Speaker 1: Welcome to tex Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios,
Speaker 1: How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
Speaker 1: I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
Speaker 1: How Stuff Works and I Heart Radio and a lot
Speaker 1: of all things tech, and today I'm going to be
Speaker 1: bringing you a classic episode of tech Stuff. Yes, I
Speaker 1: know it is not a Friday when we normally run
Speaker 1: classic episodes. But behind the curtain, guys, I'm currently getting
Speaker 1: ready to go on a vacation to Disney World, which
Speaker 1: is awesome. I'm gonna be there with my family. I'm
Speaker 1: really looking forward to it. But it meant that I
Speaker 1: had a limited amount of time and not enough time
Speaker 1: to create a whole new episode. But I didn't want
Speaker 1: to leave you guys without any episode, so instead I'm
Speaker 1: bringing you one from the fairly recent past that I
Speaker 1: think thematically ties into my vacation. This episode is titled
Speaker 1: The Wonderful World of Audio Animatronics and originally aired on
Speaker 1: June twenty three, two thousand seventeen. And audio Animatronics is
Speaker 1: you know. It's the technology that Disney has used to
Speaker 1: bring to life lots of different characters on its various
Speaker 1: rides and attractions, So this definitely ties in to what
Speaker 1: I am about to embark upon, and I am very
Speaker 1: hopeful that my little five year old niece ends up
Speaker 1: being just as captivated with audio animatronics as I was
Speaker 1: when I was her age. So sit back, relax, and
Speaker 1: enjoy this classic episode. I am an enormous Disney fanatic.
Speaker 1: I consider myself a Disney fan of film, of television,
Speaker 1: of their theme parks, probably not necessarily in that order,
Speaker 1: maybe film first, then theme parks, then television, but I'm
Speaker 1: a huge fan of Disney stuff. And recently, when I
Speaker 1: was on a trip to Los Angeles to attend E three,
Speaker 1: I found myself with a day with nothing to do.
Speaker 1: I had hoped to book some meetings that did not happen,
Speaker 1: So instead of just sitting around my hotel room feeling
Speaker 1: sorry for myself in a city where I really didn't
Speaker 1: know anybody, I decided to hop on down to Orange County, California,
Speaker 1: that is the home of Disneyland, and to go to
Speaker 1: the happiest place on Earth. It was not my first
Speaker 1: time at Disneyland, but this was the first time I'd
Speaker 1: ever gone to Disneyland completely on my own, and I
Speaker 1: was a little worried about that, like, how am I
Speaker 1: going to have fun just by myself. Turns out Disneyland
Speaker 1: did most of the work for me. I didn't have
Speaker 1: to worry so much and had a great time. But
Speaker 1: it also reminded me of how much I love the
Speaker 1: technology and innovation that goes behind Disneyland. And honestly, I
Speaker 1: could do maybe a dozen episodes about different technologies that
Speaker 1: were pioneered or perfected at the Disney theme parks, because
Speaker 1: there are a ton of them that Disney either directly
Speaker 1: had a hand in developing or tweaked it in a
Speaker 1: way to elevate it beyond what it used to be.
Speaker 1: There are plenty of examples of that. Today, we're specifically
Speaker 1: going to focus on audio animatronics, And for those who
Speaker 1: have not heard what this term is or have any
Speaker 1: idea what it means, this was a system that Walt
Speaker 1: Disney's company pioneered to create animated physical, three dimensional figures.
Speaker 1: So in a way, it's kind of similar to puppetry,
Speaker 1: right with a puppet, typically you're manipulating some sort of
Speaker 1: three dimensional figure beyond shadow puppets and that sort of puppetry,
Speaker 1: which is amazing all on its own. I'm talking about
Speaker 1: your traditional hand puppets, rod puppets, and marionettes. That involves
Speaker 1: manipulating an inanimate object in a way to make it
Speaker 1: seem like it has life, that has anima, and that
Speaker 1: you are using some sort of system, whether it's rods
Speaker 1: or you know, the puppet is essentially a glove puppet,
Speaker 1: or you're using strings with a marionette to create this
Speaker 1: illusion of movement. Well, Disney wanted to create something similar,
Speaker 1: only these would run on a mechanical system that would
Speaker 1: be painstakingly programmed rather than being under the direct control
Speaker 1: of a human being. Those figures, when they're working properly,
Speaker 1: would replicate those same motions and have the same performance
Speaker 1: every single time. So the time the character is doing
Speaker 1: a show, it's exactly the way it was the first time.
Speaker 1: So once you perfect a show and you program that
Speaker 1: into these these figures, you then have the perfect show
Speaker 1: every single time you run it, assuming everything is working properly. Now,
Speaker 1: anyone who has been to Disney enough times knows that's
Speaker 1: a big assumption to make. Sometimes things just don't do
Speaker 1: not work really well. I'll tell you about one of
Speaker 1: those times that I experienced firsthand later on in this show.
Speaker 1: But the technology itself is phenomenal, and even when it
Speaker 1: isn't working properly, that does not take away from how
Speaker 1: amazing this tech really is, especially when you consider what
Speaker 1: people had to work with back in the fifties and
Speaker 1: early sixties when they were first developing these systems. It
Speaker 1: is pretty amazing stuff. Now. The reason why Disney wanted
Speaker 1: this in the first place is he really loved the
Speaker 1: idea of creating a real, three dimensional experience similar to
Speaker 1: what you would get with an animated film. Animated films
Speaker 1: can be perfected right. You can sit there and sketch
Speaker 1: it out and get it just right before you release
Speaker 1: it as a movie. He wanted to have that same
Speaker 1: sort of experience, but in the real physical world. He
Speaker 1: was a stickler for perfection, had very, very very high standards,
Speaker 1: and and the people who worked for him they also
Speaker 1: would end up having very high standards. Everyone wanted to
Speaker 1: make sure that they met Disney's expectations. Now you can
Speaker 1: find animatronic figures in lots of Disney attractions, including The
Speaker 1: Enchanted Tiki Room, Pirates of the Caribbean, The Haunted Mansion,
Speaker 1: Great Moments with Mr Lincoln, The Hall of presidents which
Speaker 1: would be over at the Magic Kingdom and Disney World
Speaker 1: and tons more. There are lots of examples. There are
Speaker 1: also some attractions that had moving figures that didn't use
Speaker 1: the audio animatronics system. So, for example, the Jungle Cruise
Speaker 1: ride has animated animal figures. As you ride through, you
Speaker 1: see hippopotamuses and crocodiles and elephants, but these were running
Speaker 1: on a very simple mechanical loop system. They were not
Speaker 1: specifically audio animatronic. They they worked on something that was
Speaker 1: a little less sophisticated than what would follow. So you
Speaker 1: have both at Disney Parks. And I'm also sad that
Speaker 1: I can't have Holly on this up. So Holly, who's
Speaker 1: one of the co hosts of Stuff you Missed in
Speaker 1: History Class. Apart from being a brilliant podcaster and an
Speaker 1: avid historian, she is an enormous fan of all things
Speaker 1: Disney and uh and she doesn't just give me a
Speaker 1: run for my money, she leaves me in the dust.
Speaker 1: I love Disney, I have been to the Disney Parks
Speaker 1: dozens of times, but Holly is a step beyond even
Speaker 1: my own obsession. So I am sad that I can't
Speaker 1: have her here because I am absolutely certain that she
Speaker 1: would be here dropping nuggets of knowledge and trivia about
Speaker 1: these various Disney attractions that I have yet to uncover.
Speaker 1: So maybe someday I will be able to have Holly
Speaker 1: on this show and we'll do a Disney oriented episode
Speaker 1: about some other type of tech. In the meantime, there
Speaker 1: are some other podcasts we've done that relate to Disney.
Speaker 1: I did one about the peppers Ghost effect, which is
Speaker 1: used extensively in the Haunted Mansion Ride. Pepper's Ghost involves
Speaker 1: reflective surfaces and using lighting in a way so that
Speaker 1: you can create the illusion of a ghostly figure appearing
Speaker 1: before you, but what you're actually looking at is a
Speaker 1: reflection of a physical figure that's just lit in a
Speaker 1: very bright space, whereas you're in a very dark space. Uh.
Speaker 1: The famous ballroom sequence in the Haunted Mansion Ride is
Speaker 1: a big example of Pepper's Ghost. So you can go
Speaker 1: and check out those episodes of tech stuff. If this
Speaker 1: is not enough Disney for you, all right, let's talk
Speaker 1: specifically about what I wanted to concentrate on today. To
Speaker 1: do that, we have to mention Walt Disney because he's
Speaker 1: central to our story. He's kind of our main character
Speaker 1: if this were a narrative. His full name was Walter
Speaker 1: Elias Disney. He was born in nineteen o one in Illinois.
Speaker 1: He grew up in Missouri and attended high school in Chicago.
Speaker 1: He was studying art primarily. When he was sixteen, he
Speaker 1: dropped out to join the army, but they rejected him
Speaker 1: because he was too young. He then joined the Red
Speaker 1: Cross and was shipped over to Europe and drove ambulances
Speaker 1: during World War One in France. Once he is his
Speaker 1: work with the Red Cross was done over there, he
Speaker 1: moved back to the United States and he began to
Speaker 1: work for an ad company. He was making film and animations.
Speaker 1: Uh then he would go on to create his own studio,
Speaker 1: which saw some modest success, but then it ran into
Speaker 1: some hard times and eventually he had to declare bankruptcy
Speaker 1: under his first studio. But despite that, he didn't give up.
Speaker 1: He decided to make a go at it again, and
Speaker 1: he and his brother Roy were able to co found
Speaker 1: the Walt Disney Company, and from that moment forward, his
Speaker 1: influence on tech is been considerable, from actual innovations and
Speaker 1: technology to how creators can protect their intellectual property. Now,
Speaker 1: not all of those influences have been met with enthusiasm.
Speaker 1: Disney is one of the reasons why the United States
Speaker 1: has such incredibly extensive intellectual property protection laws, stuff like
Speaker 1: copyright and trademark laws that protect well beyond the lifetime
Speaker 1: of the creator. UH. A lot of that has to
Speaker 1: do with Disney, as a corporate entity, lobbying to extend
Speaker 1: those parameters. So Disney's impact on technology has been enormous
Speaker 1: in both very specific ways that relate to particular technologies
Speaker 1: to the way that those technologies are protected under intellectual
Speaker 1: property law. So Disney's use of sound with animation was
Speaker 1: a huge leap forward in the nineteen twenties, Steamboat Willie
Speaker 1: being the first cartoun was sound, and Disney himself voiced
Speaker 1: the iconic character of Mickey Mouse, who struck a chord
Speaker 1: with viewers and propelled Disney into enormous success. Over the
Speaker 1: following decades, he would see a lot more success, including
Speaker 1: going into feature length animation, which had not been done before,
Speaker 1: and he was able to UH succeed with Snow White
Speaker 1: and the Seven Dwarves. And he also continued to see
Speaker 1: success with short form stuff. Now, depending upon the account
Speaker 1: you read because there are a couple of different versions
Speaker 1: of the story. We actually begin either in France or
Speaker 1: the French Quarter in New Orleans. The story goes that
Speaker 1: Disney was on vacation with his family, and as he
Speaker 1: was on vacation, he decided to look into some uh,
Speaker 1: some antique shops, and he came across some various clockwork toys,
Speaker 1: like wind up birds and that sort of thing. One
Speaker 1: specific toy he came across in an antique shop was
Speaker 1: a bird cage that had a mechanical bird inside of
Speaker 1: it that would chirp and sing, and it would make
Speaker 1: little motions that you could describe as being somewhat robotic.
Speaker 1: They were pretty primitive motions, but you know, close enough
Speaker 1: to being an actual bird that you knew what it was.
Speaker 1: It was. It wasn't like it looked like a a
Speaker 1: monstrosity or anything like that. He thought it was absolutely charming,
Speaker 1: and he felt that there was a lot of potential
Speaker 1: there that he could use to create three dimensional physical
Speaker 1: animated figurines potentially and a theme park. That was one
Speaker 1: of the things he had been considering around this time,
Speaker 1: although Disneyland had not yet become a reality. So he
Speaker 1: brought the antique bird cage with the mechanical bird inside
Speaker 1: of it back to his company, and he went to
Speaker 1: some of his uh top thinkers over at the Walt
Speaker 1: Disney Company and said, figure out how this thing works.
Speaker 1: So they took it apart and they took a look
Speaker 1: at it, and they began to formulate ideas of how
Speaker 1: they could create their own technology that would also allow
Speaker 1: for animation of this type sort of this automated puppetry
Speaker 1: that I was talking about. Now. Disney was really excited
Speaker 1: about this prospect of having fully realized, three dimensional characters
Speaker 1: capable of delivering a performance consistently. And Jack Gladish, who
Speaker 1: was one of the engineers who would work on developing
Speaker 1: audio animatronic technology, one of many, as it turns out,
Speaker 1: would say that Disney wants joked to him, I'm tired
Speaker 1: of finicky actors. I want to develop a fully animated,
Speaker 1: articulated human being to use in place of motion picture
Speaker 1: actors and actresses. So this was Disney having a bit
Speaker 1: of fun saying that, Hey, the real reason why I
Speaker 1: want to develop this technology is because then I can
Speaker 1: get rid of all these pesky humans that keep on
Speaker 1: asking questions or having issue whereas the animatronic ones will
Speaker 1: just do what we tell them to do. And it's
Speaker 1: kind of funny because there's another famous director who said
Speaker 1: something very similar about Disney's cast. That famous director was
Speaker 1: Alfred Hitchcock, who of course made incredible films of thriller
Speaker 1: and psychological horror genres, things like The Birds and Psycho,
Speaker 1: that sort of stuff. Alfred Hitchcock reportedly once said Disney
Speaker 1: has the best casting. If he doesn't like an actor,
Speaker 1: he just tears him up. So Hitchcock's joke and Disney's
Speaker 1: joke were very similar in that respect, this idea of
Speaker 1: the frustrated director who has to contend with the delicate
Speaker 1: sensibilities of actors and actresses. But in truth, Disney just
Speaker 1: thought this was a really cool technology and he saw
Speaker 1: a lot of potential in it, and he was always
Speaker 1: looking at new ways to make use of the immense
Speaker 1: talent he had attracted to the A. Walt Disney Company.
Speaker 1: Whereas a lot of these people started off in the
Speaker 1: animation department where they were working on various films and
Speaker 1: shorts for Disney, they would eventually move into very different
Speaker 1: departments and develop stuff like the actual Disneyland theme Park
Speaker 1: disney World later on, as well as visual effects and
Speaker 1: props and sets and things of that nature for the
Speaker 1: various live action films that Disney was getting into as well.
Speaker 1: So you had people who started off as animators kind
Speaker 1: of specializing in different areas. This was the dawn of
Speaker 1: the imagineering age. There was no such thing as an
Speaker 1: imagineer yet, no one had called it that, but eventually
Speaker 1: Disney would end up referring to people who worked in
Speaker 1: this sort of field as imagineers. They were thinking outside
Speaker 1: the box, using engineering and creativity married together to create
Speaker 1: really interesting experience is that you could not find anywhere else.
Speaker 1: That was the value that Disney wanted to create to
Speaker 1: justify charging people admission to come and check it out.
Speaker 1: So he was really excited about this potential opportunity, and
Speaker 1: he had a lot of potential ways of using this
Speaker 1: technology already at this time. He was he was thinking ahead.
Speaker 1: One of those was the fact that he wanted to
Speaker 1: open up an amusement park that would eventually become Disneyland.
Speaker 1: He thought, well, I need to have attractions for people
Speaker 1: to come and experience at this park, and he thought
Speaker 1: this technology could potentially provide some of those experiences. He
Speaker 1: also had an ability to contribute to a massive event
Speaker 1: that would happen in the mid nineteen sixties, that is,
Speaker 1: the nineteen sixty four World's Fair in New York that
Speaker 1: was going to end up requiring a lot of work
Speaker 1: on Disney's part. Years in advance, he knew that he
Speaker 1: was going to be providing four attractions for this World's Fair,
Speaker 1: and he knew that the entire attention of the world
Speaker 1: was going to be on New York for this event.
Speaker 1: So he wanted to make absolutely certain that the attractions
Speaker 1: that his company designed were phenomenal and unlike anything anyone
Speaker 1: had ever experienced, and for that he needed to pioneer
Speaker 1: a new technology. So all he had to do from
Speaker 1: that point forward it was just invented, No big shakes, right,
Speaker 1: So to start. One of the earliest experiments with this
Speaker 1: idea of animating a three dimensional figure was what would
Speaker 1: eventually be called the Dancing Man or the Little Man project.
Speaker 1: This would be of a figure that measured about nine
Speaker 1: inches tall and was meant to dance based upon this
Speaker 1: automated system or mechanical system, at least if not fully automated.
Speaker 1: The story goes that Walt Disney approached the artist Ken Anderson,
Speaker 1: who was working for Disney. Anderson would become instrumental for
Speaker 1: the design and implementation of various elements in Disneyland, and
Speaker 1: he said, you know, you know what, You're working on
Speaker 1: a lot of stuff, but I wanna I want to
Speaker 1: pay you out of my own pocket for a project
Speaker 1: that I really believe in that's not really a company
Speaker 1: project yet. I want to create scenes that evoke the
Speaker 1: American way of life. And Disney had a very idyllic
Speaker 1: sense of what that meant. That small town feel that
Speaker 1: you get when you walk down Main Street, USA, if
Speaker 1: you're ever at Disneyland or disney World and you're walking
Speaker 1: down Main Street, especially if you're doing it at a
Speaker 1: time when there's not a huge crowd there, it evokes
Speaker 1: the sense of a small town maybe early nineteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: around the time when Walt Disney himself would have been
Speaker 1: growing up, where things appeared to be simple and elegant.
Speaker 1: That's what Disney wanted to create, and so he talked
Speaker 1: to Anderson, said, I want to have this idea of
Speaker 1: building this kind of experience in miniature where people can
Speaker 1: look at the different miniatures we design and different elements
Speaker 1: of it actually come to life, so at first he
Speaker 1: wanted to get some paintings, some sketches of this. So
Speaker 1: Anderson got to work and one of the first things
Speaker 1: he created was a Norman Rockwell esque scene of a
Speaker 1: soft shoe dancer performing on a stage, a small stage,
Speaker 1: so something that you might see in an old Vaudevillian theater.
Speaker 1: And Disney immediately connected to it. He thought, that's exactly
Speaker 1: what I wanted to see. And he felt that this
Speaker 1: was a figure that if they could create a three
Speaker 1: dimensional version of it and build it in a miniature
Speaker 1: set and it could move of around do its little
Speaker 1: dance routine for people, that would be phenomenal. So he
Speaker 1: took Anderson's design and he then decided to UH to
Speaker 1: work with a couple of other folks over at Disney.
Speaker 1: He UH went to a sculptor who was working for
Speaker 1: the company at the time. As the sculptor's name was
Speaker 1: Charles Clarence Christodoro, and Christodorro's dad was a famous agricultural
Speaker 1: scientist and farmer who had written extensively about agriculture. Christodorro
Speaker 1: himself had become a notable sculptor, working both in the
Speaker 1: public spaces, designing statues that were shown in San Diego
Speaker 1: and other areas of California, and also working in the
Speaker 1: movie industry. He had worked for Disney once during the
Speaker 1: nineteen thirties, left the company, and then came back in
Speaker 1: the early nineteen fifties. He was given the sketch and
Speaker 1: told to make a physical model of the dancer, which
Speaker 1: he did. He sculpted a physical model based upon the
Speaker 1: the Ken Anderson painting and gave that to Disney. Disney
Speaker 1: then took the model over to the machine shop, and
Speaker 1: he also brought in the animation department. Now, right now
Speaker 1: seems like it would be a good time to summarize
Speaker 1: all the areas that came together to make audio animatronics
Speaker 1: even possible. And I realized I haven't even gotten to
Speaker 1: what audio animatronics can do and how they do it.
Speaker 1: But it's important to understand the different departments to kind
Speaker 1: of get a grip on why it was so complicated
Speaker 1: and why it called for a multidisciplinary approach, because that's
Speaker 1: exactly what audio animatronics were. It required people of vastly
Speaker 1: different disciplines and knowledge base in order to make this happen.
Speaker 1: So in no particular order. Here are some of the
Speaker 1: departments at Disney that worked on pioneering audio animatronics. First,
Speaker 1: there was the Sound Department. Now it might seem weird
Speaker 1: that I'm starting with the sound owned department instead of
Speaker 1: the mechanical shop or animation, but the reason for that
Speaker 1: is the Sound department was in charge of the audio
Speaker 1: animatronic projects because those depended so heavily on that audio component.
Speaker 1: I'll explain more about how in a little bit. The
Speaker 1: Sound department was ultimately the one that was holding onto
Speaker 1: the project, the project leader that was the head of development.
Speaker 1: This would end up actually causing some issues later on.
Speaker 1: There would be some disagreements between the Sound department and
Speaker 1: some other departments, and they were run by different unions,
Speaker 1: which also meant that they would run into these weird problems.
Speaker 1: There was a story in one of the articles I
Speaker 1: read about how the mechanical department, the Mechanical Shop, they
Speaker 1: might be working on an audio animatronic figure and they
Speaker 1: would need to disconnect it so that they can an
Speaker 1: adjustment before reconnecting it, but they weren't allowed to actually
Speaker 1: disconnect the figure because that was a union job. That
Speaker 1: one of the Sound department guys would have to do.
Speaker 1: So they'd have to go and get someone from the
Speaker 1: sound department to come over to the machine shop, disconnect
Speaker 1: a tube, wait until the mechanical shop people had made
Speaker 1: their adjustments, reconnect the tube, and then they could proceed.
Speaker 1: By union rules, the machine shop folks were not allowed
Speaker 1: to do that on their own, so it got very
Speaker 1: frustrating at times. Then you've got the animation department, Disney,
Speaker 1: of course famous for animation. This was the group of
Speaker 1: artists who had studied movement extensively. If you're going to
Speaker 1: animate movement, you have to understand how movement works, or
Speaker 1: else you can't replicate it properly and it's not going
Speaker 1: to look right when you watch an animated film. And
Speaker 1: more importantly, they had been studying animated movement in film itself.
Speaker 1: As it turns out, film or at least magnetic tape,
Speaker 1: would be come incredibly important with audio animatronics. They leverage
Speaker 1: their expertise to help design not just the physical objects
Speaker 1: that would be animated and the actual motions those objects
Speaker 1: would make, but also the very technique for programming the objects.
Speaker 1: And I'll explain more about that in a little bit.
Speaker 1: Then you had the Modeling department. These were the people
Speaker 1: who would make three dimensional models and sculptures of the
Speaker 1: various components that you wanted so that other departments could
Speaker 1: use that as a reference. And then you had the
Speaker 1: machine shop. The machine department had to fabricate all the
Speaker 1: physical pieces that would be used in these various figures,
Speaker 1: and then you also had props and costumes that would
Speaker 1: end up outfitting these different figures. So there are a
Speaker 1: lot of different moving parts, both metaphorically and literally, as
Speaker 1: it turns out when you get to audio animatronics in
Speaker 1: order to make it possible, and all of those groups
Speaker 1: had their own leaders and their own priorities, but the
Speaker 1: fact that they were able to collaborate and create a
Speaker 1: system as intricate as audio animatronics is pretty amazing all
Speaker 1: on its own. And we haven't even gotten to the
Speaker 1: technology yet. So I want to get to that technology,
Speaker 1: and I will in just a moment, but first let's
Speaker 1: take a quick break and thank our sponsor. All right,
Speaker 1: So you got the Machine Shop and they were creating
Speaker 1: the Dancing Man or the Little Man, and Disney decided
Speaker 1: that he needed to have someone in charge of figuring
Speaker 1: out the animation for this, like figuring out what moves
Speaker 1: would need to be animated, so he tapped a guy
Speaker 1: named Waffle Rogers to work on the animation for it Now.
Speaker 1: Rogers was born in Stratton, Colorado, in nineteen nineteen, and
Speaker 1: he was a sculptor and engineer. He attended an art
Speaker 1: institute in Los Angeles and was recruited directly out of
Speaker 1: school to the Walt Disney Studios in nineteen thirty nine.
Speaker 1: He worked as an animator on films like Pinocchio and Bambi.
Speaker 1: During World War Two, he took leave of the Disney
Speaker 1: Company and served in the United States Marine Corps as
Speaker 1: a staff sergeant in the photographic section. And when he
Speaker 1: wasn't animating, he was tinkering. He was creating toys and
Speaker 1: model trains, and Walt Disney was also a model train fanatic.
Speaker 1: He loved model trains, including trains large enough to ride on,
Speaker 1: and he had a couple at his at his property,
Speaker 1: like he had a private little railroad track because he
Speaker 1: just loved trains and he loved that romantic image of
Speaker 1: travel by train. Um a lot of the things that
Speaker 1: Disney worked on he worked on while he was traveling
Speaker 1: via train, So he and Rogers had a lot of
Speaker 1: common ground there, and Disney thought that Rogers had a
Speaker 1: lot of potential to work on actual physical implementations, not
Speaker 1: just animation, So he began to rely on Rogers to
Speaker 1: sculpt objects for live action pictures, and in nineteen fifty
Speaker 1: four he tapped Rogers to help design buildings for Disneyland.
Speaker 1: So Rogers went from animator to kind of almost like
Speaker 1: an architect. Rogers would also become a chief contributor to
Speaker 1: this audio animatronics project. In fact, some would argue that
Speaker 1: he was essentially, when you got down to it, the
Speaker 1: lead audio animatronic engineer. He is also immortalized by the
Speaker 1: way at Disney's Haunted Mansion attraction. You can find his
Speaker 1: tombstone there. One of the tombstones has a name that
Speaker 1: is a and homage to him. It was created while
Speaker 1: he was still alive. Uh. The tombstone reads, here rests Wattle,
Speaker 1: our Bender. He rode to Glory on a fender, peaceful rest.
Speaker 1: So what his actual name was Rogers, not Bender. That's
Speaker 1: in honor of him now as a reference, Disney decided
Speaker 1: to bring in an actor to actually perform a soft
Speaker 1: shoe routine, and they were going to shoot this actor
Speaker 1: with film film cameras not actually shoot the actor, even
Speaker 1: Disney would not do something so brazen as that, but
Speaker 1: rather to film the actor as he was doing the
Speaker 1: soft shoe routine against a background that was a grid,
Speaker 1: so that the animators could review the footage, use the
Speaker 1: grid as reference points, watch every little motion, and try
Speaker 1: and figure out how they were going to translate that
Speaker 1: into animation when they built this system that they were
Speaker 1: working on. The actor that they got, by the way,
Speaker 1: was Buddy Epson, who was originally going to play the
Speaker 1: role of the Tin Man in the nineteen thirty nine
Speaker 1: Wizard of Oz masterpiece, but Ebson ended up having a
Speaker 1: massive allergic reaction to the aluminum makeup that was used
Speaker 1: for the Tin Woodsman, and so he would end up
Speaker 1: being replaced by Jack Haley. However, you can actual we
Speaker 1: still hear Ebsen's voice in the Wizard of Oz. Uh.
Speaker 1: It's his voice in the song We're off to see
Speaker 1: the Wizard that Dorothy Scarecrow and the Tin Woodsman sing
Speaker 1: after they've rescued the Tin Woodsman, so that that bit
Speaker 1: where there skipping off into the distance. The voice you
Speaker 1: hear is not Jack Hayley's it's Buddy Ebsen. UH. He also,
Speaker 1: by the way, played Jed clamp It in The Beverly Hillbillies,
Speaker 1: so if you ever watched that television series, he was
Speaker 1: Jed clamp It. Ebsen was a song and dance man
Speaker 1: back in the day, so it was a natural choice
Speaker 1: for Disney to bring him on. He would end up
Speaker 1: working on several Disney UH initiatives, including UH Davy Crockett,
Speaker 1: But for this he just got up. He did a
Speaker 1: soft shoe routine. They took several takes of it, and
Speaker 1: they used that to be their reference that the animators
Speaker 1: could use and that the machine shop could use to
Speaker 1: make sure that the pieces they designed would be capable
Speaker 1: of replicating all the different motions that would be necessary. Now,
Speaker 1: ideally you would be able to create pieces that did
Speaker 1: exactly what you needed and nothing else. Because if you
Speaker 1: design a figure to do moves that it doesn't need
Speaker 1: to replicate, that's time you wasted on that effort because
Speaker 1: no one's ever going to see it. So ideally, you
Speaker 1: figure out exactly what you need and you design for
Speaker 1: that specifically. Now, one of the mechanical engineers who was
Speaker 1: working on this project was Roger Edward Braggy technically Rogert E. Braggy, Sr.
Speaker 1: His son was also working for Disney and we become
Speaker 1: an imagineer. Braggy had moved to California from Chicago in
Speaker 1: the late nineteen twenties with experience in machine shop training.
Speaker 1: He joined Disney in nineteen nine, so he was originally
Speaker 1: working on some of their live action films. He helped
Speaker 1: design special effects for twenty thousand Leagues under the Sea.
Speaker 1: He also helped Walt Disney build some of those model
Speaker 1: trains for his personal collection, and Braggy was one of
Speaker 1: the engineers working on this Dancing Man project. He would
Speaker 1: later say that was a huge challenge, in part because Ebsen,
Speaker 1: when he did his soft shoe routine for the cameras,
Speaker 1: never repeated movements in the routine, so all the movements
Speaker 1: he did were original and not patterned. They weren't repetition,
Speaker 1: and that's difficult. If you're an animator. You would like
Speaker 1: to have that repetition because you can design it once
Speaker 1: and then essentially cut and paste it and use it again.
Speaker 1: But if everything is new, then you have to design
Speaker 1: it from scratch all the way through. It made their
Speaker 1: job more difficult. Ultimately, they produced this nine inch tall
Speaker 1: figure and they used cables to attach to various points
Speaker 1: on the figure, and this was controlled by external machinery.
Speaker 1: So you would have one amounts to a very complex
Speaker 1: gearbox that used cams and cables in order to control
Speaker 1: the figure. Year Now, a cam in case you don't
Speaker 1: know what that term is, it's a rotating or sliding
Speaker 1: piece of machinery, particularly used to transform rotary motion into
Speaker 1: linear motion or vice versa. So in other words, you
Speaker 1: can turn a rotational motion into a back and forth
Speaker 1: or up and down motion a linear one using these,
Speaker 1: or you can use a linear motion to create a
Speaker 1: rotational motion. If you have heard the term camshaft in vehicles,
Speaker 1: that's what a camshaft does. Uh. This was not yet
Speaker 1: an example of audio animatronics. This figure, it didn't quite
Speaker 1: work on a full audio animatronic system, but it did
Speaker 1: help plot the course for the next innovation. And Disney,
Speaker 1: not satisfied with creating this nine inch tall figure, wanted
Speaker 1: to create something more complicated. His next thought was a
Speaker 1: barbershop quartet, a little mechanical barbershop quartet that can move
Speaker 1: and dance and sing. He wanted to sing sweet add
Speaker 1: a line. But the system that the machine shop had
Speaker 1: created wasn't really sufficient because the dancing figure couldn't make
Speaker 1: very subtle movements. It was all because all or nothing. Really.
Speaker 1: With each of the movements this thing made, it jerked
Speaker 1: around a lot, and it wasn't really a lifelike representation.
Speaker 1: The mechanism that controlled the figure had to be within
Speaker 1: a couple of feet of it, so this gearbox essentially
Speaker 1: had to be really close to the dancing figure, uh,
Speaker 1: which meant that you had spatial issues you had to
Speaker 1: take into account. So Disney's original thought was this could
Speaker 1: be an attraction where maybe you walk up to a cabinet,
Speaker 1: you plunk a quarter in, a little curtain draws back,
Speaker 1: and you see this dancing figure dance for a quarter,
Speaker 1: and then once it's done, the curtain draws close and
Speaker 1: you move on. But the mechanics said, well, here's the problem.
Speaker 1: The amount of money it took to develop this and
Speaker 1: the amount of money it will take to maintain it,
Speaker 1: you will never recapture by going a quarter of you
Speaker 1: cents of you is not going to cut it. And
Speaker 1: you can't really go more expensive than that because at
Speaker 1: the time cents was, you know, not insignificant amount of money.
Speaker 1: And keep in mind this is the nineteen fifties, so
Speaker 1: these initial attempts to create an animated figure in real life,
Speaker 1: it kind of stalled out. The plans for Disneyland were
Speaker 1: continuing at the same time. The park opened in July
Speaker 1: nineteen five, but the first attraction to use audio animatronics
Speaker 1: would follow in five years. That was a ride called
Speaker 1: the Mind Train through Nature's Wonderland, which opened in May
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty. And this was able to take advantage of
Speaker 1: something that some of the engineers had noticed. They said,
Speaker 1: you know, these small figures, they require all these cams
Speaker 1: and cables and everything has to be external. We have
Speaker 1: to build the actual power system outside of the figure,
Speaker 1: so you've always got to figure out how to mask
Speaker 1: all the cables that are running up to the figure.
Speaker 1: If we make the figures larger life size, then we
Speaker 1: can store a lot of these mechanical components inside the
Speaker 1: figures themselves. It won't have to be externally controlled. You
Speaker 1: could actually build these figures that they have the internal parts,
Speaker 1: and that's you have a lot more freedom to stage
Speaker 1: them the way you want to. And this really appealed
Speaker 1: to Disney, so one of the first implementations they had
Speaker 1: was this Mind Train through Nature's Wonderland. Now that ride
Speaker 1: might sound unfamiliar to you if you've been to Disneyland
Speaker 1: and you're wondering where the Mind Trained through Nature's Wonderland
Speaker 1: ride is. Well, it used to be where Big Thunder
Speaker 1: Mountain is now, so Big Thunder Mountain is a totally
Speaker 1: different kind of train ride. The Mind Train through Nature's
Speaker 1: Wonderland was a slow moving ride that puts you through
Speaker 1: various scenes that were inspired by the Western United States
Speaker 1: of America. It was kind of the western version of
Speaker 1: Jungle Crews. So if you've ever been on the Jungle Cruise,
Speaker 1: that's a boat ride where you go through areas have
Speaker 1: been inspired by India and Africa. The Nature's Wonderland was similar,
Speaker 1: except it was a train ride through the Western US
Speaker 1: inspired areas and included things like bears playing around in
Speaker 1: a pond. Now, that was the first attraction to feature
Speaker 1: audio animatronics, and I guess now as good a time
Speaker 1: as any as to explain what audio animatronics are. Audio
Speaker 1: animatronics take on these mechanical figures that you can power
Speaker 1: in various ways, and they pair it with a system
Speaker 1: that is programmable that uses audio as its method of
Speaker 1: transmitting information and taking the information and turning it into action.
Speaker 1: So everything is based off sound, which is kind of
Speaker 1: weird to think about it. But you would store the
Speaker 1: information on these massive cassettes, these magnetic tapes. Really they're
Speaker 1: magnetic reels. They weren't really cassettes. So you take magnetic
Speaker 1: reels of tape and you would encode information in sound
Speaker 1: on the tape, and when you played it back, that's
Speaker 1: what would create the uh well, it's what would allow
Speaker 1: circuits to be completed to create the movement. You see now,
Speaker 1: how that all works, It requires a bit more of
Speaker 1: a deeper dive. First of all, the earliest audio animatronic
Speaker 1: systems were digital. Now by that, I don't mean they
Speaker 1: were computer systems. This is purely mechanical approach. It's not electronic,
Speaker 1: it's not uh you know, there's no microprocessors or transistors.
Speaker 1: It's all mechanical elements. But it is digital in the
Speaker 1: sense that it's binary and that you have two positions,
Speaker 1: you have on and off. That meant that any motion
Speaker 1: you wanted to make had only two outcomes. Arrest, position,
Speaker 1: which would be whatever it started off as. So let's
Speaker 1: take let's say that it's a human figure that you're
Speaker 1: trying to animate, and one of your animations is your
Speaker 1: human figure needs to turn her head to the left.
Speaker 1: So in the off position, in the rest position, she's
Speaker 1: just staring straight forward and isn't moving. When you activate
Speaker 1: a circuit, then she moves her head to the left,
Speaker 1: but she can't halfway move her head to the left.
Speaker 1: She can't move it a quarter of the way. It's
Speaker 1: either all the way to the left as far as
Speaker 1: her freedom of movement allows, or it's in the that
Speaker 1: rest position. That's it. Those two positions on or off,
Speaker 1: zero or one. That's why we call it digital. This
Speaker 1: was a little primitive. It limited what the animators could do.
Speaker 1: They could not put in subtle movements, So it was
Speaker 1: good for certain types of audio animatronics early on, but
Speaker 1: it had limited use. It also was limited in how
Speaker 1: much force it could use. Uh that these original audio
Speaker 1: animatronics used one of two different systems to create movement.
Speaker 1: Either it was using pneumatics or it was using solenoids.
Speaker 1: A pneumatic system uses compressed air. Compressed air is what
Speaker 1: creates the force that translates into mechanical motion in your system.
Speaker 1: So you would have tubes, pneumatic tubes that would move
Speaker 1: through this figure. You would have them, you know, wherever
Speaker 1: they needed to be, and you would have valves that
Speaker 1: when they're closed, do not allow air to move through.
Speaker 1: When you would complete a circuit, it would make the
Speaker 1: valve open, which would allow air to move through, which
Speaker 1: would then create the mechanical force necessary to make the
Speaker 1: figure move in whichever way you wanted it to. So
Speaker 1: let's say it's a a bird in the enchanted Tiki room,
Speaker 1: which one of the earliest audio animatronic attractions outside of
Speaker 1: Nature's Wonderland and still exists to this day. The pneumatics
Speaker 1: would allow the mouth to open. The closed position would
Speaker 1: be the rest position, and it would allow the mouth
Speaker 1: to open up. And when you do a lot of
Speaker 1: opening and closing, it gives the illusion that the bird
Speaker 1: is actually talking when you pair it with the appropriate sound.
Speaker 1: That was one way of creating motion, but the solenoids
Speaker 1: were a different way that was also being used in
Speaker 1: this digital system. Solenoids are a variation on electro magnets.
Speaker 1: So those of you who have listened to me talk
Speaker 1: endlessly about electromagnetism. Get ready for some more so. Your
Speaker 1: basic electromagnet consists of a coil of conductive material. Often
Speaker 1: it is insulated copper wire. You run a current through
Speaker 1: this coil and that generates a magnetic field. The magnetic
Speaker 1: field can then be used to attract any sort of
Speaker 1: faro magnetic material. That's the case of a solenoid, where
Speaker 1: you have a core that connect kind of like a piston.
Speaker 1: So when it's in his rest position, the core is
Speaker 1: outside of the cylinder. May his positioned right at the
Speaker 1: very end, so the cylinder is big enough so that
Speaker 1: the core can fit completely inside the cylinder. And when
Speaker 1: you run a current through the coil, it generates a
Speaker 1: magnetic field which attracts the faro magnetic core into the cylinder,
Speaker 1: pulls it in. And if you connect something to the
Speaker 1: other end of that little core, like a cable that
Speaker 1: then attaches to a piece on a larger animatronic figure,
Speaker 1: like let's say a mouth of the character, whenever the
Speaker 1: circuit activates, it'll pull the solenoid in the core into
Speaker 1: the solenoid, which in turn pulls on the wire or cable,
Speaker 1: but just attached to whatever body part the mouth let's say,
Speaker 1: of Mr. Lincoln, and pull pulls it down, pulls it open,
Speaker 1: and then by turning off the electricity to this coil,
Speaker 1: it negates that magnetic field. It returns to rest position,
Speaker 1: and Lincoln shuts his trap. And thus, by controlling the
Speaker 1: the flow of electricity through the solenoid, you can open
Speaker 1: and close the mouth of one of the greatest presidents
Speaker 1: of United States history, and thus magnificence is born. I mean,
Speaker 1: this was a an enormous use of technology, a very
Speaker 1: innovative use of technology at the time. So that was
Speaker 1: the basics for the movement, but that we still haven't
Speaker 1: talked about the audio part. That's kind of more the
Speaker 1: animatronic part, the idea of this animated physical being. But
Speaker 1: whether it was a bird or a president, or or
Speaker 1: a hippopotamus or whatever it might be that was using
Speaker 1: audio animatronics, the secret sauce was in that audio. They
Speaker 1: found that what they could do is create a tone
Speaker 1: on a cassette or on a magnetic reel, I should say,
Speaker 1: they could create a tone, and they used these little
Speaker 1: metal reads that would connect to circuits. When the reds
Speaker 1: would vibrate, it would close the circuit and allow a
Speaker 1: current to pass through. So if you made the reds vibrate,
Speaker 1: it would create a physical circuit that would end up
Speaker 1: making the pneumatic or solenoid system activate and thus be
Speaker 1: either on or off. You know, well on really, and
Speaker 1: once it stopped activating, it would be off. You could
Speaker 1: have your character open his or her mouth or move
Speaker 1: his or her head, or whatever the action needed to be.
Speaker 1: And the reason the way they would make it vibrate
Speaker 1: is they would use a resonant frequency. So resonant frequencies
Speaker 1: are the natural vibrating frequency of any given material. If
Speaker 1: you have a glass and you tap the glass and
Speaker 1: it makes a little ringing noise, that is its resonant frequency,
Speaker 1: and if you're able to replicate that resonant frequency, then
Speaker 1: you will make the glass vibrate just by exposing it
Speaker 1: to that frequency. So if you create a sound that
Speaker 1: is of the same pitch as an object's resonant frequency,
Speaker 1: it will naturally begin to vibrate. And if you then
Speaker 1: amplify that signal, in other words, if you increase the volume,
Speaker 1: you will increase the amount of vibration that you're creating
Speaker 1: in that material. So, again with the example, of a glass.
Speaker 1: If you have a crystal glass, then it generates a
Speaker 1: particular tone when you strike it. If you replicate that
Speaker 1: tone and you amplify the signal enough, you can make
Speaker 1: the glass vibrate enough so that it shatters. This is
Speaker 1: what we see when opera singers replicate a particular note
Speaker 1: and they try and shatter a glass. Some people can
Speaker 1: do it, but it all depends on the glass. It
Speaker 1: all depends on the person's range and how how pitch
Speaker 1: perfect they are and creating that particular frequency. It has
Speaker 1: to be close enough. There's actually a small range where
Speaker 1: it will work, but you need to be as close
Speaker 1: as possible to really get the maximum effect. It's a
Speaker 1: it's much easier to do with amplification than it is unamplified.
Speaker 1: But that's the basis for audio animatronics. They had these
Speaker 1: little metallic reads that would be connected to the various circuitry,
Speaker 1: and each one would have its own specific resonant frequency.
Speaker 1: When you played the magnetic tape back, it would play
Speaker 1: tones at that resonant frequency for whichever particular action it needed.
Speaker 1: That specific metallic read would start to vibrate close that
Speaker 1: specific circuit and then you get the motion. So if
Speaker 1: it's a figure that has several motions associated with it,
Speaker 1: Let's say it's a bird that can turn its head,
Speaker 1: flap its wings, or open its mouth. That's three different motions.
Speaker 1: That means you would have three different circuits with three
Speaker 1: different metallic reads, with three different resonant frequencies. So that
Speaker 1: way you could produce different tones and make the specific
Speaker 1: outcome that you wanted. Otherwise, every time you generated a tone,
Speaker 1: everything would go off and you would have chaos. More
Speaker 1: on that in a little bit. Again, this is a
Speaker 1: digital system, so there's no variation here. You could not
Speaker 1: have the bird turn its head halfway. It's always going
Speaker 1: to turn it as far as the animatronic is allowed.
Speaker 1: Whatever it's freedom of movement is, that's where it's going
Speaker 1: to go to. So it's still had limitations. However, by
Speaker 1: creating a specific circuit for every single motion, you could
Speaker 1: make a pretty sophisticated figure. The individual motions were pretty primitive,
Speaker 1: but collectively it could be very sophisticated. It did require
Speaker 1: a lot of work, and it required a lot of cheating,
Speaker 1: I guess is the right way of putting it. So,
Speaker 1: for example, one of the figures that Disney was working
Speaker 1: on for the New York World's Fair was Abraham Lincoln,
Speaker 1: and in order to make all the different motions of
Speaker 1: the face the way they wanted to UH, they had
Speaker 1: to put in more components than could fit within the
Speaker 1: constraint of a human head, and they weren't They didn't
Speaker 1: really have the option of scaling it up. They couldn't
Speaker 1: build Lincoln larger than human sized and get the effect
Speaker 1: they wanted. They wanted to keep Lincoln at the dimensions
Speaker 1: that they felt were important for him to get the
Speaker 1: feeling across that they wanted to make. So they had
Speaker 1: to figure out, well, how can we fit all these
Speaker 1: components inside a human head when they're larger than what
Speaker 1: the space can contain. And eventually they were able to
Speaker 1: make a head that had kind of a bulge in
Speaker 1: the back of it, and they were able to fake
Speaker 1: it with the wig that they put on Mr. Lincoln,
Speaker 1: although apparently, and at least some of the wigs that
Speaker 1: they designed for the character UH, the bulge in the
Speaker 1: back of the head was noticeable, so, considering Lincoln's fate,
Speaker 1: that might have been viewed as being tasteless, but they
Speaker 1: were working within the constraints of a very new technology. Now,
Speaker 1: I mentioned that this approach had its limitations that you
Speaker 1: could only be on or off, and that they needed
Speaker 1: to have something with a little bit more of a
Speaker 1: spectrum of outcomes in order to get the effect that
Speaker 1: they really wanted. That approach required them to switch from
Speaker 1: pneumatic and solenoid systems to hydraulic systems. Hydraulic system uses liquid.
Speaker 1: Typically it's just water as its means of creating that
Speaker 1: same sort of mechanical force. You can't really compress water,
Speaker 1: as it turns out, so if you just put force
Speaker 1: behind water, it will push against whatever constraints you have
Speaker 1: it in. So if you put a good amount of
Speaker 1: water pressure in and you use valves to control where
Speaker 1: that water can go by opening and closing those valves,
Speaker 1: you can allow for some pretty powerful movements, including stuff
Speaker 1: that's strong enough to do something like lift and arm.
Speaker 1: Because the various pieces of machinery that Disney engineers were
Speaker 1: creating they weighed a good amount of they had a
Speaker 1: good amount of weight to him, a good amount of
Speaker 1: mass to them, and pneumatic ability on pneumatic systems weren't
Speaker 1: strong enough to move them, especially not smoothly. If you
Speaker 1: want to build a compressed air system that can move
Speaker 1: a significant amount of weight, Chances are you're going to
Speaker 1: end up with an air catapult, which was not exactly
Speaker 1: what Disney was hoping for when he was thinking of
Speaker 1: these different designs. So imagineers switched to these hydraulic systems UH,
Speaker 1: and it also meant that they wanted to create more
Speaker 1: gradations of movement. They didn't want to just be on
Speaker 1: and off then just want to be open and closed,
Speaker 1: or left or right. They wanted to have some different abilities.
Speaker 1: They wanted to create a lot of different potential movements
Speaker 1: within the limbs of characters. One of the UH exhibits
Speaker 1: that they were working on for the New York World's
Speaker 1: Fair was the Carousel of Progress, which you can still
Speaker 1: see in certain Disney parks. The Carousel Progress features multiple
Speaker 1: scenes of a family through different eras of human history,
Speaker 1: including near future, where you get to see the innovation
Speaker 1: of progress, how systems have improved over time to make
Speaker 1: our lives more convenient and enjoyable, and all of these
Speaker 1: various exhibits. A New York had different sponsors, so Disney
Speaker 1: was partnering with other companies that had a vested interest
Speaker 1: in the public seeing this stuff. So there were branded
Speaker 1: materials inside Carousel of Progress so that people would say, oh,
Speaker 1: you know what, I need to buy X kind of
Speaker 1: refrigerator because I want my life to be as convenient
Speaker 1: as it was for those robots we just saw. So
Speaker 1: in order to make this look convincing, they wanted the
Speaker 1: human characters to have very lifelike motions. Well, you can't
Speaker 1: do that with just the digital system, so they needed
Speaker 1: to go with an analog system. Analog means that you
Speaker 1: can have a variable element. It's not just on or off.
Speaker 1: That's what digital is. Either the signals going or it's not.
Speaker 1: Variable means you can actually create variations, and you do
Speaker 1: this through voltage. By changing the amount of voltage in
Speaker 1: a system, and by increasing it or decreasing it, you
Speaker 1: could create different ranges of motion within a properly designed system.
Speaker 1: So that's what the imagineers started working on with both
Speaker 1: Lincoln and the Carousel Progress. They wanted to create more
Speaker 1: sophisticated systems that would allow for this sort of realistic motion,
Speaker 1: and by pairing the hydraulic systems with this analog voltage system,
Speaker 1: they could then create a more natural movement. Now, in
Speaker 1: order to encode that they had to use varying tones
Speaker 1: on this magnetic tape, and to do that, they ended
Speaker 1: up having to use multiple tracks on a single piece
Speaker 1: of magnetic tape in order to conserve space, because otherwise
Speaker 1: you would have to have a real for every single
Speaker 1: component that is controlled by some sort of hydraulic system,
Speaker 1: and that's just not feasible. So they ended up creating
Speaker 1: multi track systems where they could record I think up
Speaker 1: to twenty four eventually different tracks. But not all of
Speaker 1: those tracks were for the actual animatronic figures. Some of
Speaker 1: them were for theat coal elements like lighting queues, or
Speaker 1: whether or not certain uh like products would open, like
Speaker 1: the refrigerator door might open, a drawer might slide out,
Speaker 1: an element in the fridge might tilt so people can
Speaker 1: get a better look at it. All of those were
Speaker 1: their own separate little circuits, and they all needed to
Speaker 1: be programmed into the audio animatronic reels, which again we're
Speaker 1: still using tones, So the sound department was still heavily
Speaker 1: involved in this. As you can imagine this complicated thing
Speaker 1: significantly once they got to the part where it was
Speaker 1: time to program the carousel of progress and the great
Speaker 1: moments with Mr Lincoln and I'll explain how some of
Speaker 1: that turned out in just a minute, but first let's
Speaker 1: take another quick break and thank our sponsor. So when
Speaker 1: we talk about programming this this stone where you've got
Speaker 1: all these different tracks that control these different elements within
Speaker 1: an animatronic UH system, keep in mind that depending on
Speaker 1: how many figures you have and how many points of
Speaker 1: articulation they have and what they need to do, these
Speaker 1: could be incredibly complicated. From a macro standpoint, each individual
Speaker 1: figure might be fairly simple, but taken as a as
Speaker 1: a whole, it gets to be enormously complex. One of
Speaker 1: the earliest ways that they experimented with programming was using
Speaker 1: silver paint. They use these old movieola movie editors that
Speaker 1: were designed to edit film, but instead of that, what
Speaker 1: they did was they took this this tape and they
Speaker 1: would paint silver lines on it to create a circuit,
Speaker 1: and whenever the reading head would pass over the silver
Speaker 1: it would create UH an electrical circuit that in would
Speaker 1: send out as a command for the various action to happen.
Speaker 1: So let's say again that it's a parrot opening its beak,
Speaker 1: and you would use a little line of silver paint
Speaker 1: along the length of this tape to indicate this is
Speaker 1: where the beak needs to be opened. Because they were
Speaker 1: using animators to design the system, in part, the animators
Speaker 1: loved it. They were using it very similar to the
Speaker 1: way they would edit animation reels. With animation, you think
Speaker 1: of the work in terms of feet, not necessarily in seconds.
Speaker 1: So instead of saying, oh, I need this mouth to
Speaker 1: be open for two seconds, you might say, oh, I
Speaker 1: need this to happen for two ft of film. So
Speaker 1: you would literally mark out the spot on the tape
Speaker 1: where the action needed to start, and you would mark
Speaker 1: out the spot on the tape where the action needed
Speaker 1: to stop, and you would just connect those two points
Speaker 1: with some silver paint, and then when it would read
Speaker 1: through the system, it would play back that way. When
Speaker 1: it would hit that point in the tape, the action
Speaker 1: would happen. So as long as you either had all
Speaker 1: of your tracks on one tape, and they could do
Speaker 1: up to six tracks on this method. This was just
Speaker 1: the prototype method. If you had six different sets of
Speaker 1: actions all on their each individual lines, you had six
Speaker 1: contacts that could create the different circuits. Then you can
Speaker 1: program up to six different components of your audio animatronic
Speaker 1: scene using one reel of tape, and they'd all be
Speaker 1: synchronized because you would just measure it out on the
Speaker 1: physical tape and draw where you needed the elements to happen.
Speaker 1: So maybe you'd say, all right, well, in three seconds
Speaker 1: in I need the bird to flap its wings, and
Speaker 1: at second number four I needed to start talking, but
Speaker 1: by second number five and needed to stop flapping its wings.
Speaker 1: But it keeps talking on and off until second number ten. Well,
Speaker 1: that's how you would mark it out on your magnetic tape,
Speaker 1: and you would just draw one line to be the
Speaker 1: control for the beak and another line to be the
Speaker 1: control for the wings, and as it would move through
Speaker 1: the Moviola editor and the contacts that the engineers that
Speaker 1: essentially added into this Moviola editor, it would play it
Speaker 1: back the same way every time. Now, this was not
Speaker 1: the system that Disney decided to use for everything. They
Speaker 1: again switched to an audio tone format instead of using
Speaker 1: lines of silver paint, the reason being that you could
Speaker 1: only play the tape so many times before the silver
Speaker 1: paint started to flake off, and once it started to
Speaker 1: flake off, then you no longer had a strong signal.
Speaker 1: You never didn't necessarily have the circuit completing anymore, and
Speaker 1: so you would get jitter emotions, or sometimes enough paint
Speaker 1: would peel off where you wouldn't even get the result
Speaker 1: you wanted at all. So it wasn't a permanent solution,
Speaker 1: but it was an interesting step towards what they needed.
Speaker 1: When they went with tones, they found that that was
Speaker 1: a better approach. But as they started programming the Great
Speaker 1: Moments with Mr. Lincoln, they started to run into some
Speaker 1: serious issues. The way they did this is they had
Speaker 1: editing machines and had playback machines. The playback machines all
Speaker 1: they could do was play the magnetic tape back again.
Speaker 1: And this was they would call these machines dummies, because
Speaker 1: that's all they could do is just play something back.
Speaker 1: So they had more dummies than they had editing machines
Speaker 1: where they could write to magnetic tape. They would record
Speaker 1: to magnetic tape both the tones that would control the
Speaker 1: various animatronic actions, the lighting of the theater, any other
Speaker 1: elements that needed to happen within the theater. They would
Speaker 1: all be encoded on this magnetic tape as well, and
Speaker 1: they would also have the audio for the actual presentation.
Speaker 1: So in the case of Great Moments with Mr Lincoln,
Speaker 1: the various speeches that Mr Lincoln delivers had to be
Speaker 1: on that magnetic tape as well. You would first produce
Speaker 1: an individual tape for every single one of those, and
Speaker 1: then you would end up combining those onto a master tape. Eventually,
Speaker 1: there's actually a step in between, called a sub master,
Speaker 1: but we're gonna simplify for the purposes of this podcast,
Speaker 1: so that if ultimately you would end up with a
Speaker 1: master tape that would have everything you needed on it,
Speaker 1: you might imagine that having one master tape that has
Speaker 1: multiple tracks numbering and more than two dozen in some cases,
Speaker 1: that you could run into some interference and you would
Speaker 1: be right. It turned out that some of these, because
Speaker 1: of the different volumes that they recorded at the tones,
Speaker 1: would sometimes mask one another and or other times they
Speaker 1: would activate more than one element and you'd end up
Speaker 1: with chaos. So Mr Lincoln might end up having a
Speaker 1: bit of a freak out on stage while deliver the
Speaker 1: Getty's Brig address, and that just doesn't convey the stately
Speaker 1: nature that you want when you're trying to reenact one
Speaker 1: of the most iconic moments in American history that there is.
Speaker 1: Having Abraham Lincoln's eyebrows go crazy all over his face
Speaker 1: while he's talking might be a little distracting, so it
Speaker 1: required a painstaking process of editing. They would get the
Speaker 1: magnetic tape, they would run it through the system using
Speaker 1: one of these dummies. They would take notes, copious notes
Speaker 1: about everything that was going on with the performance of
Speaker 1: the audio animatronic show, in this case Great Moments with
Speaker 1: Mr Lincoln, and anything that went wrong. They had to
Speaker 1: make note of whether it was a hand motion or
Speaker 1: an eyebrow, or the mouth wasn't moving in sync with
Speaker 1: the sound, or maybe the sound itself was at the
Speaker 1: wrong volume. Whatever the problem was, they had to make
Speaker 1: note of it, and then they had to take that
Speaker 1: same magnetic tape back and figure out how they could
Speaker 1: fix it. Sometimes they could fix it by making a
Speaker 1: couple of tweaks. Sometimes it require re recording an entire section,
Speaker 1: so it might be that you're recording a brand new
Speaker 1: section just to control the fingers on the left hand.
Speaker 1: That's how exacting this had to be. And again you
Speaker 1: had to make sure that you were synchronizing it with
Speaker 1: everything else. And it may be that you would find
Speaker 1: that one element is slightly out of sync of everything else.
Speaker 1: You had planned it out, you plotted it, you recorded it.
Speaker 1: When you laid down the tracks, you didn't realize that
Speaker 1: they didn't quite line up the way you wanted them to,
Speaker 1: and that might require you to cut out one of
Speaker 1: the tracks and then splice it back in by hand
Speaker 1: cranking the system to the right starting point and adjusting
Speaker 1: it that way. So maybe you would say, all right, well,
Speaker 1: the track for the left hand needs to start at
Speaker 1: second number two point four, and unfortunately it's starting at
Speaker 1: two point eight, and because of that, the left hand
Speaker 1: is making just years point four seconds after it's supposed to,
Speaker 1: and it looks ridiculous. You would have to go back
Speaker 1: and try and hand crank it to the spot where
Speaker 1: it needs to start and splice it back in that
Speaker 1: section that track back into the master. Worst case scenario scenario,
Speaker 1: you'd have to rerecord the master and just make sure
Speaker 1: everything is lined up in its new orientation based upon
Speaker 1: the notes you made. To make matters even more complicated,
Speaker 1: they were using a sound studio that was busy during
Speaker 1: the day, so the only time the engineers could actually
Speaker 1: work on this project, which had to be done before
Speaker 1: the World's Fair opened was at night. They would go
Speaker 1: to this recording studio at night that had its equipment
Speaker 1: on different floors, so they actually had to run cabling
Speaker 1: systems to go up and down floors so that they
Speaker 1: could connect the various parts that they were using in
Speaker 1: order to make these minute changes. It was an incredibly
Speaker 1: painstaking process to get the the performance that they wanted,
Speaker 1: all using this combination of pneumatics, hydraulics, and solenoids to
Speaker 1: see if they can get the right sequence of movements
Speaker 1: to match the prerecorded audio and give the experience that
Speaker 1: they intended to their audience. Programming this way took a
Speaker 1: lot of work. If you watch there's a Wonderful World
Speaker 1: of Color episode where they talk about the Disneyland presence
Speaker 1: at the World's Fair and the way the audio animatronics work.
Speaker 1: There's a point where Walt Disney walks up to one
Speaker 1: of his imagineers who's wearing this weird harness. Uh, there's
Speaker 1: a control system. It's directly connected to the father character
Speaker 1: of carousela Progress. So when the guy makes a big
Speaker 1: motion with his arm, you see the Carousel of Progress
Speaker 1: character make that same motion, and Disney refers to that
Speaker 1: as programming, but that's not actually how they programmed it.
Speaker 1: They programmed it more more granularly than that. They could
Speaker 1: control a character directly using this method, but that was
Speaker 1: only really good for one on one digital puppetry, as in,
Speaker 1: you have a human controller actually manipulating the character at
Speaker 1: that very moment. If you wanted it automated, you had
Speaker 1: to go through this other, very painstaking process. And this
Speaker 1: is pretty much how they used audio animatronics. For the
Speaker 1: next several years, they would develop lots of different rides
Speaker 1: that used audio animatronic figures. Pirates of the Caribbean, the
Speaker 1: Haunted Mansion, rides like that, where you had some sophisticated movements,
Speaker 1: something a little more advanced than just a static character turning.
Speaker 1: A lot of the dark rides in fantasy Land are
Speaker 1: more primitive and don't need to be audio animatronic because
Speaker 1: there's no real articulation with the characters. They're kind of
Speaker 1: static and they can move up and down or turn
Speaker 1: left and right, but they don't have any facial motion
Speaker 1: or their limbs don't really move in any meaningful way
Speaker 1: as opposed to characters that say Pirates or Haunted Mansion.
Speaker 1: Some of those have much more sophisticated movements and needed
Speaker 1: the audio animatronic system in order to do it. To me,
Speaker 1: it's fascinating that they were able to do all of
Speaker 1: this using tones, whether it was to just create that
Speaker 1: binary system or the UH analog system where you had
Speaker 1: the variable voltage that could create different types of movement.
Speaker 1: And I'm also fascinated by all the different people who
Speaker 1: worked on these systems. There were a ton of them
Speaker 1: who all contributed, and without them, these just wouldn't even
Speaker 1: be a reality today. UH. They were able to make
Speaker 1: a huge impact at the New York World's Fair, and
Speaker 1: this really did cement Disney as being an innovative company,
Speaker 1: not just in movies and animation, but also in theme
Speaker 1: parks and experiences. UH set them apart from their competitors.
Speaker 1: And it wasn't just the theming, which has always been
Speaker 1: one of disney strong suits, but the technology itself, the
Speaker 1: fact that the company was willing to be a pioneer
Speaker 1: in those spaces. So I find it one of the
Speaker 1: most interesting stories, and I love the fact that it
Speaker 1: also gives me the opportunity to touch on other elements
Speaker 1: of the mechanical and technological worlds. Stuff like pneumatic systems,
Speaker 1: hydraulic systems, the concept of cams, the concept of solenoids.
Speaker 1: All of these elements are obviously components of the audio
Speaker 1: animatronic systems, but also it's fun to have that opportunity
Speaker 1: to just touch on those in this episode and to
Speaker 1: tell you, guys, you know what those were and how
Speaker 1: they were incorporated into this audio animatronic system. So the
Speaker 1: next time you ride one of these rides, think about
Speaker 1: all the technology that went into it and the fact
Speaker 1: that it's just magnetic tape that's giving all the instructions
Speaker 1: and not through any sort of computer program, but literally
Speaker 1: through sound. That the sound itself is what allows those
Speaker 1: circuits to complete, and it varies that voltage, and it
Speaker 1: allows Mr Lincoln to stand up as he addresses you.
Speaker 1: And here's where we get to my story of a
Speaker 1: funny little disney World fail. This was at disney World,
Speaker 1: not at Disneyland, and it was the first time my
Speaker 1: wife had ever been to disney World. And I was
Speaker 1: so excited because if you've been to disney World several times,
Speaker 1: after a while, you know what to expect. And while
Speaker 1: it is still an amazing achievement to have built an
Speaker 1: amusement park so uh immersive and with such detail, and
Speaker 1: to then staff it with people who have some of
Speaker 1: the best customer service points in the world. That alone
Speaker 1: is amazing. But if you go with someone who has
Speaker 1: never been before and you've been several times, there's a
Speaker 1: special kind of joy there because you can almost experience
Speaker 1: Disney World for the first time by vicariously experiencing it
Speaker 1: through your friend who had not been there before. In
Speaker 1: this case, it was my wife. She had never been
Speaker 1: to Disney World, so I was having this wonderful experience
Speaker 1: of taking her to different rides and she gets to
Speaker 1: see them for the first time, and she's blown away,
Speaker 1: and I remember how special it is because again I've
Speaker 1: ridden most of these rides dozens of times, so for me,
Speaker 1: while I enjoyed them, the special part it kind of
Speaker 1: worn off. Seeing it through her eyes brought it all
Speaker 1: back and it was amazing. Then we go to the
Speaker 1: Hall of Presidents, and at the Hall of Presidents, uh,
Speaker 1: the curtains open and if you've never been to the
Speaker 1: Hall of Presidents at Disney World, there's a point where
Speaker 1: curtains open up and you see all of the presidence
Speaker 1: of the United States they're all there, every single one
Speaker 1: who's ever sat as president is there, animated this audio
Speaker 1: animatronic and they all do little weird things like they fidget,
Speaker 1: they look around. Some of them appear to be a
Speaker 1: little bored with what's going on. Some of them seem
Speaker 1: really engaged. It's kind of it's kind of charming. They
Speaker 1: introduced them one at a time. Well, Mr Lincoln uh
Speaker 1: sits in a chair and then when it's his turn
Speaker 1: to actually address the audience, because he first, they introduce everybody,
Speaker 1: and everyone does a little gesture. They might not or
Speaker 1: wave a hand, but ultimately Lincoln stands up and then
Speaker 1: delivers a speech to the audience. When the curtains open,
Speaker 1: Lincoln was already standing. He was not seated as he
Speaker 1: normally would be, which tells me that the hydraulic system
Speaker 1: for his legs had already activated. However, he was not
Speaker 1: standing tall. He was bent at the waist. So he's
Speaker 1: standing up bent down as if he's tying his shoes,
Speaker 1: and his two arms are dangling at his sides. But
Speaker 1: they're still animated, so you still see them fidget and gesture.
Speaker 1: When he's announced and the spotlight hits his chair, which
Speaker 1: he was not sitting in, so the spotlight's actually hitting
Speaker 1: behind where he was. His hand made a little motion.
Speaker 1: It was at that point that I expected someone from Disney,
Speaker 1: one of the cast members to come down and hit
Speaker 1: the stop on the show, but they had not yet
Speaker 1: noticed the problem, and so I was starting to get
Speaker 1: the giggles a little bit. My wife was definitely getting
Speaker 1: the giggles, and my dad was encouraging it. My dad
Speaker 1: is the ultimate dad joke dad, and I love him dearly.
Speaker 1: But I hear my dad just say I begged them
Speaker 1: not to make an animatronic John Wilkes booth completely inappropriate
Speaker 1: and hilarious and tragic and hilarious. So we're watching as
Speaker 1: Lincoln continues to gesticulate while bent over, staring at the floor. Ah,
Speaker 1: And then it gets to his speech and music swells
Speaker 1: and he starts to speak and move his arms more expressively,
Speaker 1: still bent at the waist, he does not stand up.
Speaker 1: It's at that point that a Disney cast member takes
Speaker 1: notice and rushes down and hits the stop button, which
Speaker 1: closes the curtains, and says, Mr Lincoln is not feeling
Speaker 1: very well, please check back again later today. And as
Speaker 1: we walk out I you know, we start making other
Speaker 1: jokes like is that my face on that penny, little
Speaker 1: jokes about Lincoln bent over for some reason. And Uh,
Speaker 1: it's unfortunate because that's my wife's first and first impression
Speaker 1: of the Hall of Presidents. That's her, that's the memory
Speaker 1: she associates with it. And I know for a fact
Speaker 1: that I can never take her to the Hall of
Speaker 1: Presidents ever again and have her take it seriously at all.
Speaker 1: Whenever it gets to Lincoln, she's gonna get the giggles,
Speaker 1: and she's gonna expect him to stand up and bend
Speaker 1: over at the waist and just stare at the floor
Speaker 1: for the rest of the day. So these animatronics didn't
Speaker 1: always is work perfectly. Sometimes some part of the system
Speaker 1: or other would fail, and once that happens, then you
Speaker 1: get these sort of experiences where maybe part of the
Speaker 1: animation just isn't working. It could be something as simple
Speaker 1: as an arm is not animating the way it's supposed to,
Speaker 1: or it could be something a little more noticeable, like
Speaker 1: a character is bent over and slumped down because they
Speaker 1: don't have the proper pressure to stand up. Uh, it
Speaker 1: probably was just a valve that had failed to open,
Speaker 1: so there was probably some circuit where it no longer
Speaker 1: was completing, and therefore the hydraulic system could not actually
Speaker 1: activate through the upper half of Mr. Lincoln, so he
Speaker 1: couldn't stand up tall. That's that's my guess as a
Speaker 1: you know, armchair technologist taking a look at what happened.
Speaker 1: So that's it. That's how audio animatronics work. It is
Speaker 1: a really interesting system. I love the fact that it
Speaker 1: predates computer systems. For theme parks. These days, you're going
Speaker 1: to find much more complicated programming. There's gonna be microprocessors
Speaker 1: and characters. I don't know for a fact that the
Speaker 1: characters they added to the Pirates of the Caribbean Ride,
Speaker 1: for example, are more advanced versions, like there's a Johnny
Speaker 1: Depp character that shows up three times and the new
Speaker 1: Pirates of the Caribbean Ride. Uh, there's Barbosa character. Jeffrey
Speaker 1: Rush's character from the movies is also in that. I
Speaker 1: suspect that those are updated systems that are not running
Speaker 1: on the old audio animatronic system, but that's just a guess.
Speaker 1: I do not know that for a fact. They are
Speaker 1: certainly much more sophisticated than the original Pirates of the
Speaker 1: Caribbean characters were. Now there's a lot more stuff I
Speaker 1: could talk about, Like I could talk about how Disney
Speaker 1: had to work on building a new type of material
Speaker 1: for these human figures called d reflex. It's not the
Speaker 1: same thing that you find in cars that have d
Speaker 1: reflex bumpers, but they had to create d reflex because
Speaker 1: latex was too delicate to work over and over, especially
Speaker 1: in an environment that had lots of oil and moving parts.
Speaker 1: Uh sod reflex was the thing that they had to
Speaker 1: create in order to keep a realistic skin looking texture.
Speaker 1: But I figured that's for another episode further down the line. Well,
Speaker 1: I hope you enjoyed that classic episode, and please forgive me.
Speaker 1: It was not something I entered into lightly to do
Speaker 1: a classic episode instead of a normal one. But honestly,
Speaker 1: I ran out of time and I and rather than
Speaker 1: give you a haphazard, you know, jerky kind of tech
Speaker 1: stuff episode that clearly I did not put my full
Speaker 1: effort and attention into would not have met my standards.
Speaker 1: So it was a tough call. But I think this
Speaker 1: is probably the best option. But I'm very curious about
Speaker 1: you guys out there, if you have any favorite technology
Speaker 1: that relates to things like amusement part or attractions like that.
Speaker 1: Let me know because I would love to really do
Speaker 1: another dive into this kind of topic. I love amusement parks,
Speaker 1: So let me know what you would like. Send me
Speaker 1: an email the addresses text stuff at how stuff works
Speaker 1: dot com or pop on over to our website that's
Speaker 1: text stuff podcast dot com. You'll find an archive of
Speaker 1: all of our past episodes. You'll find links to where
Speaker 1: we are on social media. You can always reach out there,
Speaker 1: and you'll find a link to our online store where
Speaker 1: every purchasing make goes to help the show and greatly
Speaker 1: appreciate it, and I'll talk to you again really soon.
Speaker 1: Text Stuff is a production of I Heart Radio's How
Speaker 1: Stuff Works. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit
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