The deal had already been made long before the controversy reached the public.
The Walt Disney Company — which owns the rights to the image of its founder, Walt Disney — had dotted their i’s and crossed their t’s before they made the public announcement that they would be installing an animatronic of Uncle Walt in the Main Street Opera House at Disneyland; where he would alternate shows with an audio-animatronic that the flesh-and-blood Walt had, himself, directed the creation of, Abraham Lincoln.
An early version of the show and of the animatronic was shown, in 2023, to Walt’s Grandson, Chris Miller, who gave the thumbs-up to the project. It was subsequently brought to the Board of Directors of The Walt Disney Family Museum — the official mouthpiece of the family, containing five of Walt’s grandkids and three of his great-grandkids — which also approved. At the event where the new show was announced, Disney’s D23 convention in Anaheim, members of the museum staff were already quietly answering questions about the new show and confirming that, indeed, they had given it the okay. Staff were careful to point out that this did not mean that every member of the family was in agreement, but that the organization as a whole was raising no objections.
It became quickly apparent that some members of the family, however, were not simply in disagreement, but were deeply upset. Granddaughter Joanna Miller quickly made her concerns over the figure public, expressing her dismay. Her concerns about a “robot of grampa” are heartbreaking to read and should be treated with respect and sympathy. The decision had long been made, however.
The Disney Company does not, legally, need anyone’s permission to create an animatronic of its founder having owned the rights to his image for some time, but their due diligence by reaching out to the only official representation of the Disney family, the Walt Disney Family Museum Board of Directors, and receiving its blessing, is enough to seal the deal.
Whatever opinion the public might have about the new show will now have to be expressed in quantities of butts in seats.
It is a tricky question, for a company that has been around for a hundred years and who have been producing audio-animatronic and animatronic figures for about half of that time, as to what is legal and what is ethical when reproducing a machine version of a real human being. The answers are not simple, but let’s look at how the company has handled the question over the years.
The first audio-animatronic of an identifiable historical figure was, of course, the one that cyber-Walt will be sharing the Opera House with next May, Abraham Lincoln.
Lincoln was an experiment; initially intended to be a part of a full “Hall of Presidents” — more on that in a moment. Disney’s Imagineers had secured a copy of a life mask of the sixteenth President — one created by Leonard Wells Volk in 1860 — and had used it to sculpt a head to place on top of a robotic frame.Seeing the figure in an early form, New York Parks Commissioner, and prime mover of the 1964 New York World’s Fair, Robert Moses, insisted that it be included in the event. Disney’s Imagineers rushed the animatronic to completion and it was installed at the Illinois Pavilion in Flushing Meadows.
With Lincoln, being a major historical figure who had been dead for about 99 years at the time of the Fair, it is doubtful that any rights to his likeness would need to be secured and, with the rush to complete the figure, it’s doubtful anyone would have even considered it. That show, Great Moments With Mr. Lincoln (1964) along with its avian contemporary, The Enchanted Tiki Room (1963), serve as the launching point for all modern animatronics. (The finest book I’ve ever read on the subject is Ken Bruce’s “Before the Birds Sang Words.” Do yourself a favor and grab a copy.)
The audio-animatronic figure of the sixteenth President has been redone several times now — one frame hangs in a display case at the Walt Disney Family Museum, another in the Walt Disney Presents exhibit in Disney’s Hollywood Studios — but the show continues to inspire at Disneyland today.
The next attempt to bring humans to life through animatronics was not attempted for another seven years and served as a fulfillment of the intention of the original Lincoln figure. It is Walt Disney World’s Hall of Presidents which debuted in 1971.
For the most part, permissions for the first 36 Presidents, those featured in the attraction at opening, fell into the same sort of historical fair use that Lincoln had in his California attraction. But the difference this time was that there were three of the figures which had been modeled on people who were still alive.
Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon (the incumbent) were still around. Whether or not Truman or Johnson had any reservations isn’t clear — that no Presidents other than Lincoln had a speaking part in the show at this point probably made it easy for them to ignore — but Nixon, the current President, made his feelings apparent. The President, a longtime friend of Walt Disney going back to his time as a California Senator, had sent a flag that had formerly flown over the White House to commemorate the opening of Walt Disney World and the Hall of Presidents.
The flag currently resides in the lobby of the attraction as a display.
From this point on, at each subsequent inauguration of a new President, the Hall of Presidents would be closed for a time while a new animatronic was added. None of these spoke. It seemed that no American President either cared that much, or thought it politically wise to go to battle against Mickey Mouse, and the tradition continued for decades without official protest. (Notably, President Jimmy Carter’s wife, Rosalynn Carter, did object to the tacky suit they had put her husband in and sent them a new one, which is what the figure wears today.)
The show was, however, about to change in 1993 when Michael Eisner, then CEO of the Walt Disney Company, suggested giving the animatronic of the standing President a few lines. Bill Clinton was the first to give a speech in the attraction and, from this point on, each new addition would have something to say. Sometimes it was a speech, at other times it was just the Oath of Office, but they each participated somehow. (George W. Bush’s recording session was said to have lasted all of six minutes.)
While the First Amendment of the United States Constitution does guarantee a right to use images of the President to comment on or protest their policies, this show remains in a grey area as far as legal rights. The attraction doesn’t take much of a stand on any policy issue and is part of a for-profit enterprise. Famously, both Presidents Obama and Trump have sued when their images were used by other companies for commercial reasons. Nevertheless, one has to assume that their participation in the recording of the show constitutes a sort of tacit acceptance that their images are being used fairly.
Were there to be, however, a large-scale political disagreement between the Walt Disney Company and an administration, far more likely in today’s political climate than in decades past, one wonders what would happen to that tacit acceptance?
It was quite some time before another reproduction of a living human showed up as an animatronic, not until the 1989 opening of the gate formerly known as the Disney-MGM Studio Theme Park. The signature attraction of the park was a trip through the history of movies called The Great Movie Ride (1989) and it required, as one might expect, a lot of animatronic movie stars.
Disney’s licensing deal with MGM Studios smoothed out a lot of the film rights that were required for the scenes that the massive ride vehicles would pass through and those that MGM didn’t own had separate deals struck. The usage of actors, living or deceased, was another matter, however, and Disney meticulously reached out the every living performer and the relatives of those who were not, to receive permission.
Only one request was refused, that of the family of Lee Marvin who’s performance in the ribald Cat Ballou (1965) was to be featured. The family felt that Marvin’s comic drunkard was not the way they wanted him remembered and, honoring the family’s wishes, he was replaced with Clint Eastwood who seemed to be performing as his Spaghetti Western hero “The Man With No Name,” though it wasn’t specified.
It is worth noting that Harrison Ford also agreed to have his Indiana Jones character reproduced in a scene from the classic Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). His attitude was to be very different in a few years.
In 1995, Disneyland introduced one of its most triumphant modern attractions, the Indiana Jones Adventure (often referred to as Indiana Jones and the Temple of the Forbidden Eye). Harrison Ford, who had evidently had no real issues with his animatronic in The Great Movie Ride, put his foot down here. The problem stemmed from an agreement that the Disney Company had made that Ford felt they had reneged on. Originally the company asked if they could use his voice and likeness for the attraction — it was planned that he would record the dialogue himself — and then they would use some of the audio in a promotion that they had planned for the halftime ceremonies of the 1995 Super Bowl game.
Ford had said yes to the attraction and no to the Super Bowl, but when he received the contract to sign, Disney had slipped the Super Bowl piece into the back half of the contract. Ford was incensed and refused to sign over his rights for either use and this is why the voice and face of Indy, in the attraction, are just wrong.
Harrison Ford, by the way, was right about not wanting to have anything to do with this halftime show.
One could argue that the next item on this list should be the much hated, Disney California Adventure opening day attraction, Superstar Limo (2001). These figures, however, aren’t animatronics; they are simple motorized figures. They are also meant as caricatures which would clearly be covered by parody laws if it came up.
By the mid-2000s, with one of Disney’s hottest live-action franchises being based on their classic Pirates of the Caribbean (1967) attraction, the company had begun including clauses in their contracts that had already hashed out the terms of usage for an actor’s inclusion in a theme park ride. Johnny Depp being added into the Pirates ride or the cast of the Star Wars sequels showing up in Rise of the Resistance (2019) were working within contract stipulations that had been hammered out long before the animatronics had been built.
It was unlikely that they would run into another Lee Marvin/Harrison Ford situation with modern franchises. But with the addition of Walt Disney into their audio-animatronic pantheon, they run into a much different problem. They have no legal concerns, but they are manipulating their audience’s nostalgia and their sense, perhaps illusory, of a more innocent time.
When the company included a holographic Walt in their Disney100 exhibit last year, the feature was met with some praise and also a considerable amount of unease. And this show, in spite of its “AI” buzzword labeling, was really just manipulated and upscaled film and audio displayed like a Pepper’s Ghost effect. (Much more on the misuse of the Pepper’s Ghost terminology in our podcast about Sleeping Beauty’s Castle (1955). It really was just film of actual Walt Disney with some fancy editing, and it unnerved people.
Will this new animatronic excite the guest’s nostalgia or will it be another exercise in trying to squint past the uncanny valley?
Time will tell.
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Kelly McCubbin is a columnist for Boardwalk Times
