The Animated Man (61 page)

There were limits to what could be done along those lines, though, and Davis acknowledged them on other occasions when he contradicted his own use of “storytelling.” An amusement park's rides “should be what people don't expect them to be,” he said, “and it doesn't have a lot to do with continuity of story. It does have to do with the entertainment value of surprise and seeing things that you can't see anyplace else.”
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He and Disney were in agreement on that, he said: “Walt knew that we were not telling stories . . . he and I discussed it many times. And he said very definitely, ‘You can't tell a story in this medium.' ”
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By the early 1960s, preliminary work on a Haunted Mansion was under way, but that work was wedded to the idea of telling a gruesome story as visitors walked through. And that story line, Davis believed, was the reason “Walt never bought the Haunted Mansion in his time.”
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If storytelling was not possible, the experiences that Disneyland could provide otherwise were constrained by the extremely limited movement that was possible for its mechanical creatures. As
The “E” Ticket
explained, the Jungle Cruise's mechanized animals “moved without really moving. These animal replicas . . . were very realistic in appearance but were mostly limited to lateral motion and a few hydraulic mechanical functions.” The animals included “crocodiles with hinged jaws, a gorilla that rocked up and down, giraffes whose necks would sway and rhinos which circled on tracks in the dry grass.”
Their actions “consisted mostly of charging and trumpeting, surfacing and submerging, and sliding around on underwater runways.” (In the early days of the park, these simple mechanical movements were called “gags.”)
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Disneyland's vaunted malleability was thus something of an illusion. Finding some way to make his mechanical animals more lifelike was for Disney a necessity if the park was not to become an increasingly ordinary place, for him and for its visitors.

As with so many other things, Disney had nursed an interest in mechanical movement for years before he put it to use at Disneyland. At least since his 1935 trip to Europe, he had been intrigued by mechanical toys and had brought them back to the studio. “When we went to Paris,” Diane Disney Miller said—that was probably in 1949—“Dad went off on his own and came back with boxes and boxes of these little windup toys. He wound them all up and put them on the floor of the room and just sat and watched them. You know, the dog that rolls over and stuff like that. He said, ‘Look at that movement with just a simple mechanism.' He was studying. . . . We thought he was crazy.”
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Even before that, probably in New Orleans on his 1946 train trip to the Atlanta premiere of
Song of the South
, Disney had bought what Wathel Rogers called “this little mechanical bird in a cage. . . . One of those that you could wind up and it would whistle.” Years later, when Disneyland was open and Rogers was on the WED staff, “Walt gave it to me and asked me to look inside it. I was supposed to take it apart, and it was like taking apart a piece of jewelry. When I finally got it all apart and laid everything out I found a little bellows made of canvas, and some little cams and other parts.”
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To an extent now hard to determine, Disney's interest in such mechanical toys figured into his plans in the early 1950s for his Americana in miniature, but it was for Disneyland that his WED employees seriously investigated such mechanisms and began applying what they learned to animated figures. By the fall of 1960, Disney was demonstrating to reporters the animated heads of what one writer called “his new waxworks figures.”
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In 1963, it was when his glum luncheon conversation with Aubrey Menen turned to the robotic technology he now called “Audio-Animatronics” that Disney finally brightened: “ ‘Now
there
,' he said, smiling at last. ‘There is where I am
happy
.” '
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That interview was published when Disneyland was about to open the Enchanted Tiki Room, the first true Audio-Animatronics attraction. As
The “E” Ticket
explained, “The mechanized figures developed after 1963 were a complete departure from those installed in the park in its first years of operation. . . . 
Access to space-age fabrics, plastics and metals, miniaturized solenoids and other electronic components made new degrees of animation possible. With hydraulic movements (for strength) and pneumatic movements (for low-pressure delicacy), and with ever smaller servo-mechanisms, Disney began creating improved, more believable animals and humans. . . . For the first time (with the help of Marc Davis and other new designers) they could individually perform for the audience. The complex control systems devised for the Enchanted Tiki Room and other shows began as notched platters and light-sensitive photo cells,” were succeeded by magnetic tape and ultimately were computerized, long after Disney's time.

“With these methods, Disney was able to dictate and sequence great numbers of actions for one or more figures, from a distance. It became possible to program specific movements of face and head, limbs and body, the character's words and music, and even coordinate the actions of many performers within an entire attraction or show.”
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The Tiki Room aside, the initial showcases for the new technology were not at Disneyland, but at the New York World's Fair of 1964–65.
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He undertook the world's fair projects “to benefit Disneyland,” Disney said in 1963. “We won't lose money on the work, but we don't expect to make much, either. We expect these exhibits, or part of them, to end up at the park, where they will add to our free attractions. Or, if the corporations do not decide to exhibit them at Disneyland, they will pay a penalty which will amount to our profit in creating them.”
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Said Bob Gurr, a member of the WED staff: “One big thrust behind our design work for the World's Fair was the fact that we were going to own all the equipment. In other words, somebody else would build the pavilion, on somebody else's property, but the show equipment that went in there was Disney's, and he had a ready-made location waiting for it. The fact that the Fair was going to run two years meant he could build more expensively, and Disney priced these projects in a way that the sponsors were paying for everything for a two-year use.”
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Disney approached the fair with a certain skepticism, even so. “You don't like to do those things unless you have fun doing 'em,” he said in 1961, when work on the exhibits was just getting under way. “You don't do 'em for money.” Robert Moses, the imperious road builder who was in command of the fair, “wanted us to develop the amusement area and we looked at it,” Disney said, “but it just wasn't for us. I wouldn't want to try to do anything in New York. I'm not close enough. . . . On top of that, I mean I don't know whether I want to do any outside of Disneyland because you don't want to spread yourself thin.”

By the time the fair opened, Disney had banished any such reservations and was planning a new amusement park in central Florida. His world's fair exhibits would allow him to learn just how receptive East Coast audiences—especially tough New York audiences—would be to the Disneyland-style entertainment he expected to offer in Florida, although by 1964 he had scant reason for doubt on that score.

All four exhibits were, however, a reversion to the kind of sponsored shows that Disney had abandoned almost twenty years earlier when he stopped making industrial films. (Dick Irvine referred to General Electric's Progressland Pavilion, which housed the Disney-designed Carousel of Progress, as “a refrigerator show.”)
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When he was desperate to fill Tomorrowland's empty spaces before Disneyland opened, Disney let several companies open static exhibits—including what the official guidebooks called “the modernistic Bathroom of the Future”—that were nothing more than displays of their products. In general, Disney had not had happy experiences with such sponsors, except when his position was strong enough that he could tell them what to do.

But the fair was appealing to Disney because with the help of subsidies from the four sponsors, he could use all the exhibits to refine Audio-Animatronics. That technology was now central to his continuing enthusiasm for Disneyland.

Two of the exhibits, Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln (for the state of Illinois) and the Carousel of Progress, revived ideas for unrealized attractions in Disneyland itself. “As usual,” Randy Bright wrote, “Disney kept closely involved in the [carousel's] design. When his staff worked on a comical 1920s scene in which lazy, beer-drinking ‘Cousin Orville' was to sit in a bathtub with his back to the audience, Walt questioned the staging. He turned the tub around to face the audience, took off his shoes and socks, and jumped in. ‘He'd wiggle his toes, don't you think?' was Disney's conclusion. It was another of the subliminal touches that had become a Disney trademark.”
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Audiences at the Carousel of Progress rotated around four central stages, each depicting a home that became increasingly electrified over the course of the century. The carousel, populated by Audio-Animatronics figures, was optimistic about the future in a way that brooked no dissent, highly sentimental in its depiction of changing family life, and curiously ambiguous about the family itself (it seemed as if no one in it ever died). Like the carousel, two other Disney-designed exhibits were technologically ingenious but vulnerable to criticism on other grounds. Pepsi-Cola's exhibit, It's a Small World, combined an insistently repetitive song by Disney's house composers, the brothers Richard and Robert Sherman, with animated displays designed by
Mary Blair to represent the world's children. Blair, who made preliminary color sketches for many of the animated features of the 1940s and early 1950s, embraced emphatically modern ideas about color and form but applied them to figures that could only be called “cute” (and without a trace of irony). The Audio-Animatronics Abraham Lincoln for the Illinois pavilion provoked especially intense criticism—it seemed to the novelist John Gardner that what made the “obviously dead” figure “horrible . . . was the ghastly suggestion, which had never occurred to Disney and his people, that all religion and patriotism are a sham and a delusion, an affair for monstrous automatons.”
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All three exhibits invited aesthetic and intellectual objections that could not be applied seriously to the earlier rides at Disneyland.

The Ford exhibit, called Magic Skyway, was more conventional, with less-advanced animated figures. Disney's friend Welton Becket was the architect for the pavilion that housed the Magic Skyway exhibit, and he remembered the intense interest Disney took not just in the exhibit itself but in its surroundings. “He wanted the toilets in the right positions,” Becket said, and he wanted the people waiting in line to have something to look at. “I've never seen a great executive get down and take his coat off and really direct and work as he did on those exhibits.”
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Disney emerged from his experience with the New York fair skeptical of world's fairs in general. They were out of date, he said, and of benefit only to hotels and restaurants.
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Neither had his skepticism about working with big corporations been much eased. Ford decided not to come into Disneyland as the sponsor of an exhibit, despite what Marty Sklar, who had been writing promotional material of various kinds since Disneyland opened, called “a major effort” by Disney himself. “I went back with Walt for the Ford presentation. . . . Walt had Bob and Dick Sherman write a song, called ‘Get the Feel of the Wheel of a Ford.' . . . It was a fabulous piece, and it would have been the greatest commercial for Ford. We went back there, and we made this pitch, and the end of the presentation was this song. And they turned us down. Walt couldn't understand, and he was really upset on the plane going back to New York. When Walt got involved with somebody, he did it all the way.”
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Once the fair was out of the way, Disney shifted his attention back to how the technology the fair had nurtured could improve Disneyland. Walt Disney Productions purchased its first aircraft, a Beechcraft Queen Air, in January 1963, and took delivery of second plane, a Grumman Gulfstream, in March 1964.
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Disney used the Gulfstream for short trips inside California and the Queen Air for longer trips out of state (it was replaced in July 1965
by a Beechcraft King Air). By mid-1965, according to
Business Week
, Disney was flying south to Disneyland about once a week. But he was driving several times a week to WED in Glendale to keep tabs on the development of Audio-Animatronics figures.
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Audio-Animatronics, based on Marc Davis's designs, transformed the Jungle Cruise in particular. The elephants bathing in the river were sly comedians now, as were the hyenas laughing at the five members of a safari trapped atop a pole by a rhinoceros.

Davis recalled designing a walk-through attraction on a pirate theme after talking about one with Disney, evidently in the early 1960s. “But the funny thing was, Walt was never quite ready to look at these drawings. He'd come into my room and not look at the walls and boards. He'd come in and he'd talk to me about pirates, but he would deliberately not look at the storyboards. It was annoying as hell to me, because I knew I had some work that I thought was pretty good, and also, I wanted to know what he thought about them. This went on until we went back to New York . . . and I think when we came back from there, Walt knew what he wanted to do”—not a walk-through attraction under New Orleans Square but a much more elaborate ride.
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