentially added into this Moviola editor, it would play it

back the same way every time. Now, this was not the system that Disney decided to use for everything. They again switched to an audio tone format instead of using lines of silver paint, the reason being that you could only play the tape so many times before the silver paint started to flake off, and once it started to flake off, then you no longer had a strong signal.

You never didn't necessarily have the circuit completing anymore, and so you would get jitter emotions or sometimes enough paint would peel off where you wouldn't even get the result you wanted at all. So it wasn't a permanent solution, but it was an interesting step toward what they needed. When they went with the tones, they found that that was a better approach. But as they started programming the Great Moments with mister Lincoln, they started to run into

some serious issues. The way they did this is they had editing machines and they had playback machines. The playback machines all they could do was play the magnetic tape back again. And this was they would call these machines dummies, because that's all they could do is just play something back. So they had more dummies than they had editing machines.

Where they could write to magnetic tape, they would record to magnetic tape, both the tones that would control the various animatronic actions, the lighting of the theater, any other elements that needed to happen within the theater, they would all be encoded on this magnetic tape as well, and they would also have the audio for the actual presentation. So in the case of Great Moments with mister Lincoln, the various speeches that mister Lincoln delivers had to be

on that magnetic tape as well. You would first produce an individual tape for every single one of those, and then you would end up combining those onto a master tape. Eventually, there's actually a step in between, called a submaster, but we're going to simplify for the purposes of this podcast, so that ultimately you would end up with a master

tape that would have everything you needed on it. You might imagine that having one master tape that has multiple tracks numbering in more than two dozen in some cases, that you could run into some interference, and you would be right. It turned out that some of these, because of the different volumes that they recorded at, the tones would sometimes mask one another, and or other times they would activate more than one element and you'd end up with chaos.

system using one of these dummies. They would take notes, copious notes about everything that was going on with the performance of the audio animatronic show, in this case Great Moments with mister Lincoln, and anything that went wrong. They had to make note of whether it was a hand motion or an eyebrow, or the mouth wasn't moving in sync with the sound, or maybe the sound itself was

at the wrong volume. Whatever the problem was, they had to make note of it, and then they had to take that same magnetic tape back and figure out how they could fix it. Sometimes they could fix it by making a couple of tweaks. Sometimes it required re recording an entire section, so it might be that you're recording a brand new section just to control the fingers on the left hand. That's how exacting this had to be.

And again you had to make sure that you were synchronizing it with everything else, and it may be that you would find that one element slightly out of sync of everything else. You had planned it out, you plotted it, you recorded it. When you laid down the tracks, you didn't realize that they didn't quite line up the way you wanted them to, and that might require you to cut out one of the tracks and then splice it back in by hand cranking the system to the right

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

Worst case scenario scenario, you'd have to re record the master and just make sure everything is lined up in its new orientation based upon the notes you made To make matters even more complicated, they were using a sound studio that was busy during the day, so the only time the engineers could actually work on this project, which had to be done before the World's Fair opened, was

at night. They would go to this recording studio at night that had its equipment on different floors, so they actually had to run cabling systems to go up and down floors so that they could connect the various parts that they were using in order to make these minute changes.

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

So when the guy makes a big motion with his arm, you see the Carousel of Progress character make that same motion, and Disney refers to that as programming, but that's not actually how they programmed it. They programmed it more granularly than that. They could control a character directly using this method, but that was only really good for one on one digital puppetry, as in, you have a human controller actually

manipulating the character at that very moment. If you wanted it automated, you had to go through this other, very painstaking process. And this is pretty much how they used audio animatronics. For the next several years, they would develop lots of different rides that used audio animatronic figures. Pirates of the Caribbean, the Haunted Mansion, rides like that, where you had some sophisticated movement, something a little more advanced

than just a static character turning. A lot of the dark rides in Fantasy Land are more primitive and don't need to be audio animatronic because there's no real articulation with the characters.

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. They were able to make a huge impact at the New York World's Fair, and this really did cement Disney as being an innovative company, not just in movies and animation, but also in theme parks and experiences.

It set them apart from their competitors. And it wasn't just the theming, which has always been one of Disney's strong suits, but the technology itself, the fact that the company was willing to be a pioneer in those spaces. So I find it one of the most interesting stories. And I love the fact that it also gives me the opportunity to touch on other elements of the mechanical and technological worlds, stuff like pneumatic systems, hydraulic system the

concept of cams, the concept of solenoids. All of these elements are obviously components of the audio animatronic systems, but also it's fun to have that opportunity to just touch on those in this episode and to tell you, guys, you know what those were and how they were incorporated

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

know what to expect. And while it is still an amazing achievement to have built an amusement park so immersive and with such detail, and to then staff it with people who have some of the best customer service points

in the world, that alone is amazing. But if you go with someone who has never been before, and you've been several times, there's a special kind of joy there because you can almost experience Disney World for the first time by vicariously experiencing it through your friend who had not been there before.

brought it all back, and it was amazing. Then we go to the Hall of Presidents, and at the Hall of President's the curtains open, and if you've never been to the Hall of President's at Disney World. There's a point where curtains open up and you see all of the presidents of the United States. They're all there, Every single one who's ever sat as president is there, animated this audio animatronic and they all do little weird things, like they fidget, they look around. Some of them appear

to be a little bored with what's going on. Some of them seem really engaged. It's kind of it's kind of charming. They introduce them one at a time. Well, mister Lincoln sits in a chair and then when it's his turn to actually address the audience, because he first, they introduce everybody, and everyone does a little gesture. They might nod or wave a hand, but ultimately Lincoln stands up and then delivers a speech to the audience. When

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

and gesture. When he's announced and the spotlight hits his chair, which he was not sitting in, so the spotlight's actually hitting behind where he was, his hand made a little motion. It was at that point that I expected someone from Disney, one of the cast members to come down and hit the stop on the show, but they had not yet noticed the problem, and so I was starting to get the giggle a little bit. My wife was definitely getting

the giggles, and my dad was encouraging it. My dad is the ultimate dad joke dad, and I love him dearly. But I hear my dad just say I beg them not to make an animatronic John Wilkes booth completely inappropriate and hilarious and tragic and hilarious. So we're watching as Lincoln continues to gesticulate while bent over, staring at the floor, and then it gets to his speech and the music swells and he starts to speak and move his arms more expressively, still bent at the waist, he does not

stand up. It's at that point that a Disney cast member takes notice and rushes down and hits the stop button which closes the curtains, and says, mister Lincoln is not feeling very well, please check back again later today. And as we walk out, I know, we start making other jokes like is that my face on that penny, little jokes about Lincoln bent over for some reason. And it's unfortunate because that's my wife's first and first impression of the Hall of Presidents. That's her, that's the memory

she associates with it. And I know for a fact that I can never take her to the Hall of Presidents ever again and have her take it seriously at all.

It could be something as simple as an arm is not animating the way it's supposed to, or it could be something a little more noticeable like a character is bent over and slumped down because they don't have the proper pressure to stand up.

the variations of animatronics on them. I think it's an amazing combination of art and technology, and I just find it endlessly entertaining and fascinating and just I'm always so impressed with the technological innovations that made it possible to have sort of automated real world puppetry that can repeat itself, you know, indefinitely, although you do have to do repairs

and maintenance obviously. It's just really one of those things that when you stop and really think about what's happening and what's going on, it gets really impressive, at least to me.