This would then in turn cause the animatronics to move and perform actions, coordinated fluidly with the audio. The magnetic recording tapes held the audio recordings that would play, and the sounds triggered electrical signals that then reverberated into the coils. That all changed when Disney started utilizing solenoid coils and magnetic recording tape. While these early animal animatronics were revolutionary for the time, they still only had limited movement and sounds. Click here to read more about the history of the Jungle Cruise Breakthrough in the Tiki Room One early ride featuring animatronics was the Jungle Cruise, which used hydraulic technology to give the hippos, rhinos, elephants, and other wildlife simple movements like shaking their head or opening and closing their mouth. They found it easier at first to make animal animatronics, as they were still struggling to fluidly imitate humans. While these early designs were certainly a bit more clunky than what we see in our audio animatronics today, Disney continued to experiment and apply the animatronics to their first Disneyland park in Anaheim, California. After Buddy Ebsen (left) showed off his dance, Walt and his team carefully studied the action second-by-second, before designing a 9-inch man to do the same tricks. ©Disney

One early prototype was Project Little Man, which used cams and levers to make a robot perform actor Buddy Ebsen’s dance routines. This inspired Walt to have Imagineers create their own mechanical constructs to mimic living things. On the outside, it looked like a taxidermy songbird in a cage, but internally it was a machine, which would chirp out music as if it were alive. It all started when Walt Disney came back from a 1950s trip with a mechanized little toy bird. But have you ever wondered how they came to be? There’s actually a remarkable, ongoing history behind these creatively designed robots, and today we’re going to take a dive into their story.Īs it turns out, Disney was responsible for innovating audio animatronics to begin with. There’s another element, though, that sets Disney apart from all the rest - its animatronics. These mechanical marvels come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, and together they bring Disney magic to life. Dark rides, theming, the “Disney bubble” - these are all things that make the Disney experience so magical. There are a lot of elements that set the Disney Parks far outside the realm of a “regular” theme park.

Abandoned animatronics