Tech Thursday: Greater Moments with Mr. Lincoln

Richard Kaufman

15 years ago

In a world
buffeted by gargantuan amounts of electronic information delivered in
bits of three to 30 seconds, what could be more retro than sitting in a
theater for 15 minutes and watching what is essentially a gussied up
slide show and listening to a robot talk?

The DNA of Walt Disney is intermingled very deeply in only one Disney park: Disneyland
in
Anaheim, California. It was, and will always remain, the only Disney
park which Walt built and whose growth he oversaw for over a decade.
Even after his death, attractions in which he had varying degrees of
input, such as The Haunted Mansion, Adventures Thru Inner Space, and Space Mountain, continued his posthumous influence for many years.

And in Walt’s park it’s vital that certain things remain — both shops
and attractions—because they carry an important part of the soul of the
park within them. In Disneyland, bobsleds still careen around the one
and only Matterhorn; the birds and flowers in The Enchanted Tiki Room still sing and tell the same jokes they did in 1963; there is still a Magic Shop on Main Street and the Main Street Cinema
is always showing the earliest Mickey Mouse cartoons; and in Town
Square the greatest president in the history of our country still stirs
the hearts of people in a theme park.

And
while Walt also stated that Disneyland was a living thing, always
growing and changing, he never intended for Disneyland to turn into an
unkempt clump of roller coasters, cement, and a Main Street turned into a
strip mall. It requires more than just wonderful theming and
attractions for Disneyland to retain its unique quality — it requires
depth; everything needs to be firmly anchored in some sort of reality,
and there needs to be a variety of realities.
History, some connection with the real life’s blood of our country, must
remain in Disneyland in order for it stay Walt’s park.

In the case of Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln,
that reality is vital to any understanding of the history of the United
States. Without Lincoln, there’s a good chance we would have no union
today. What would our country have become without our sixteenth
president? Walt was inspired by
the story of Lincoln from any early age, something which the Imagineers
who have recreated Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln thankfully highlight
in the best video pre-show they’ve ever put
together. Here, Lincoln, Walt Disney, Royal Dano (the actor), Blaine Gibson (the sculptor), Paul Frees (the narrator), and the team that created the original show for the New York World’s Fair in 1965-65
are celebrated for their work in bringing to life perhaps the most
important figure in our nation’s past. Photographs of Lincoln, clips
from both Disney’s TV show, and of Royal Dano
portraying Lincoln in a long-unseen TV show, all bring together in the
best possible way everything that was great about the original show.

The new show is a production in which Imagineering Senior Vice President Tony Baxter, and
Imagineers Scott Trowbridge and Josh Shipley,
have done virtually every single thing right. The 500-seat theater has
been returned to its original beauty and intimacy with the removal of
the foo-faw which marred the most recent version of the show in which a
labored overlay about a young soldier getting a haircut before meeting
Lincoln, which you heard through headphones, and with props staged
around the room, has all been stripped away. The focus is squarely on
the horror of the Civil War, the wrenching tragedy of a country tearing
itself apart, and most importantly on the struggle of Abraham Lincoln —
who humbly considered it his divine
destiny — to prevent the destruction of the United States of America.

The narration by Paul Frees, famous for his many voices in the Haunted Mansion and
Pirates of the Caribbean,
is brought back in both the pre-show and stage show. Previously
unused portions of Frees’ audio track have been added. The original
vocal performance of Lincoln by actor Royal Dano, famous for previously
portraying the president on both stage and television, has been spruced
up. If the tracks sound slightly different, with new intonations and
clarity, it’s because they are from a different recording session than
was used in all previous shows. The Imagineers had over two hours of
Dano’s recordings to select from.

Growing up in Queens, New York, I made quite a few trips to the World’s Fair between the
ages of 6 and 8. I remember It’s a Small World, Ford’s Magic Skyway with Walt’s narration and the dinosaurs (thankfully preserved as the Primeval World seen while traveling on the Disneyland Railroad), the Carousel of Progress,
but of all those things it was seeing Abraham Lincoln stand up and
speak that remains most firmly in my mind. Here was a miracle of
technology supported by the importance of history. Technology has
improved, and in the new show history is brought into sharper focus
because of it. The body of the new Audio-Animatronic figure of Lincoln
is not the most advanced Disney uses; Mr. Lincoln’s gestures and body
language are somewhat limited and a bit stiff, but the face is something
else entirely. Something new, and the illusion of life has never been
embodied as robustly as it is in the countenance of the new
Audio-Animatronic
figure. Drawing audible gasps from the crowd, its life-like quality
transcends anything ever done before in this area. Writing on the
official Disney Blog, Heather Hust Rivera
explains, “The previous Lincoln head and face had seven functions, and
the new and improved head and face has a total of 20 functions. Lincoln
can now purse his lips, smile, grimace and form an ‘O’ with his lips.”
Click on this link and you’ll find some
excellent video clips in which the Imagineers explain and demonstrate elements of the new figure.

Complex and seemingly genuine human emotion is not something we’ve
seen before from Audio-Animatronic robots in a Disney park. “Emotion,”
yes—but on a superficial level. There’s
certainly emotion in the Captain Jack Sparrow figures in Pirates of the Caribbean,
but it’s simplistic: Captain Jack being curious and sneaky. This is
entirely different from the moodiness and grief convincingly portrayed
by the new Audio-Animatronic figure of Lincoln. It’s not just that the
new head, which is electronic rather than hydraulic, has a mouth which
can pronounce vowels. The movement of the mouth during speech is indeed
amazing. But the variety of
expressions that cross the face render the words we’ve heard numerous
times before with a greater sense of emotion and reality—an urgency in
Lincoln about getting the job finished before his time is up.

This is Abraham Lincoln as we’ve never seen or heard him before. His
presence in the small theater is palpable. Your presence in the theater
is required on your very next visit to Disneyland.