The True Story Behind the Rumored Walt Disney Audio-Animatronic

Many Disneyland fans have heard about a rumored Walt Disney Audio-Animatronic that would be temporarily installed into the Main Street Opera House by the Imagineers. This would be for the 100th Anniversary of the Walt Disney Studios aka Disney100. Is there any truth to this? The answer may surprise you.

Yes, there was talk about a Walt Disney Audio-Animatronic show! Imagineer Eddie Sotto shared the details of it in an interview with Didier Ghez way back on January 20, 2009. I was sent a series of audio discs by Didier detailing this extensive interview. Eddie discusses a variety of topics including unrealized plans for Disneyland Paris and Disneyland's Indiana Jones Adventure, and yes, the idea for a robotic version of Walt that he personally worked on. 

I tried to upload an edited MP3 of that portion of the interview, but I had no luck. Instead, here is the transcription:

"As embarrassing and weird as it may seem, I worked on a show that had an Audio-Animatronic Walt Disney in it. And it was in the Opera House, and the way we were going to do it, I think, would have been respectful and done in a real tear-jerker, you know, made for the Disney fan kind of way, and it was the Walt Disney story. But the idea of the Walt Disney story, the way we would do this, we would have a scrim or a translucent background we could project on. We'd have several of these, so when we projected on them the guests could almost get the impression of seeing in 3-D. 

And to tell you about it, you'd see a short brief film of Disney's history and then coming up to what's going to come to Disney's future. And in all this stuff I remember somehow - you know I worked on this for Tokyo Disneyland too - it'd say "And your host, like in the television show, Walt Disney" and up would come the desk from his office and he'd be sitting on the corner of his desk kind of in silhouette, and you would see Walt Disney kind of in silhouette, and just softly lit, and he would talk about and gesture and we'd project Tinker Bell flying around him and all these amazing things going on. 

It wouldn't be like Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln, where he's being sole focus of the show, he's kind of hosting you a little bit, throughout the history of Disney and America and all the things that we were doing. So I remember working on that. Never happened. But you know, the idea was that you wouldn't lean on it as the sole element of the show. It was like American Adventure at Epcot you see these characters that come and go and they're part of a bigger picture."

Will this ever happen at Disneyland? Is the rumor true? Who knows! But there is history behind it to be sure. (The image above is a random one from Disney Research.)