Something’s amiss at the House of Mouse.
Ahead of Disneyland’s 70th anniversary, slated for July 17, the Imagineering team offered fans a long-awaited sneak peek at the new Main Street exhibit — and fanatics are short-circuiting over the news.
The special exhibit titled “Walt Disney – A Magical Life” celebrates the legacy and life of the franchise’s famed founder with a 16-minute-long life-size show.
Notably, two of those precious moments see the first-ever audio-animatronic figure of Walt himself in a recreated version of his original office.
Though many fans appreciated the company’s motive behind the exhibit, they didn’t find the figure’s appearance faithful, replying under the park’s Instagram announcement, one fan called it “a massive swing and a miss.”
Back when the news was initially announced, Joanna Miller, Walt Disney’s granddaughter, publicly criticized the franchise for recreating his likeness in the animatronic tribute.
“People are not replaceable. You could never get the casualness of his talking,” wrote Miller in her initial Facebook post.
“I think I started crying,” she told the Los Angeles Times after she saw robo-Disney for the first time. “It didn’t look like him, to me.”
After the animatronic’s appearance was finally revealed to the public on July 14, many fans seemed to share the sentiment and took to the comments of the franchise’s Instagram announcement with their thoughts.
“I was SOOO EXCITED for this and now I’m low-key scared,” read one reply.
“You really had a chance to do something here, and instead you insulted the reason you all have jobs,” ranted one scathing fan.
“Once again, this has been the Disney motto as of recent — how much money can we get out of it, and how quickly can we get it done to pump it out. Seems like no effort was put into this to make sure it looked like Walt. Just shameful and embarrassing.”
Though a majority of comments expressed disappointment, others found the tribute moving.
“I’m genuinely not okay in the best way,” gushed one ride-or-die fan, while another said: “10 seconds in and hearing his voice already got me teary.”
Aside from the fact that, in the opinion of Miller and many others, the animatronic didn’t resemble the man himself, she also criticized the company’s move because she says her grandfather didn’t want to be remembered as a robot.
Imagineer Jeff Shaver-Moskowitz rebuffed Miller in an April statement: “In all our research, we never found any documentation of Walt saying that. We know that it’s anecdotal and we can’t speak to what was told to people in private.”
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