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Designer Times
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GE Carousel of Progress Audio Animatronic Figures
The period from 1954 to 1964 was filled with all kinds of developing ideas to go beyond the superb film and print 2-D animation that Walt Disney had pioneered so beautifully. Walt wasn't going to stop until he could create really stunning 3-D animation. Somewhere during these years, the phrase "Audio Animatronics" was coined and copyrighted. We designers used the simple tag......AA Figures. In1962 I started an alpha-numeric part numbering system to keep track of all the new parts that were popping up both at Wed Enterprises in Glendale and the Studio Machine Shop in Burbank.
Before all the serious AA Figure design work started, Walt and Roger Broggie in the Studio Machine Shop started to work on a "Dancing Man Machine". This was an idea Walt had pursued since 1949 when he had purchased a tiny mechanically animated bird. In the book "Walt Disney Imagineering", the early story of how Audio Animatronics got started with this little bird is told on pages 118 thru 121.
By 1954 Wathel Rogers was assigned to animate a second machine in the form of a barber shop quartet. I used to watch Wathel trying to get this quartet machine to work in late 1954. Roger had put me to work in a big room in the Studio's Zorro building along with Wathel. I really felt sorry for him as it seemed a hopeless task to get this conglomeration of big cam disks, rollers, cables and itty bitty figure motion parts to look believable. Walt came in several days a week to encourage Wathel onwards. Walt wanted this thing ready for the opening of Disneyland, but very little progress had been made, and the job was set aside.
Meantime, Bob Mattey, Walt's movie mechanical special effects guru was building a couple of animated Indians for the opening of Disneyland. These animated figures, along with the Jungle cruise and the later Mine Ride animations in 1956 were very simple. Control was directly by electric motorized small cams driving the physical parts, or by cams operating pneumatic valve switches. The pneumatic valves would in turn operate pneumatic air cylinders, or sometimes water cylinders for underwater animations.
The next idea to try was to use bigger cams to operate light beam devices such as the Cadillac Autronic Eye, which would sense light and dark to automatically turn car headlights on and off. Since these cams did not have any cam followers rubbing on the cams, these could be quickly shaped by cutting cardboard cams with scissors. Much faster than poor old Wathel laboriously filing aluminum cams. We even tried highway bus air suspension leveling valves which needed very little force to operate the valves for big animation cylinders.
The Space Race technology of the 1960's was providing all kinds of control valves which could be more than simple on/off. These valves had variable position and speed, just like real human motion! Soon we had suppliers like Atchley and National Water Lift coming to Disney with a neat menu of potential animation control devices. Most of our physical animated figures were simple but heavy "iron frame" and fiberglass structures, like those on the Jungle Cruise and those being built for the Ford Pavilion at the New York World's Fair.
Walt wanted a lot of really life like animated humans for the NYWF General Electric Carousel of Progress Show. We were all trying everything. I had a brainstorm to make animated humans in a frameless method using the body shell as the frame. This would give more space inside for the quite large pneumatic servo cylinders that we were going to use. I also thought we could transmit body motions by cable circuits, like a dentists drill. These would be very light and flexible. Page 119 In the book "Walt Disney Imagineering" shows this harebrained idea. Walt is standing in front of my drawings while gesturing to the first test human frameless torso. Watching Walt (left to right) are Ken O'Brian, harebrain Gurr, and sculptor Blaine Gibson.
I soon learned that this whole idea was as hopeless as the barbershop quartet. The mechanical fabricators in the Studio Machine Shop demonstrated the schemes failings; the cables would not stay on the pulleys, the body shell could never be made stiff enough, and there was almost no room inside for all the functioning parts, and get your hands and tools inside for service. I had hoped later that all evidence of my fiasco would have been buried. To my horror, this photo still shows up from time to time.
The Machine Shop guys developed the best way to make animated humans by using light weight stainless steel frames, pneumatic servos, and cover the whole thing with transparent plastic body shell sections. These were fast and easy to make from thermo-formed clear butyrate and attached with little brass thumbscrews. Now you had lots of room inside, and could see everything without taking the shells off. From that time onwards our small group of designers at WED Enterprises made drawings in parallel with the Studio fabricators. The Audio Animatronic figures were built first, then designed! We would make manufacturing drawings only after the parts were built and shown to work. This sounds backwards, but it sure worked great. We already had devised the AA part number system, so it was easy to document Walt's latest Audio Animatronic designs for re-creation on future attractions.
As part of this AA figure development for GE, we all gravitated to a standardized family of parts. The first ones were all hand made, the later ones developed for the Pirates of The Caribbean were made from fully tooled cast stainless steel parts using the latest space age investment casting techniques. Many of these basic parts are still used almost (40) years later. Walt Disney made a giant leap in 3-D animated figures in the decade from 1954 to 1964. But in 1963 Walt wanted yet another giant leap on top of everything we had developed up to that time. He wanted to animate America's Greatest President.
oOo
Next month: Next month: ABRAHAM LINCOLN FIGURE 1963
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-- Bob Gurr
Bob Gurr began working with Disney in 1954. He retired in 1981 but occassionally consults for the Company. Since Disney he's worked on the sinking ship at Las Vegas' Treasure Island, Universal Studios' King Kong, Godzilla for the film by the same name and much more. Among his proudest accomplishments he lists "making Walt tickled pink that some of the things he wanted to build actually worked. You could tell how proud he was when he would show off things to his friends and the press. Lincoln and the Monorail were two big ones for him."
Designer Times is normally posted the second Wednesday of each month.
The opinions expressed by Bob Gurr, and all of our columnists, do not necessarily represent the feelings of LaughingPlace.com or any of its employees or advertisers. All speculation and rumors about the future of Disneyland and the Walt Disney Company are just that - speculation and rumors - and should be treated as such.
-- Posted May 8, 2002
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