When Disneyland turns 70 this July, Main Street’s Opera House will play host to the return of Walt Disney, who will sit down with audiences to tell his story in robot form.
The response to the announcement at D23 Expo 2024 that Walt Disney Imagineering was working on a way to bring an animatronic, lifelike Walt into the parks to greet guests in Walt Disney – A Magical Life has been mixed, even among members of the Disney family.
At the expo Disney’s grandnephew, Roy P. Disney, was present in support of the announcement. Meanwhile Walt’s granddaughter Johanna Miller wrote a Facebook post stressing that he would not have wanted to be turned into an animatronic: “The idea of a Robotic Grampa to give the public a feeling of who the living man was just makes no sense. It would be an imposter.”
The LA Times recently reported on the discourse after previewing some of the show’s concepts without the animatronic present. Disney Imagineering’s Tom Fitzgerald posits that the choice to create the animatronic falls in line with Walt’s initiative to always be progressing with the tools at Disney’s disposal.
“His life story had been told in these other formats already,” Fitzgerald told the LA Times. “What could we do at Disneyland for our audience that would be part of our tool kit vernacular but that would bring Walt to life in a way that you could only experience at the park? We felt the technology had gotten there. We felt there was a need to tell that story in a fresh way.”
Among the supporters are Kirsten Komoroske, the executive director of the Walt Disney Family Museum, who shared that the organization has conferred with other members of the Disney family on the concept.
“They really feel that he would have liked this project,” she said. She also said there was no documentation to Miller’s claim that Walt would have stood against it.
“We know that it’s anecdotal and we can’t speak to what was told to people in private and we can’t speak to Joanna’s specific feelings about the project. But we have worked very diligently for many years with the Walt Disney Family Museum and members of the Disney and Miller family. … We’ve taken care to make sure that the family is along the journey with us and we feel that we’ve presented a faithful and theatrical presentation that keeps Walt alive in the medium that he pioneered.”
When asked why the Walt animatronic was happening now, Fitzgerald explained, “For two reasons. One is Disneyland’s 70th anniversary is an ideal time we thought to create a permanent tribute to Walt Disney in the Opera House. The other: I grew up watching Walt Disney on television. I guess I’m the old man. He came into our living room every week and chatted and it was very casual and you felt like you knew the man. But a lot of people today don’t know Walt Disney was an individual. They think Walt Disney is a company.”
Now Disney fans of all ages can meet Walt Disney, the robot, this summer.
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