Speaker 1: Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
Speaker 1: I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer at
Speaker 1: how Stuff Works and I love all things tech. And
Speaker 1: this episode is to publish on the fourth of July
Speaker 1: two thousand eighteen. And here in the United States that
Speaker 1: date is treated with some reverence, as we consider it
Speaker 1: Independence Day. And back in seventeen seventy six, the Continental
Speaker 1: Congress representing the thirteen colonies of the America's declared those
Speaker 1: colonies a new nation called the United States of America.
Speaker 1: But that actually happened on July two, seventeen seventy six.
Speaker 1: John Adams was convinced that that was going to be
Speaker 1: the day we all celebrated. As it turned out, we
Speaker 1: decided to do it on July four, because that was
Speaker 1: the day the Declaration of Independence, that famous document outlining
Speaker 1: America's are uments for seceding from the British Empire was
Speaker 1: dated is dated on July fourth, seventeen seventy six. Also, um,
Speaker 1: despite what popular musical numbers would have you believe, it's
Speaker 1: mostly likely that that most of the representatives did not
Speaker 1: sign the Declaration of Independence that day. They probably did
Speaker 1: it on August second, seventeen seventy six. But never mind
Speaker 1: all that. The fourth of July is when the US
Speaker 1: celebrates Independence Day. Whenever it happened doesn't matter. It just
Speaker 1: matters when we celebrate it. And in the past on
Speaker 1: tech stuff, I've tried to time vaguely related topics to
Speaker 1: that date. Whenever we've published on or around the fourth
Speaker 1: of July, we've talked about the tech of say Independence Day,
Speaker 1: the movie, or like Fireworks. And today I want to
Speaker 1: talk about a Disneyland attraction called Great Moments with Mr
Speaker 1: Lincoln because I feel that's sort of quintessentially American, even
Speaker 1: though Lincoln was our sixteenth president and governed in the
Speaker 1: nineteenth century, not the teenth century, but never mind America, right,
Speaker 1: And you know, they're talking about Disneyland, something that is
Speaker 1: truly a piece of Americana, and Great Moments with Mr
Speaker 1: Lincoln is located on Main Street, USA. That was Walt
Speaker 1: Disney's monument to the classic Americana. It's a small town,
Speaker 1: almost like an America that never was an idealized America.
Speaker 1: So I figured it was a good topic to cover
Speaker 1: in this episode. Now, I have done an episode about
Speaker 1: audio animatronics in the past, and I'm going to be
Speaker 1: covering some of that ground again here. But we're specifically
Speaker 1: looking at the development of the Mr. Lincoln attraction in
Speaker 1: this episode, so I'm not going to focus too much
Speaker 1: on the other stuff. I'll have some stuff to say
Speaker 1: about some of the predecessors because that's important to understand
Speaker 1: in order to figure out how Mr Lincoln worked. So
Speaker 1: if you're unfamiliar with the attraction great Moments with Mr Lincoln,
Speaker 1: here's kind of how it goes. You would go into
Speaker 1: a building is the Grand Opera House on Main Street,
Speaker 1: USA and Disneyland, and you would see a little pre
Speaker 1: show piece before going into a theater, and you'd sit down.
Speaker 1: You get another little film, and then a screen would
Speaker 1: lift up and you would see, seated center stage, the
Speaker 1: audio animatronic figure of Abraham Lincoln. And then Abraham Lincoln
Speaker 1: stands up out of his chair and speaks to the crowd.
Speaker 1: And the content and the technology of the attraction have
Speaker 1: changed several times throughout the years. In fact, these days
Speaker 1: you wouldn't call it audio animatronics at all. It's the
Speaker 1: only reason anyone would refer to it that way is
Speaker 1: just because that's what the technology had been called for
Speaker 1: years and years and years. But the current incarnation at
Speaker 1: Disneyland isn't really audio animatronic. It's not working on that
Speaker 1: same system. Now, before I talk about how it works,
Speaker 1: let's go into the history of audio animatronics and the
Speaker 1: development of this attraction in particular, because I think it's
Speaker 1: pretty fascinating to learn abou not just the technology side,
Speaker 1: but the business side of this. So first we got
Speaker 1: to go back to nineteen That's when Walt Disney took
Speaker 1: his family on a vacation in Europe, and on that trip,
Speaker 1: Disney got enamored with some clockwork mechanical toys, including a
Speaker 1: mechanical little bird. You would wind it up and it
Speaker 1: with tweet and flap its wings and it would move
Speaker 1: in a pretty convincing way. And he was inspired by
Speaker 1: that to take these toys back to his his folks
Speaker 1: over at Walt Disney Studios and say, you know, we've
Speaker 1: we've animated stuff on film. We've taken cells and we've
Speaker 1: drawn pictures on them, and we've taken photographs of that
Speaker 1: and turned it into a film where it looks like
Speaker 1: the inanimate is moving around What if we did something similar,
Speaker 1: but we did it in the real world, we brought
Speaker 1: it into the three dimensions around us, and make make
Speaker 1: this idea sort of a grander scale. We're gonna take
Speaker 1: these little mechanical elements that I've seen here and make
Speaker 1: it something much bigger. So you were turned to California.
Speaker 1: He brought ideas to his team of developers that we
Speaker 1: now today would call imagineers. That's a portmanteau of imagination
Speaker 1: and engineer, and he said, what if we were to
Speaker 1: make something like this but bigger? So in nineteen fifty one,
Speaker 1: he gave an assignment to two of his employees, Roger
Speaker 1: Braggy and Wattle rogers Uh. Roger Braggy was born in
Speaker 1: nineteen o eight in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and he attended a
Speaker 1: vocational school and trained in machine shop work. He would
Speaker 1: relocate to Los Angeles and he found a lot of
Speaker 1: work in the film industry. He even developed technologies like
Speaker 1: a rear projection system for major movie studios, and in
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty nine he got an invitation to join the
Speaker 1: Walt Disney Studio as a precision machinist. One of his
Speaker 1: first jobs he had was to install the multiplane animation
Speaker 1: camera in the studio's brand new Burbank location. Now, this
Speaker 1: was a camera that consisted of not just a film camera,
Speaker 1: but also a massive frame, and that frame could hold
Speaker 1: multiple layers or planes of an animated cell. So you
Speaker 1: might have a foreground image, you might have a main image,
Speaker 1: you might have a couple of background images, and they
Speaker 1: would all be held at different heights relative to this
Speaker 1: camera lens. And then by moving the frames either closer
Speaker 1: to or further away from the camera, you can make
Speaker 1: elements within that animated scene appear to move at different
Speaker 1: speeds and give this illusion of depth. So it's almost
Speaker 1: like you're zooming in through an animated scene. And that
Speaker 1: was something that was really really innovative. Well, also, I
Speaker 1: should mention that Disney did not necessarily invent that one
Speaker 1: of his former employees more or less invented this approach
Speaker 1: of eye works, but that's a different story. Disney made
Speaker 1: extensive use of that technology when his studio made snow
Speaker 1: White in the Seven Dwarfs. By nine, Broggy had been
Speaker 1: promoted to the head of the studio Machine Shot and
Speaker 1: when all started thinking about building a theme park, Braggy
Speaker 1: was one of his go to engineers for attractions. Rogers meanwhile,
Speaker 1: was born in nineteen nineteen in Stratton, Colorado, and he
Speaker 1: studied art at an institute in Los Angeles. He became
Speaker 1: proficient in lots of different areas of art, including sculpting,
Speaker 1: so he joined the Walt Disney Studio also in nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty nine along with Braggy, and early on he worked
Speaker 1: primarily as an animator on films like Pinocchio, Bambi, Cinderella,
Speaker 1: and Peter Pan. He also created props and managers for
Speaker 1: the studio's live action films, and like Braggy, he would
Speaker 1: be invited by Disney to work on attractions for the
Speaker 1: upcoming Disneyland theme park. So Walt Disney comes up to
Speaker 1: these two guys and he says, I want you to
Speaker 1: build me a figure approximately nine inches tall of a
Speaker 1: man that can move around like a human can, so
Speaker 1: sort of like a puppet, but not puppeteered by any
Speaker 1: person in real time. It would be an entire mechanical
Speaker 1: system that would be able to do this, and it
Speaker 1: was called Project Little Man. So as to build a
Speaker 1: nine inch human figure that could move and and move
Speaker 1: its mouth as if it's talking and be able to
Speaker 1: synchronize that with an actual voice track, and essentially he
Speaker 1: just wanted to bring that concept of animation into the
Speaker 1: real world. Buddy Ebsen, the actor who would become Jed
Speaker 1: Clampett and the Beverly Hillbillies, would come into the studio
Speaker 1: and he did this whole song and dance routine in
Speaker 1: front of a screen that was just a bunch of
Speaker 1: grid lines, so that the animators had a reference they
Speaker 1: could work from. And Buddy would later say of Disney, quote,
Speaker 1: he took me to a room where there were these
Speaker 1: seven little guys with aprons and thick glasses working on
Speaker 1: a contrivance that pulled wires, and a little mechanical man
Speaker 1: that moved his arms, legs, head, and mouth end quote.
Speaker 1: So the two engineers lead this team. They used cables
Speaker 1: and cams and hinged limbs to create sort of a
Speaker 1: rudimentary must soul in skeletal system for this little figure,
Speaker 1: and the machinery would end up being underneath this little
Speaker 1: figure's stage. So the whole thing was actually quite large.
Speaker 1: The figure was only nine inches tall, but the whole
Speaker 1: system was really big, and it wasn't really that dissimilar
Speaker 1: to a puppet, except again, the puppeteer was mechanical, not
Speaker 1: a human, and it was it was. It kind of worked,
Speaker 1: but it wasn't practical. Later, when it came time to
Speaker 1: look into making audio animatronics for theme park attractions, Broggy
Speaker 1: would actually go to All Disney and say that we
Speaker 1: should really create larger life sized figures. It would actually
Speaker 1: make it easier because you could fit a lot of
Speaker 1: the elements inside the figure itself instead of having to
Speaker 1: find places in the environment to hide all the mechanisms
Speaker 1: that would make the figure move. So this would serve
Speaker 1: as the genesis for a new field of innovation in Disney,
Speaker 1: which was audio and animatronics. The term is defined as
Speaker 1: being or consisting of a lifelike electro mechanical figure of
Speaker 1: a person or animal that has synchronized movement and sound. Although,
Speaker 1: to be fair with the audio animatronics, it's synchronized to
Speaker 1: sound and it's not the sound you hear, ha ha.
Speaker 1: So Walt Disney has this idea. He says, you know,
Speaker 1: we've got Disneyland, We're opening that up. What have we
Speaker 1: created a restaurant. Let's make a Chinese restaurant. And in
Speaker 1: the lobby of this Chinese restaurant is a figure of
Speaker 1: a little old, wise Chinese man who will dispense words
Speaker 1: of wisdom like Confucius. But it's not an actor. It's
Speaker 1: actually gonna be a mechanical man. And a team got
Speaker 1: to work designing that kind of a figure, and according
Speaker 1: to Rogers, he said, quote you could always tell who
Speaker 1: was working on the job because they never looked at
Speaker 1: your eyes when you were talking to them. They were
Speaker 1: always looking at your mouth end quote. They did eventually
Speaker 1: build a mock up of a head for this figure,
Speaker 1: but they didn't get much further than that. Disney had
Speaker 1: decided to drop that idea for something else, and that
Speaker 1: idea would eventually be the Enchanted Teaking Room, which we
Speaker 1: will come back to in just a minute now. Disneyland
Speaker 1: open on July sev In nineteen fifty nine, Walt Disney
Speaker 1: was working on the design of a new land that
Speaker 1: would go in Disneyland. He was already thinking about how
Speaker 1: to build it out more and originally this was going
Speaker 1: to be called Liberty Street. It would run parallel to
Speaker 1: Main Street, and we feature an attraction called One Nation
Speaker 1: Under God. In this attraction, the audience would be treated
Speaker 1: to a view of audio animatronic figures of every single
Speaker 1: president up on stage. Every president would be life sized,
Speaker 1: would have lifelike motions, and would be animated. So he
Speaker 1: tasked his engineers to get to work on that concept,
Speaker 1: and they had to start somewhere. So the team chose
Speaker 1: Abraham Lincoln as their first figure, and they were able
Speaker 1: to get a copy of a life mask that Lincoln
Speaker 1: had made back before he was president. They got a
Speaker 1: copy of the US and a sculptor named Blaine Gibson,
Speaker 1: who would go on to create most of the faces
Speaker 1: for Disney Animatronics, would use that as a guide to
Speaker 1: create the mask for the Lincoln animatronic. By nineteen sixty one,
Speaker 1: they had an early build of the Abraham Lincoln figure
Speaker 1: and it had some limited mobility and expressions. It could
Speaker 1: be controlled or manipulated if you prefer, live by an
Speaker 1: actual UH engineer, so it wasn't automated yet, so it
Speaker 1: was not the finished product, but it was apparently quite
Speaker 1: impressive even early on, because in nineteen sixty two the
Speaker 1: team received a visit from a guy named Robert Moses.
Speaker 1: Robert Moses was a public official from New York City
Speaker 1: who held numerous positions, none of them publicly elected, and
Speaker 1: had become incredibly influential. He was responsible for massive projects
Speaker 1: in New York, and some of them were controversial, and
Speaker 1: he was in charge of getting New York City ready
Speaker 1: for a World's Fair to be held there in nineteen four.
Speaker 1: So Disney introduced Moses to the audio animatronic Abraham Lincoln.
Speaker 1: An engineer controlled Lincoln to make him stand up and
Speaker 1: reach out his arm to shake Moses hand, and Moses
Speaker 1: was so impressed they declared the World's Fair would absolutely
Speaker 1: have to feature this technology, which would require the team
Speaker 1: to step up their work if they were to meet
Speaker 1: that particular deadline. How did they do it, Well, I'll
Speaker 1: tell you in just a moment, but first let's take
Speaker 1: a quick break to thank our sponsor. So the team
Speaker 1: had a goal get a show featuring an audio animatronic
Speaker 1: Abraham Lincoln ready to go for the New York World's
Speaker 1: Fair in nineteen sixty four, that was thirteen months away.
Speaker 1: A few other components outside the technology fell into place
Speaker 1: to make this paw stable. Because the tech part was
Speaker 1: just one aspect. Another part was where is the money
Speaker 1: going to come from? So part of that piece of
Speaker 1: the puzzle was from the Illinois Commission. They had decided
Speaker 1: that the theme for the Illinois pavilion at the World's
Speaker 1: Fair would be the Land of Lincoln. The provisional chairman
Speaker 1: for this commission was a guy named Fairfax Cone. So
Speaker 1: Moses tells Cone, you gotta go and see what Walt
Speaker 1: Disney is working on out in California. It's gonna make
Speaker 1: you flip your lid. And Cone goes out there and
Speaker 1: ends up meeting with Disney. He sees the Lincoln figure
Speaker 1: for himself, he too, is really impressed. He would then
Speaker 1: recommend to the permanent commission chairman, who was a Lincoln
Speaker 1: historian named Ralph Newman, that he incorporate the Abraham Lincoln
Speaker 1: figure in the Illinois pavilion. So Newman would end up
Speaker 1: going out and meeting with Walt Disney, and he would
Speaker 1: see the Abraham Lincoln figure, and he too was blown
Speaker 1: away and said, yes, we absolutely need this. So the
Speaker 1: next step was convincing the Governor of Illinois, Otto Kerner,
Speaker 1: that this in fact was something that the state should
Speaker 1: sponsor in order to get that out to the New
Speaker 1: York World's Fair. So Otto Kerner met with Walt Disney
Speaker 1: and He was convinced that the Lincoln figure would be
Speaker 1: a great addition to the Illinois Pavilion, but the expense
Speaker 1: of the project was pretty high. Originally, Disney said a
Speaker 1: million dollars, and that was kind of a figure that
Speaker 1: was out of nowhere, but that was the point, the
Speaker 1: starting point for negotiations. Eventually, the Disney company would say,
Speaker 1: we can go as low as six hundred thousand dollars,
Speaker 1: and we could divide that up over two years, so
Speaker 1: the first year would be three fifty thousand dollars, in
Speaker 1: the second year would be two d fifty thousand dollars.
Speaker 1: But that was kind of putting Illinois in a tough position.
Speaker 1: Kerner was having to negotiate not just with Walt Disney,
Speaker 1: but with Moses as well in the World's Fair, because
Speaker 1: Moses was demanding that any exhibitor at the World's Fair
Speaker 1: had to go through him and his departments for things
Speaker 1: like power and set up and tear down and all
Speaker 1: these other things that had fees associated with them. So
Speaker 1: the state was going to have to pay two different
Speaker 1: groups an enormous amount of money in order for this
Speaker 1: to happen. But Newman knew that Moses was really impressed
Speaker 1: by this Lincoln figure, and Newman and Disney together met
Speaker 1: with Moses talked to him about this stuff. They were
Speaker 1: trying to convince him to uh to lower some of
Speaker 1: the world's fair requirements in order to make this happen.
Speaker 1: And Newman, in fact even let it slip that he
Speaker 1: was going off to meet with some people over the
Speaker 1: United Nations to make it sound like things were super
Speaker 1: important on his end, And eventually Moses decided to renegotiate,
Speaker 1: and so they gave several concessions to the state of Illinois,
Speaker 1: said you're not gonna have to pay these fees. These fees,
Speaker 1: you're going to have a maximum amount of five thousand
Speaker 1: dollars for something that could have cost you ten times
Speaker 1: as much, and even agreed to a two hundred fifty
Speaker 1: thousand dollars stipend to help fund the Lincoln attraction, because
Speaker 1: that's how impressed Moses was of it. So Disney had
Speaker 1: cut that deal where the nineteen sixty four rental fee
Speaker 1: for Lincoln would be three fifty thousand dollars, and then
Speaker 1: there was the option for the state to extend that
Speaker 1: through nine five, two hundred fifty thousand dollars after Illinois
Speaker 1: got that two hundred fifty thousand dollars stipend from the
Speaker 1: Fair that men They got Lincoln for the low low
Speaker 1: price of a hundred grand for that first year, and
Speaker 1: it also marked the one and only time in the
Speaker 1: World's Fair history that the fair subsidized and exhibit. The
Speaker 1: state gave Disney the official news in a nineteen sixty three,
Speaker 1: so nineteen sixty four World's Fair was right around the corner.
Speaker 1: It was super fast for them to get this turned around. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: the team was really hard at work to try and
Speaker 1: put the show together. Much of the groundwork for audio
Speaker 1: animatronics had already been laid by an electrician named Lee Adams,
Speaker 1: who created the giant squid featured in the film twenty
Speaker 1: Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. A lot of people point
Speaker 1: at that as being the first true animatronic figure under Disney,
Speaker 1: although of course that wasn't used as an attraction. It
Speaker 1: was used in a movie. The tentacles of the massive
Speaker 1: squid in that film were actually kind of like balloons,
Speaker 1: so you would use a pneumatic system to pump air
Speaker 1: into the tentacles that would cause them to unfold and
Speaker 1: allowing the air to escape would cause the tentacles to
Speaker 1: curl back up, so controlling the airflow would allow you
Speaker 1: to puppeteer this giant squid. Disney Imagineers had also already
Speaker 1: created a theme part attraction using audio animatronic technology at
Speaker 1: that point. The Enchanted Tiki Room, which I mentioned earlier,
Speaker 1: was the first attraction to feature audio animatronics, and it
Speaker 1: opened at Disneyland in nineteen sixty three. It was originally
Speaker 1: going to be that Chinese restaurant, then they decided to
Speaker 1: change it to a Polynesian themed restaurant, and then they
Speaker 1: decided to eventually drop the restaurant angle entirely and just
Speaker 1: making an attraction. So how does it actually work well?
Speaker 1: With the Tiki birds, Everything was pretty much binary. Every
Speaker 1: single element, every moving element had a neutral position. So
Speaker 1: let's say that we're looking at one of the four
Speaker 1: hosts that are macaus, and you're looking at the beaks
Speaker 1: of those macaus. The neutral position would be a closed beak.
Speaker 1: So if nothing is going to the the that particular bird,
Speaker 1: it's beak should be closed. A pneumatic system, which is
Speaker 1: one that uses compressed air to do work, would activate
Speaker 1: a SAWNI would actually activate and allow compressed air to
Speaker 1: move through to force the mouth to an open position.
Speaker 1: So if you were to do that manually, you would
Speaker 1: pull a trigger and that would open up a valve
Speaker 1: and that would cause air to flow through the system
Speaker 1: to the appropriate element, causing the beak to open. But
Speaker 1: how was this done automatically not with an actual human
Speaker 1: operating the thing? Well, the secret was an ultrasonic tones
Speaker 1: recorded onto magnetic tape, like like the kind of tape
Speaker 1: you would use in a real to real tape machine
Speaker 1: or even a cassette player. Disney used tape that was
Speaker 1: an inch wide when it was first doing this, and
Speaker 1: that inch wide tape that they used in in the
Speaker 1: encantiqui room had fourteen tracks that you could lay on
Speaker 1: that one inch of tape and you could put up
Speaker 1: to sixteen signals on a single track. So you would
Speaker 1: record these ultrasonic frequencies on the tape and when played back,
Speaker 1: they would cause metallic reads to vibrate in very relays.
Speaker 1: When the reads vibrated, they would close a circuit. That
Speaker 1: circuit would send an electric current to a solenoid valve
Speaker 1: that would allow air to flow to the appropriate feature
Speaker 1: like that mccause beak causing it to open. And because
Speaker 1: the system worked off these audio cues, Disney called the
Speaker 1: tech audio animatronics. Even though the audio in question is
Speaker 1: inaudible to humans, right, we don't hear in those ultrasonic frequencies.
Speaker 1: So you could record an audible track that's within human
Speaker 1: hearing on that same tape, and that way you synchronize
Speaker 1: the ultrasonic frequencies that give the commands to the various
Speaker 1: elements in the animatronic figure with the audio track, and
Speaker 1: that way you can have the birds sort of. I
Speaker 1: was gonna say lip sync, but I guess it's more
Speaker 1: like beak sinc To the audio track you recorded. Some
Speaker 1: of the audio animatronic technology Mr Lincoln dependent upon was similar.
Speaker 1: They had the pneumatic switches for certain parts of the
Speaker 1: Lincoln animatronic, but only for the smaller features, because pneumatics
Speaker 1: would not supply the power needed to move some of
Speaker 1: the larger elements, like arms. A person's arms are pretty
Speaker 1: big and the the air would not be sufficiently powered
Speaker 1: to move them. Also, if you did use air and
Speaker 1: you did use enough compression to make the arms move,
Speaker 1: they would shoot around like like like Lincoln was some
Speaker 1: sort of crazy karate monster. That would not work very
Speaker 1: well for the attraction, so instead they put hydraulic systems
Speaker 1: in place for some of the larger elements. Hydraulics use
Speaker 1: liquids and they use pressure to move the liquids around,
Speaker 1: and the liquids act as a source of mechanical force.
Speaker 1: So it's similar to pneumatics, but with hydraulics you can
Speaker 1: do a lot more. You can move much heavier things,
Speaker 1: and you can do so in a controlled way with
Speaker 1: the right amount of pressure. So in theory, Mr Lincoln
Speaker 1: would move according to the ultrasonic recordings on that magnetic tape,
Speaker 1: and the playback would cause the reeds to vibrate, completing
Speaker 1: circuits and forcing either air or liquid through the relevant
Speaker 1: tubes to make Lincoln move in the appropriate way in theory.
Speaker 1: Oh and um, let's talk about solenoids really quickly. I
Speaker 1: mentioned it before. A solenoid valve. A solenoid is a
Speaker 1: cylindrical coil of conductive wire, and when you pass a
Speaker 1: current through the wire, it generates a magnetic field. You know,
Speaker 1: this is a basic principle of electromagnetism. A solenoid valve
Speaker 1: has a solenoid with a movable ferromagnetic core in the
Speaker 1: center of this coil, so the core can move uh
Speaker 1: laterally through this coil. The core is typically called a plunger,
Speaker 1: So when there's no current running through the coil, the
Speaker 1: plunger is in a rest position. Typically that means it's
Speaker 1: closing off an opening that's otherwise inside this valve, so
Speaker 1: the valve is closed. When you run a current through
Speaker 1: the coil, it creates a magnetic field that pulls the
Speaker 1: core out of its rest position. It lifts the plunger,
Speaker 1: it opens the valve, so the solenoid valve acts as
Speaker 1: the switch for the pneumatic and hydraulic elements. In addition,
Speaker 1: the team began to develop a technology to make movements
Speaker 1: more smooth and natural and less just on off or jerky.
Speaker 1: You know, you didn't want your your positions to all
Speaker 1: be one or two. You wanted to have a range,
Speaker 1: especially once you started to get too larger figures, human
Speaker 1: sized figures. So to do that, they need to create
Speaker 1: systems that could respond to variable voltage. Increasing or decreasing.
Speaker 1: The voltage would activate the complex movements. So instead of
Speaker 1: going from one to two, you could adjust the voltage
Speaker 1: slightly make it move from one to one point three
Speaker 1: or one point seven, and you're not going all the
Speaker 1: way to your final possible position, and that ended up
Speaker 1: creating a much greater range of movements. Performers would use
Speaker 1: either a potentialometer joystick for every single joint to send
Speaker 1: varying voltages to the control system for that joint, or
Speaker 1: later on they created harnesses, and the harnesses were able
Speaker 1: to capture more complicated coordinated movements by measuring voltage changes
Speaker 1: at all of the different various joints. Otherwise, doing something
Speaker 1: seemingly as simple as making the figure lifting arm and
Speaker 1: point with its hand would be incredibly difficult because every
Speaker 1: single joint needed its own control system under the potentiometer
Speaker 1: joystick approach, and you had to coordinate all of that
Speaker 1: correctly right. You couldn't just have one person move the
Speaker 1: arm and then rewind it back and then try and
Speaker 1: move the wrist and then try and move the hand.
Speaker 1: All of that was really complicated. So once you rehearse
Speaker 1: all this, whether it was with the potentiometer joysticks or
Speaker 1: with the harness, you would then record this in the
Speaker 1: form of audio tones overlaid on thirty five millimeter film stock,
Speaker 1: and each joint would take up a reel of film,
Speaker 1: and then all the reels would be recorded to a
Speaker 1: master tape. Lincoln would use both the potentiometer approach and
Speaker 1: the harness approach. They got an actor named Royal Dano
Speaker 1: to provide the voice for Abraham Lincoln. That would actually
Speaker 1: get some criticism later on, where people said that his
Speaker 1: voice was not appropriate for President Lincoln because Lincoln's voice
Speaker 1: was said to have kind of a high tenor pitch
Speaker 1: to it and Royal Dano's voice had a lower pitch
Speaker 1: to it. But you know, some people argue that that
Speaker 1: was a show stopper, and other people say it wasn't
Speaker 1: such a big deal. Near mileage berries. One story does
Speaker 1: say that during an early trial run of the show,
Speaker 1: one of the hydraulic hoses inside the Lincoln figure ruptured.
Speaker 1: The valve itself actually broke, and that red hydraulic fluid
Speaker 1: began to leak out and staying Lincoln's shirt, prompting one
Speaker 1: of the guests to joke that perhaps they were commemorating
Speaker 1: Lincoln's assassination, which did not make Walt Disney laugh. He
Speaker 1: then told his team to switch to clear hydraulic fluid,
Speaker 1: which they did from that point forward. Then there were
Speaker 1: times when the valves didn't operate properly. They would cause
Speaker 1: the figure to jerk around unpredictably, which put more pressure
Speaker 1: on the rest of the system. The technical issues forced
Speaker 1: the team to delay the opening of the Lincoln exhibit
Speaker 1: at the New York World's Fair for about two weeks
Speaker 1: while they worked out all the bugs. But when it
Speaker 1: did open, it was so convincing that some people were
Speaker 1: certain that the figure was a human actor in a
Speaker 1: costume and not an audio animatronic figure. Now, when we
Speaker 1: come back, I'll tell the rest of this story as
Speaker 1: well as what has happened since Mr Lincoln debuted at Disneyland,
Speaker 1: But first let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor.
Speaker 1: So while the World's Fair was going on, Disneyland prepared
Speaker 1: its own identical attraction, the Great Moments with miss Or
Speaker 1: Lincoln attraction, that would open in the park on July eighth,
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty six, and it would use pretty much an
Speaker 1: exact copy of the World's Fair exhibit. Both would operate
Speaker 1: around at the same time for a while, so you
Speaker 1: had the same show happening on both coasts, and the
Speaker 1: Disneyland version was sponsored originally by Lincoln Savings and Loan,
Speaker 1: not the state of Illinois. It was housed in the
Speaker 1: Opera House on Main Street, USA. Disneyland never built Liberty Street,
Speaker 1: but they did decide to repurpose the Opera House. That
Speaker 1: was one of the first, if not the very first
Speaker 1: building constructed for Disneyland, and during the construction phase for
Speaker 1: the park it had served as sort of a carpentry
Speaker 1: shop and workshop. Back in those days, Disneyland attractions were
Speaker 1: divided up into various categories related to how elaborate the
Speaker 1: attraction was. And this is where you get terms like
Speaker 1: a ticket or a ticket attraction, and that just referred
Speaker 1: to the level uh that that attraction belonged to. A
Speaker 1: ticket attractions were simple attraction, little bitty things that you
Speaker 1: you know, weren't weren't huge crowd pleasers. Maybe it's a
Speaker 1: simple ride on Main Street like a trolley ride, but
Speaker 1: if you wanted to ride something a little more advanced,
Speaker 1: then you needed to be ticket or a CE ticket.
Speaker 1: And the really big ticket items were E tickets. Great
Speaker 1: Moments with Mr Lincoln was different. It was absolutely free
Speaker 1: once you got into the Disneyland park. Ticket books did
Speaker 1: often contain a coupon for the attraction, but that was
Speaker 1: just meant to help encourage people to go see it.
Speaker 1: There was no need to actually have a coupon in
Speaker 1: order to see it. You could just walk right in.
Speaker 1: The original script for Great Moments with Mr Lincoln included
Speaker 1: snippets from various speeches Lincoln gave throughout his life. The
Speaker 1: general theme was freedom, liberty, and independence, and it would
Speaker 1: stay that way until January one, nineteen seventy three. At
Speaker 1: that point, Disneyland closed the attraction to convert it into
Speaker 1: a new exhibit called The Walt Disney Story that was
Speaker 1: to honor the life of Walt Disney himself, as he
Speaker 1: had passed away several years earlier for lung cancer. The
Speaker 1: Walt Disney Story was a twenty eight minute film about
Speaker 1: the life of Disney and his work, but guests were
Speaker 1: upset at the removal of Mr Lincoln, and so in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy five, the attraction was revised as The Walt
Speaker 1: Disney Story Featuring Great Moments with Mr Lincoln, and it
Speaker 1: became a combined exhibit. The pre show area was dedicated
Speaker 1: to Disney's life, and the theater was back to the
Speaker 1: Lincoln Show. In the late nineteen sixties, Disney Imagineers developed
Speaker 1: the Digital Animation Control System, also known as DAX D
Speaker 1: a c S. This system could record control commands onto
Speaker 1: a disk rather than on magnetic tape. That meant that
Speaker 1: programming could be done from a control board with various buttons, switches,
Speaker 1: and dials rather than with a harness or a potentiometer, joystick,
Speaker 1: and elements could easily be deleted or overwritten, so you
Speaker 1: didn't have to worry about doing endless takes to get
Speaker 1: just the right performance. You could just fix any mistakes
Speaker 1: you made as you went along. In the Imagineers introduced
Speaker 1: another system called compliance. Compliance was meant to reduce the
Speaker 1: wear and tear on animatronics, as well as to make
Speaker 1: them more show worthy. If an animatronic has to do
Speaker 1: a quick move, let's say it's waving and it's moving
Speaker 1: its arm from left to right. Once it reached the
Speaker 1: end of its movement, it would frequently caused the entire
Speaker 1: figure to vibrate. Usually get that little robotic vibration at
Speaker 1: the end of a movement. If you ever see anyone
Speaker 1: dance the robot, you know what I'm talking about. There's
Speaker 1: that little jerky motion when you get to the end, well,
Speaker 1: compliance would allow limbs to move just a little past
Speaker 1: their normal end location, and that was in order to
Speaker 1: be a shock absorber. So think about where your wave
Speaker 1: would end and the the animatronic would start to slow down,
Speaker 1: but it would continue to allow itself to move past
Speaker 1: that point for just a little bit, so that it
Speaker 1: had more of a gradual slowing instead of just a
Speaker 1: sudden stop, and you wouldn't get that robotic shake well
Speaker 1: or great moments with Mr Lincoln underwent a refurbishment and
Speaker 1: there was a new animatronic Lincoln installed that used more
Speaker 1: of this technology. It also had updated artificial skin, it
Speaker 1: had a new costume, it had more advanced digital electronics.
Speaker 1: But that one closed in two thousand for another refurbishment,
Speaker 1: and two thousand one it reopened and Lincoln now delivered
Speaker 1: the Gettysburg address instead of this sort of sort of
Speaker 1: grouping of various clips from various speeches, So now he
Speaker 1: gave the Gettysburg address, and that version closed again in
Speaker 1: two thousand five because Disneyland was celebrating its fiftieth anniversary
Speaker 1: and the theater was given over to a special attraction
Speaker 1: about the history of the park. Itself. That kept on
Speaker 1: going until two thousand nine, and then Lincoln came back again.
Speaker 1: The newest version is an electric animatronic figure. The speech
Speaker 1: Lincoln gives is more or less the original one from
Speaker 1: the nineteen sixty four World's Fair does have a few
Speaker 1: edits to it. It's not quite as long as the
Speaker 1: original speech was, so it's more like the version, though
Speaker 1: not exactly the same. In two thousand thirteen, Disney would
Speaker 1: shut down its internal division called MAPO M A p O.
Speaker 1: Some people say that stands for Mary Poppins because it
Speaker 1: was formed after the success of the movie Mary Poppins.
Speaker 1: Others say, no, it's manufacturing and production. That was where
Speaker 1: the name came from. But anyway, whether whatever its name
Speaker 1: came from, that was the division that was responsible for
Speaker 1: producing audio animatronics and then later electronic version of animatronics.
Speaker 1: All of them came out from there for the most part,
Speaker 1: and toward the end of its run, more and more
Speaker 1: of those projects we're getting outsourced to other companies. So
Speaker 1: in twenty thirteen the company decided, you know, we're just
Speaker 1: gonna go with this contract approach. We're not going to
Speaker 1: build them in house anymore, and the company that's mostly
Speaker 1: in charge of developing animatronics for Disney is Garner Holt Productions.
Speaker 1: That company is located out of California. It also makes
Speaker 1: animatronics for lots of other clients, not just Disney, but
Speaker 1: that's the company that's mostly responsible for them, and has
Speaker 1: had incredible demonstrations of really complicated, sophisticated animatronic figures that
Speaker 1: are eerily realistic, like we're talking Uncanny Valley style realistic,
Speaker 1: including an Abraham Lincoln bust that makes faces that I
Speaker 1: would say start to lean toward the scary, but you
Speaker 1: have to see the videos to to understand what I'm
Speaker 1: talking about. Anyway, that wraps up the great moments with
Speaker 1: Mr Lincoln's story. It's fascinating to me to see how
Speaker 1: an idea could go from just hypothesis to an actual
Speaker 1: working attraction. How do you go for um, I want
Speaker 1: this thing to exist, to making it so. Walt Disney's
Speaker 1: imagineers have a reputation for doing that time and time again,
Speaker 1: and the attractions that Disney are are evidence of that fact,
Speaker 1: And as a lifelong Disney fan, I have a great
Speaker 1: appreciation for that. Although I have seen comparable work at
Speaker 1: other parks, I mean, there are plenty of other places
Speaker 1: that have used that same philosophy to great effect, like
Speaker 1: Universal's Islands of Adventure, for example. But that wraps up
Speaker 1: this fourth of July episode. If you have any suggestions
Speaker 1: for future episodes of tech Stuff let me know. Why
Speaker 1: don't you send me an email the addresses tech Stuff
Speaker 1: at how stuff works dot com, or drop me a
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