Growing up in Southern California, we lived just 20 minutes from Disneyland, the world’s first Disney theme park. One day in 1956, the year after it opened, my parents took me there to see it.
I was seven and completely enchanted by the place. We had just entered the front gate when a train stopped on the track overlooking it. A jaunty man with an engineer’s cap pulled down over his eyes jumped from the locomotive and hurried toward the fire station across the town square.
“Oh goodness,” my mother said, “I think that’s Mr. Disney.”
Before I could react, the great man himself stood staring down at me from what seemed like an enormous height. “Hello young man,” Walt Disney said in the familiar grandfatherly voice I heard weekly on TV. “Are you enjoying the park?”
I don’t remember how—or if—I responded. What I do remember is him hurriedly scribbling his name on the E-ticket we proffered. Had I kept it, I probably could have retired early.
It wasn’t until decades later, as a newspaper reporter, that I learned of Mr. Disney’s destination on that distant afternoon; the tiny secret apartment he maintained above the firehouse featuring a large picture window from which, park historians later said, he often gazed out over the crowds gathered in the square.
Disney died in 1966, five years before his magic kingdom took its first step towards global prominence by expanding into Florida’s Disney World. There probably aren’t too many of us left in that world who actually shook the old man’s hand. That could change this summer, however, if Disneyland planners get their way. The idea: to mark the park’s 70th anniversary this coming July 17 by unveiling an animatronic version of its famous founder to greet, converse with, and, yes, shake the hand of anyone close enough to say hello.
“Why are we doing this now?” one longtime Disney Imagineer mused aloud to the Los Angeles Times. “I grew up watching Walt Disney on television…you felt like you knew the man. But a lot of people don’t know Walt Disney was an individual.”
Not everyone, however, is thrilled by his eminence’s forthcoming reincarnation as a robot. “Dehumanizing,” is how Disney’s granddaughter, Joanna Miller, 69, described it on Facebook. Later she expounded on her motives to a reporter: “When you get older,” she said, “you just get pissed off. And you get tired of being quiet…”
Personally, I’m curious whether the new Walt will be as kind as the old one, or just stiff, mechanical, and, well, rudely robotic.
Lately, I hear the line between those two types is becoming uncomfortably thin. The Wall Street Journal recently reported on an alarming experiment conducted by a prominent nonprofit lab; In 79 out of 100 trials, it seems, an AI program independently chose to edit its own script, permanently disabling the shutdown command. “The gap between ‘useful assistant’ and ‘uncontrollable actor,’” the paper concluded, “is collapsing.”
Which has led some to speculate that what science fiction has long warned us about is finally happening: artificial intelligence taking possession of its own autonomous consciousness. Willful robots “are our own progeny,” predicts Manuel Blum, a professor emeritus at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University. “Down the road,” he says, “machines like these will be entities…when we are no longer around.”
None of which has dampened my enthusiasm for Disneyland’s upcoming 70th anniversary. I was actually present at the 50th in 2005, a gala celebration featuring then-California-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, among many others.
My favorite memento of that event was a commemorative set of golden mouse ears that sat proudly on my Northern Mindanao bookshelf until Typhoon Odette brutally removed it four years ago.
Which is why I’m utterly determined to attend next month’s 70th anniversary bash. My only question is whether this year’s mouse ears will be platinum.
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David Haldane is an award-winning American journalist and author who divides his time between Mindanao and California, where he once covered Disneyland for the Los Angeles Times. His latest book, Dark Skies: Tales of Turbulence in Paradise, is available on Amazon. This column appears weekly in The Manila Times.
