by Bob Thomas
One of his major challenges for WED was to develop a method of animating three-dimensional figures in the same way that he had been able to give life to cartoon characters in films. The project had its origins in the miniatures with which Walt worked as relief from studio problems in the postwar years. Then came the Dancing Man, the nine-inch replica of Buddy Ebsen. The Barbershop Quartet was a step forward, affording songs and movement by a series of metal cams. The big drive to open Disneyland postponed the development; two of the early attractions, the Jungle Cruise and Nature’s Wonderland, featured moving animals, but their actions were simplistic.
After Disneyland was operating successfully, Walt returned to the idea of animating figures with the realism of life. He told his WED designers, “Look, I want to have a Chinese restaurant at the park. Out in the lobby will be an old Chinese fellow like Confucius—not an actor, but a figure made out of plastic. Now, the customers will ask him questions, and he’ll reply with words of wisdom. We’ll have an operator in back of the figure answering the questions and making the lips move.”
The system for animating the Dancing Man and the Barbershop Quartet had serious limitations. Cutting of the cams was a tedious process, and the action of the figure was limited to the diameter of the cam; also, the mechanism had to be placed within a foot or two of the figure. With the help of the studio’s sound and electrical departments, a new system was devised to control the actions electrically by means of magnetic tape. A standard optical-sound-track tape sent signals to activate solenoid coils within the figure and produce the action.
The Chinese head, molded of latex, was able to blink and turn its eyes and open and shut its mouth. “Okay,” said Walt, “now let’s make him talk.” He instructed the WED crew to watch television without sound, observing how people formed words. Wathel Rogers, who directed the project, recalled: “You could always tell who was working on the job; they never looked at your eyes when you were talking to them, always at your mouth.” While working on the lip movements, the WED craftsmen also sought a better material for the figure. Latex deteriorated and cracked, and the surface resisted repair by vulcanizing. A hot-melt plastisol proved a far better substance; it had the flexibility and texture of human skin and could be repaired by soldering. The Chinese head was never finished. Walt had embarked on plans for a Disneyland exhibit that would dramatize American history. It would be called the Hall of Presidents, and every American President would appear in lifelike form. Now Walt’s challenge to WED was to create a figure that would move and talk and look like Abraham Lincoln.
Since the new system combined sound, animation and electronics, it acquired the name of Audio-Animatronics. Its first application to Disneyland entertainment was the Enchanted Tiki Room, which opened in 1963. It was originally planned as a restaurant, with mechanical birds performing a concert at the end of the meal. Walt decided there wasn’t enough time to serve the meals and perform the show, so the attraction was expanded to a seventeen-minute performance, with 225 birds, tiki gods and flowers singing, telling jokes, appearing and disappearing. As in cartoons, movements of animals were easier to reproduce convincingly in Audio-Animatronics than those of humans. Walt was convinced that his WED staff could do both. He checked the progress daily, and when disappointments came, he said, “Don’t worry—it’s going to work.”
The overwhelming success of Disneyland inspired offers for Walt Disney to build theme parks in other parts of the country. “There will only be one Disneyland,” he insisted, but there were hints that he had other plans in mind. Once he remarked to an associate, “Do you realize that we play to only one-fourth of the United States at Disneyland? There’s a whole other world on the other side of the Mississippi.”
Walt knew that his organization needed new goals—not only additions to Disneyland, but other challenges that would improve technology and stretch imagination. In 1960, he summoned his staff of planners and told them, “There’s going to be a big fair in New York. All of the big corporations in the country are going to be spending a helluva lot of money building exhibits there. They won’t know what they want to do. They won’t even know why they’re doing it, except that the other corporations are doing it and they have to keep up with the Joneses. Now they’re all going to want something that will stand out from the others, and that’s the kind of service we can offer them. We’ve proved we can do it with Disneyland. This is a great opportunity for us to grow. We can use their financing to develop a lot of technology that will help us in the future. And we’ll be getting new attractions for Disneyland, too. That’ll appeal to them: we can say that they’ll be getting shows that won’t be seen for just two six-month periods at the fair; those shows can go on for five or ten years at Disneyland.”
He instructed a task force to visit the nation’s top corporations and offer the Disney services for the New York World’s Fair of 1964–65. If interest was expressed, Walt followed up personally. General Motors was the first to consider a Disney operation at the fair, and Walt journeyed to Detroit for discussions. General Motors executives were so convinced of the potential that they decided to develop their own organization to build an exhibit. “But you ought to try Ford,” said one of the G.M. men. “They really need you.”
Ford was responsive to Walt’s proposal of an attraction that would carry fair visitors in Ford cars through Audio-Animatronics depictions of Man’s development from the Stone Age to modern times. It didn’t matter to Walt that Audio-Animatronics had not been perfected, and that there was no system for moving the cars through the exhibit at varying speeds. Walt was confident that his “imagineers,” as they were called, would solve such problems.
General Electric, which was seeking to repair an image damaged by a price-fixing scandal, also hired Disney to create a world’s fair exhibit. WED devised a revolutionary concept: a theater in which the spectators’ seats would revolve around a series of stationary stages. Each of the stages would depict progress of the American home and electrical appliances. To coordinate the “Progressland” project, General Electric assigned a vice president whose previous expertise had been in heavy machinery. He listened impatiently as Walt outlined how the show would trace the American household from 1890 to the future. When Walt finished, the vice president remarked, “Well, that’s not exactly what we had in mind. We’re in the business of selling progress. What do we want with all that nostalgia?”
To the WED staff, the room temperature seemed to drop perceptibly. Walt replied with an edge to his voice, “Look, I built this studio on the basis of nostalgia, and we’ve been doing a pretty good job of selling it to the public all these years.” Afterward he was so incensed that he ordered the legal department to determine if the General Electric contract could be broken. When the G.E. president, Gerald Phillippi, visited the studio on a vacation two weeks later, Walt told him, “I’m having trouble with one of your vice presidents.” The man was instructed to stay out of Walt’s way.
Robert Moses, president of the New York World’s Fair, visited Disneyland and the studio in 1963, accompanied by his executive vice president, William E. (Joe) Potter, a retired general and onetime governor of the Canal Zone. Walt showed them a slide presentation of the Hall of Presidents and displayed the working model of Abraham Lincoln. The astonished Moses exclaimed, “I won’t open the fair without that exhibit!”
“Well, we couldn’t get the entire Hall of Presidents together in time,” said Walt. “But we might be able to finish Lincoln.”
Moses negotiated with the state of Illinois to sponsor a lifelike representation of Abraham Lincoln at the World’s Fair. Announcement of the exhibit brought criticism from a few Illinois citizens, who feared that the state’s greatest citizen might be “cartoonized.” Walt allayed such fears by appearing at a press conference in Springfield, Illinois, on November 19, 1963, to explain his good intentions. After all, he pointed out, he himself was a native of Illinois.
The last World’s Fair attraction to be undertaken was “
It’s a Small World.” Pepsi-Cola executives went to California to seek help from Disney in creating an exhibit to benefit UNICEF, the United Nations agency for children’s welfare. A Disney executive, believing that three projects were more than enough to occupy WED, sent the Pepsi-Cola people to an engineering firm that specialized in children’s playgrounds. Walt was angry when he heard about it. “I’m the one who makes those decisions!” he declared. “Tell Pepsi I’ll do it.”
His decision came less than a year before the May 1964 opening of the fair. Marc Davis, a Disney animator who had moved to WED, designed the animation for a boat ride through countries of the world, and Mary Blair provided the settings. The ride’s effectiveness hinged on creating a song which could saturate each area and blend from one to the other. Walt gave the assignment to a pair of brothers, Richard and Robert Sherman, who had come to the studio to write songs for Annette Funicello and Hayley Mills to record. Walt drove the brothers to the WED headquarters, now located two miles east of the studio, and demonstrated the workings of the “It’s a Small World” exhibit. “What I want,” Walt explained, “is a song that is universal, that can be sung in any language, with any type of instrumentation, simultaneously.” A large order, but the Shermans composed a simple two-part song that could be sung as a round or in counterpoint. It worked to perfection.
The WED crew worked night and day, combating impossible odds to prepare the four attractions for the fair opening. Walt made his own contributions to the show concepts. One of the scenes for the General Electric exhibit portrayed “Uncle Charlie” sitting in a bathtub with a cake of ice, trying to keep cool in the hot summer. Walt himself climbed into the bathtub to devise the action. “He shouldn’t be reading a newspaper; it should be the Police Gazette,” Walt mused as he sat in the tub. “There should be a glass of iced tea on the toilet seat there. And—let’s see—his toes would be sticking up at the other end of the tub, and wiggling. Yeah, let’s have his toes wiggling.”
As always, Walt put himself in the position of the public. He realized that there would be a lot of waiting in line at the fair, and people wouldn’t know whether or not a ride was shut down. “Let ‘em see that something is going on,” he said, and so the Ford cars and the “Small World” boats loaded outside the attractions. He even positioned the rest rooms to make them convenient for those in line. As at Disneyland, the queues were doubled back, so that those in line would have a sense of advancing toward their goal and would see a constantly changing human vista.
His technicians were astounded by the speed with which Walt absorbed the most complex of procedures. One morning he dropped in at the machine shop and asked a sound technician, Gordon Williams, to explain the workings of the tape machines that were being used for Audio-Animatronic figures. Williams took an hour to detail the functions of the transistors, recorders and other components of the highly complex system. That afternoon Walt returned with a group of General Electric executives. Williams expected to repeat his explanation of the tape system. Instead, Walt did it himself, using the precise terms and telling it all in ten minutes. It was a faultless performance.
The four World’s Fair projects were assembled in mock-ups at the studio and shipped piece by piece to New York. As time grew short, some of the components were sent off whether they were working or not. Two hundred WED employees went east to complete the assembly and final tests for the exhibits. They encountered a multitude of unforeseen problems, including New York construction crews who resented the “outsiders” from California. Joe Bowman, who was supervising the building of the “Small World” ride, had won grudging acceptance from the construction workers, but progress was slow, and he was uncertain of meeting the opening-day deadline. With the building half completed, Walt arrived for an inspection. When he finished, he asked, “Joe, is there anything I can do to help?”
“It might help me get things moving around here if you met the men and talked to them,” Bowman remarked. Walt chatted with the workers and inquired about their jobs, mentioning that his own father had been a carpenter on the Chicago World’s Fair seventy years before. Bowman had no labor problems after Walt’s visit.
The WED men themselves were working long hours to complete the exhibits. One evening four of the men were riding in a taxi to Walt’s hotel after an inspection tour. “How are your wives getting along in New York?” Walt asked. There was silence, and he realized that the men had been working for weeks in New York, away from their families. The next day, the men began receiving telephone calls from California; their wives were joining them.
As opening day drew near, it appeared that Walt Disney might perform a miracle; the shows were beginning to perform as planned. Except for Mr. Lincoln. The Lincoln figure was by far the most sophisticated that the WED craftsmen had undertaken. Being Lincoln, it had to move with dignity, and Audio-Animatronics seemed too undeveloped to accomplish such a feat. On May 16, a week before opening day, “Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln” passed its test at the WED headquarters in California. The figure was shipped by air freight to New York the next day.
The arrival in New York was a portent of things to come. The delivery truck became ensnarled in the traffic for the opening of Shea Stadium, adjacent to the fair, and delivery was delayed until the following day. WED technicians set up the elaborate controls for the figure and discovered to their horror that it wouldn’t work. “Mr. Lincoln” delivered his performance perfectly, then went into convulsions. The dampness of the New York air was suspected as a cause. Also the fluctuations of electrical current caused by the Shea Stadium lights and twelve-billion-candlepower beam in the Tower of Light Pavilion.
The temporary wiring in the Illinois building proved faulty, and electricians couldn’t ensure a permanent installation until the day of the opening. A transformer broke down, and the show was without power for two days. Fuses blew and wires crossed, causing “Mr. Lincoln” to behave unpresidentially. Early one morning as the figure had failed for the hundredth time, Marc Davis turned to Jim Algar, who had written the script for the show, and remarked, “Do you suppose that God is mad at Walt for creating Man in his own image?”
Walt was present throughout the testing period, and if he experienced any concern, he didn’t show it. He seemed confident that the show would be ready for a preview to be attended by Governor Otto Kerner, Adlai Stevenson and two hundred other Illinois dignitaries on April 20, two days before the fair opening.
For Walt Disney it was a crucial time. He was involved in a venture over which he did not have total control. He was putting his reputation and the skill of his organization in a mammoth arena where nations and corporations had spent millions of dollars in competition with each other. If he failed, he would evoke the scorn of Easterners to whom “Mickey Mouse” was an epithet for something made with eccentric skill. If he succeeded, he might win support for the future plans that were stirring in his mind.
“Mr. Lincoln” wouldn’t work. Its electronic ills defied healing, even though the technicians worked around the clock. All of them understood the pressure that Walt faced. There were still rumblings of objections to a “fantasized” Abraham Lincoln, and members of the press were sniping at the project because Walt had decreed there would be no photographs.
On the day of the preview, the five hundred seats of the Lincoln Theater filled with the Illinois dignitaries and members of the international press. His face drawn, Walt watched as his technicians made one last, luckless attempt to master the faults of “Mr. Lincoln.” Officials of the Illinois Pavilion spoke to the audience on the other side of the curtain, then Governor Kerner introduced Walt.
Walt lifted an eyebrow and told the audience with a half-smile, “There isn’t going to be any show.” The guests began to laugh. Walt continued, “It’s true. We’ve worked like beavers to get it ready, but it’s not ready, and I won’t show it to you until it is. I’m sorry, but there’s no point in showing a thing that might fall apart on us.” He went on to explain in layman terms what
the trouble seemed to be, and he assured the audience that “Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln” would open as soon as it worked.
A week later, “Mr. Lincoln” suddenly began functioning to perfection. On May 2, the Illinois Pavilion opened without fanfare, and it quickly became one of the most popular attractions at the fair. Among the industrial exhibits, General Electric’s “Progressland” and Ford’s “Magic Skyway” placed second and third in attendance during the first year; General Motors, with a much greater capacity and cost, was first. “It’s a Small World” was rated the most charming attraction by most critics.
Before concluding the agreements with Ford and General Electric, Walt had suggested to his negotiator, Bill Cottrell, “Don’t you think we ought to get something for the use of the Disney name?” Cottrell agreed, since the two corporations would benefit from association with Disney for the two years previous and the two-year duration of the fair. Cottrell returned from negotiations to report that both Ford and General Electric had agreed to a fee of one million dollars. “Do you think we should have asked for more?” Walt asked wryly.
At the conclusion of the World’s Fair, he made a remarkable offer: If the two corporations established their exhibits at Disneyland, the million-dollar fee could be applied to moving expenses. The proposal was favorable not only to Ford and General Electric but to the stockholders of Walt Disney Productions; Disneyland would be the recipient of major attractions created and owned by Walt’s personal company, WED.