For young children today, just as it was for generations of their predecessors, nothing is quite so thrilling about their first visit to a Disney theme park as catching a glimpse of Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, or another beloved character greeting them in real life. Creating this memorable experience requires nothing more advanced than a well-trained employee (or “cast member,” as the company puts it) in an oversized costume. Nevertheless, effective though it may be, it wasn’t part of Walt Disney’s long-term vision. A true man of the Space Age, he looked ahead to the time — surely not all too far in the future — when he could instead fill Disneyland with reliable, untiring, perfectly lifelike robots in the shape of animals, human beings, or anything else besides.
In the event, Disney only lived long enough to see his people create a mechanical version of Abraham Lincoln, whose abilities were limited to standing up from his chair and delivering a short speech. By the time that “audio-animatronic” resurrection of the United States’ sixteenth president was first publicly shown at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, its rumored development had already set off a number of ethical and aesthetic controversies. Yet it worked so well — at least after its early, embarrassing technical difficulties were ironed out — that some attendees assumed that they were looking at an actor dressed up as Lincoln, and even wondered if the poor fellow got tired doing the same routine all day long.
This story is included in the video above from Defunctland, a YouTube channel that focuses on amusement-park-related failures, especially those connected with the Disney empire. The Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln show was a success, as was the all-robotic Hall of Presidents that opened at Disneyland in 1971, a few years after Disney’s death. But try as it might — and spend as much as it will — the company has yet to realize the vision that came to obsess its founder: in effect, that of creating technological life. Of course, Disney was hardly the first to entertain such Promethean ambitions: mankind had already been trying to pull that trick off for quite some time, as evidenced by the efforts, previously featured here on Open Culture, of minds like Leonardo da Vinci and the medieval polymath Al-Jazari.
To explain Disney’s long, frustrated quest to create artificial human beings — or mice, as the case may be — requires a good deal of historical, economic, technological, and even philosophical context. That’s just what Defunctland creator Kevin Perjurer does, and then some, in the documentary that comprises the earlier video from last year and its just-released second part above. Over its collective runtime of six hours, he goes deep into a question of great interest to Disney enthusiasts: what, exactly, has prevented the most ambitious entertainment company in the world from perfecting its automatons, even here in the twenty-first century? But then, as those of us of a certain age who have fond memories of the relatively crude likes of the Haunted Mansion and Pirates of the Caribbean (to say nothing of non-Disney operations like Chuck. E Cheese) understand, perfection isn’t always the way to a child’s heart.
Related content:
The Armored-Knight “Robot” Designed by Leonardo da Vinci (circa 1495)
200-Year-Old Robots That Play Music, Shoot Arrows & Even Write Poems: Watch Automatons in Action
The First-Ever Look at the Original Disneyland Prospectus
Disneyland 1957: A Little Stroll Down Memory Lane
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
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