Great Moments with Mr Lincoln was considered to be one of Walt Disneys greatest achievements at the time. The idea began to begin in 1956 when Disney wanted to have a One Nation Under God attraction at
Disneyland. this show would have featured a 5-screen wrap around presentation with artwork and narration, culminating in a Hall of Presidents in which all of America's presidents would be featured in some way, but the highlight of which would be Abraham Lincoln. By April, 1962, ."One Nation Under God" had progressed to the point that an Audio-Animatronic Lincoln prototype could rise from his chair and shake hands. Robert Mosses The World's Fair President who was checking on the status of other Disney attractions was so impressed by this demonstration that he was adamant that "One Nation Under God" be presented at the Fair. He was soon given Disney's blessings to try to find a sponsor for the show, despite Disney's misgivings that the technology wasn't completely developed enough to have the show completed in time for the Fair's opening in 1964.
Moses turned his considerable persuasive power on the United States government to sponsor "One Nation Under God" as the main component of the Federal pavilion. The cost of the show would have amounted to only approximately 20% of the Federal budget for participation in the Fair. Although Moses spent the better part of 1962 and early 1963 trying to sell various Federal officials on the merits of the show, he was unsuccessful in getting the Department of Commerce World's Fair Commission to sponsor it as their main exhibit.
With time running out, Disney and Moses agreed to scale back the exhibit to a one-figure show, a President Lincoln show. The Coca-Cola company was given a demonstration of the Lincoln figure in hopes that they might sponsor him at the Fair. However Coca-Cola also declined. Mosses was able to get the State of Illinois to sponsor the attraction. And the rest is History.
Here is an interview from E-Ticket Magazine and Marc Davis.
MARC DAVIS:...Robert Moses, the head of the World's Fair, flew out to see Walt at what we called WED at that time. He insisted that Walt had to give him this Abraham Lincoln. Well, we didn't have the technology for it....and this was when Walt put me on it. I have a notebook in there that I did, "How To Build A Mechanical Man"....and all of this was wrong. We weren't building a mechanical man....we were building an illusion. An illusion of man. That took a while to soak into me and into everyone else.
I want to show you something I think you'll be interested in. Walt told me that he wanted to build Abraham Lincoln. He knew I knew a lot about anatomy and things, so I went ahead and put these drawings together. This sequence shows Mister Lincoln standing up. Here are the different movements that Lincoln went through in his performance. You know, they say somebody else animated that....that's a lot of crap. This is Mister Lincoln, and these are the things he had to do. Here, he leans forward....and he rises, watching the center of gravity. Then, see where he has to move this one leg? This is what I mean by the illusion.
THE "E" TICKET: It's difficult to comprehend the amount of effort it must have taken to turn these concepts into a finished attraction in 12 months!
MARC DAVIS: Well, when we got him built, Mister Lincoln would go through his performance...everything would be fine, and then, all of a sudden, there'd be some kind of glitch and he'd become a "spastic" suddenly. The poor sound men would have to come back night after night and redo the tapes that would control the figure. And after two weeks ... I guess the Fair was open ... Robert Moses decided he wanted to see this Mister Lincoln, since he'd talked the State of Illinois into buying it. He came into the Mister Lincoln show with all of the New York "ward healers" and their wives ... and we had to run it for them. This was maybe 11:00 in the morning. I sat next to Dick Irvine, and he sat next to Walt. There was General Potter, the one time head of the Panama Canal, and he was Bob Moses' assistant. General Potter sat on my right, as I recall, and then there was Moses and all the other officials and their wives.
Mister Lincoln went through his performance ... and God ... not one glitch! We wanted to hug him! The only thing was, you couldn't go up and hug a big pile of machinery like that because it could kill you. This thing had 500 pounds of hydraulic pressure ... it could kill you. Sometimes you worked on it and you forgot that it wasn't a human being. If somebody fooled around, this thing could floor you!
You know, on Mister Lincoln I didn't turn the knobs that controlled him myself, but someplace you'll find my "dialogue sheets" all marked out just like you do for animation ... every move Lincoln was to make ... and whether it was a larger move, to turn his hand at this point, and so on.
THE "E" TICKET: Did they refer to those as a script, or something else?
MARC DAVIS: Well, they didn't call it anything. It was just the "animation pattern" so that the guys that turned the knobs could follow and watch along with it, to animate the figure. I see an awful lot of this stuff done now, and it's so meager and so poorly thought out ... and it doesn't come to life. Mister Lincoln did come to life, to a point. When the attraction was opened to the public, the New York Times, in their Sunday section, reviewed it full-page and said, "At this point Mister Lincoln stands up and walks forward on the stage, and delivers his address." The illusion was that good, that this reviewer thought that Lincoln literally walked forward. I think that was a hell of a compliment.
The "E" TICKET: Of the four attractions at the World's Fair, was "Great Moments With Mr. Lincoln" the most complex?
MARC DAVIS: Well it was the one where we "sweated blood." You know, Walt was about ready to cut his own throat and we were ready to jump off the bridge with him. You know it was horrible! You can't believe ... here we were, stuck with something and Walt didn't have the technology to have accepted that assignment at that time.
THE "E" TICKET: And you were actually at the elbow of everyone working on the installation during that time?
MARC DAVIS: Oh absolutely! It was like working on the first automobile or the first airplane or whatever and you didn't know whether it was going to fly or not.
Taken from
www.nywf64.com Please go to that site if you want to learn more of the Worlds Fair and the Four Disney attractions