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Designer Times
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26. Abraham Lincoln Figure 1963

By 1963 Walt had seen how much development the many creators at WED Enterprises had achieved with Audio Animatronics, particularly for the various New York World's Fair shows. 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. A lot of folks had been involved in all the developmental details of designing the Lincoln Show for the State of Illinois Pavilion at the Fair.

Paul Anderson's 1995 book, Persistence of Vision Issue #6/#7, tells the very thorough story of how Lincoln was created. As the story unfolds, Paul comes to the part where the first Lincoln Animated Figure had started to come to life in the Disney Studio's "secret room". It was time for a complete overhaul of the mechanical design. Walt requested that Roger Broggie and I take a look at the progress to date. "Bobby, I want half the weight and twice the motions" I was told by a somewhat upset Walt. So, on top of all the other projects I was working on at the time, Walt passed out yet another one. I was busy on Ford, General Electric, and Small World, and now I was to get cracking immediately on redesigning the mechanical portion of the Animated Abraham Lincoln Figure.

So how does a car guy who used to work at the Ford Motor Company as a car stylist designing Lincoln Automobiles re-design a mechanical human Lincoln? My first thought was that the first Lincoln had very heavy parts, typical for industrial equipment. I was in a glider club at the time and had a WWII training glider fuselage in my garage. It had a very light welded alloy steel tube frame. I was always poking around aircraft and was familiar with aircraft light weight design details. Lincoln will re-start his life as an airplane!

Click here for a larger version of this picture

Like an airplane, Lincoln would have an internal framework, with many internal animation bits and pieces, and an exterior body shape which would later be covered with costume clothing. Car and airplane bodies are rigid structures, human animations are moving bodies. The human Lincoln would have (13) main structural units, all moving in dozens of directions. This would require a rat's nest of linkages, bearings, bellcranks, and a ton of monkey-motion doo dads to provide the articulated motions. These motions would be powered mostly by large pneumatic servo cylinders. All of this stuff had to fit inside this tall, skinny Lincoln. Oh gosh, why didn't Walt want Grover Cleveland.

Blaine Gibson had sculpted the full size Lincoln and I requested a complete one piece rigid foam body from the plaster shop. I layed out the basic Lincoln body shape the same as a car body with horizontal station lines every few inches vertically on the foam body. I then ran Lincoln thru a bandsaw, slicing him up like a meat carcass into the main chunks. Then I sawed these into 1 inch thick slices. My drafting board looked like a meat market, especially the leg slices which were just like slabs of round steak.