A deep, deep dive into the history of Disney's animatronics

The Defunctland YouTube channel has just released a video documentary on the history of Disney animatronics, and as usual for creator Kevin Perjurer, it is a deeper dive into the subject than you'd ever suspect. It starts in Ancient Egypt, lingers in the 18th and 19th century Europe for quite a while, and exhaustively covers Walt Disney's early interest and successes in creating mechanical creatures and humans before concluding at one hour forty-five minutes and revealing (Spoiler Alert) that it's only Part One.

It looks like Part Two will cover the Disney company's continued progress in the field following Walt Disney's death in 1966, with computers replacing the mechanical contraptions that controlled the mechanical figures explained so thoroughly in the first part.
It's a fascinating look at the history of building mechanical figures, overlaid with Perjurer's theme that this impulse to create mechanical "life" has been for some reason held a fascination for humanity, and an obsession for some people, including Walt Disney.


I was surprised to learn how many different methods for programming and creating movement were used by Disney in these early years from "Disneylandia" experiments, to the Tiki birds, to Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln, to The Carousel of Progress, to the Haunted Mansion and Pirates of the Caribbean, to Country Bear Jamboree.

One of the more compelling stories in the documentary is the controversy over Disney creating an Abraham Lincoln audio-animatronic for the New York City World's Fair in 1964. While we now consider this kind of thing commonplace, there was apparently a real distaste among many critics for using new technology to create a moving, talking replica of a real, historical, deceased person. Walt Disney's motivation for his almost maniacal insistence that it be completed seemed to go beyond business issues, and was very personal to him.


And I'd seen the term Audio-Animatronics to describe the figures, but I didn't know what the "audio" part of the term referred to. I thought (and apparently this is still one theory of the etymology) that it just referred to the fact that the figures are made to move and talk. But the more compelling explanation (because some audio-animatronics don't talk) is that the primary early method for programming their movements was the use of audio tape to send electronic signals to the figure's mechanisms.