Disneyland is receiving pushback from some of Walt Disney’s family members over a robot of the iconic animator that will be on display at the theme park.
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According to the Los Angeles Times, the new show, Walt Disney—A Magical Life, will open in Disneyland this summer and feature an animatronic version of Walt Disney.
Tom Fitzgerald, a Disney Imagineer, told the media outlet that the company aims to “bring Walt to life in a way that you could only experience at the park.”
“We felt the technology had gotten there,” he explained.
The Disneyland Walt Disney robot will represent the animator in 1963. He died in 1966 at the age of 65. “He also has expressive eyebrows, which many of you had heard about,” Fitzgerald explained. “When he speaks, he speaks with his eyebrows… One of the things I discovered in watching the footage, he doesn’t blink when he speaks.”
However, not everyone in the Disney family is thrilled about the Disneyland Walt robot. In a Facebook post, Joanna Miller, one of Walt’s granddaughters, stated that the robot would be an “impostor.”
“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 [impostor] They are Dehumanizing him,” she claimed. “People are not replaceable. You could never get the casual ness of his talking interacting with the camera his excitement to show and tell people about what is new at the park.
She further pointed out, “You can not add life to one. Empty of a soul or essence of the man. Knowing that he did not want this. Having your predecessors tell you that this was out of bounds… So so Sad and disappointed.”
Other Members of the Disney Family Speak Out About the Walt Robot at Disneyland
Despite Joanna’s protest, other members of the Disney family are more open-minded about the Walt robot at Disneyland.
Walt’s grandson, Chris Miller, shared that The Walt Disney Company was “very eager to be as accurate as possible in creating this.”
“We came away confident that this is the right group to take on this important project,” he explained.
Chris said he would “have been enthusiastic about the project and fascinated by the advancements of the Audio-Animatronics technology that was first developed during his days at WED (now Imagineering).”
Roy P. Dinsey, Walt’s grandnephew, was present when the company first unvield the Walt Disney robot at its fan convention last summer.