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.so one nods like this and the other one does this.and you im-mediately have an idea.That s what I started doing on the rides. 69There were limits to what could be done along those lines, though, andDavis acknowledged them on other occasions when he contradicted his ownuse of storytelling. An amusement park s rides should be what people don texpect them to be, he said, and it doesn t have a lot to do with continuityof story.It does have to do with the entertainment value of surprise and see-ing things that you can t see anyplace else. 70 He and Disney were in agree-ment on that, he said: Walt knew that we were not telling stories.he andI discussed it many times.And he said very definitely, You can t tell a storyin this medium. 71 By the early 1960s, preliminary work on a Haunted Man-sion was under way, but that work was wedded to the idea of telling a grue-some story as visitors walked through.And that story line, Davis believed,was the reason Walt never bought the Haunted Mansion in his time. 72If storytelling was not possible, the experiences that Disneyland could pro-vide otherwise were constrained by the extremely limited movement that waspossible for its mechanical creatures.As The E Ticket explained, the JungleCruise s mechanized animals moved without really moving.These animalreplicas.were very realistic in appearance but were mostly limited to lat-eral motion and a few hydraulic mechanical functions. The animals included crocodiles with hinged jaws, a gorilla that rocked up and down, giraªeswhose necks would sway and rhinos which circled on tracks in the dry grass. res tles s i n the magi c ki ngdom, 1 959 1 965 289 Their actions consisted mostly of charging and trumpeting, surfacing andsubmerging, and sliding around on underwater runways. (In the early daysof the park, these simple mechanical movements were called gags. )73Disneyland s vaunted malleability was thus something of an illusion.Find-ing some way to make his mechanical animals more lifelike was for Disneya necessity if the park was not to become an increasingly ordinary place, forhim and for its visitors.As with so many other things, Disney had nursed an interest in mechan-ical movement for years before he put it to use at Disneyland.At least sincehis 1935 trip to Europe, he had been intrigued by mechanical toys and hadbrought them back to the studio. When we went to Paris, Diane DisneyMiller said that was probably in 1949 Dad went oª on his own and cameback with boxes and boxes of these little windup toys.He wound them allup and put them on the floor of the room and just sat and watched them.You know, the dog that rolls over and stuª like that.He said, Look at thatmovement with just a simple mechanism. He was studying.We thoughthe was crazy. 74Even before that, probably in New Orleans on his 1946 train trip to theAtlanta premiere of Song of the South, Disney had bought what Wathel Rogerscalled this little mechanical bird in a cage.One of those that you couldwind up and it would whistle. Years later, when Disneyland was open andRogers was on the WED staª, Walt gave it to me and asked me to look in-side it.I was supposed to take it apart, and it was like taking apart a piece ofjewelry.When I finally got it all apart and laid everything out I found a littlebellows made of canvas, and some little cams and other parts. 75To an extent now hard to determine, Disney s interest in such mechanicaltoys figured into his plans in the early 1950s for his Americana in minia-ture, but it was for Disneyland that his WED employees seriously investi-gated such mechanisms and began applying what they learned to animatedfigures.By the fall of 1960, Disney was demonstrating to reporters the ani-mated heads of what one writer called his new waxworks figures. 76 In 1963,it was when his glum luncheon conversation with Aubrey Menen turned tothe robotic technology he now called Audio-Animatronics that Disneyfinally brightened: Now there, he said, smiling at last. There is where Iam happy. 77That interview was published when Disneyland was about to open theEnchanted Tiki Room, the first true Audio-Animatronics attraction.As The E Ticket explained, The mechanized figures developed after 1963 were acomplete departure from those installed in the park in its first years of oper-290 where i am happy ation.Access to space-age fabrics, plastics and metals, miniaturized sole-noids and other electronic components made new degrees of animation pos-sible.With hydraulic movements (for strength) and pneumatic movements(for low-pressure delicacy), and with ever smaller servo-mechanisms, Disneybegan creating improved, more believable animals and humans.For thefirst time (with the help of Marc Davis and other new designers) they couldindividually perform for the audience [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]