For thee generations of Americans, the first live robot a kid ever saw may well have been at Disneyland. What Disney’s Imagineers have called Audio-Animatronics have been entertaining families since 1963, when Disney was isnpired by a mechanical bird to create the legendary Enchanted Tiki Room. That’s when New York City called.

From D23:

When Walt Disney found an antique mechanical singing bird in a shop while on vacation in New Orleans, he was intrigued…Walt had Wathel Rogers and other studio technicians take the bird apart to see how it worked. Then work was started to come up with a prototype figure. Charles Cristadoro, a sculptor, modeled some human heads, utilizing actor Buddy Ebsen and staff members around the Studio as models, and experiments were made with cams, hydraulics, and other methods of enabling the figures to move realistically.

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