Get Lucky!
Imagineering's Most Complex Robot Yet
Meet Lucky. He's one year old, weighs 450 pounds, and is nine feet tall. He's also very green and scaly. But that's to be expected, because he's a dinosaur. And he could very well become the hit of Disneyland.
Lucky is not just any dinosaur. He's the latest in a long line of increasingly lifelike robotic figures at Disneyland and Disney World that Walt Disney dubbed "Audio-Animatronics" back in the early 1950s.
Disney had purchased a mechanical bird while vacationing in Europe, which would be the initial inspiration for Audio-Animatronics. The earliest experiments, which predate the opening of Disneyland in 1955, utilized simple mechanical devices - cams and levers to animate miniature scale model human figures such as Dancing Man, a nine inch tall tap-dancing vaudevillian, who was programmed to mimic the dance steps of the late Buddy Ebsen.
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Keywords
Audio-AnimatronicsWalt Disney Imagineering