Disneyland is different things to different people, from a nostalgic return to one’s carefree youth to a shameless cash grab. But a factory? For Roland Betancourt, author of Disneyland and the Rise of Automation: How Technology Created the Happiest Place on Earth, the Anaheim theme park is the most innovative and accessible of factories, one of the few places where one can buy a ticket and see full-scale automation at work. In this case, however, the product moving down the line isn’t a car or a chocolate bar or a smartphone—it’s you. And the end product, assuming the park does its job, is still you, but happier.
Born and raised in Miami, Betancourt grew up going to that other Disney park. When he moved to Southern California to teach in UC Irvine’s art history department, he decided to write about Disneyland—“I’m at UCI, so it’s 20 minutes down the street”—in particular, the technology that makes the whole place run. Walt Disney, he soon learned, was fanatical about technology, enamored with the idea of creating a theme park that eliminated the sorts of problems that come with human workers: a coaster operator pushing the wrong button, say, or dropping dead at the controls. “This was the 1950s, and there was a real concern about someone having a heart attack at the control console,” Betancourt says when we speak over Zoom.
As for human performers, why pay a guy to play Abraham Lincoln multiple times a day when you can create an animatronic robot, one that never ages or asks for wages, to do the same thing? But it wasn’t just this “cynical idea of, Let’s not pay an employee,” Betancourt explains. “There’s a certain scale of production necessary in an amusement park that you just can’t achieve with human labor alone.”
The book offers an intriguing look at how Disney borrowed some of the era’s most popular aspects of factory automation to create his groundbreaking park. For Peter Pan’s Flight, he repurposed a popular overhead monorail track system—traditionally used in factories to move everything from car parts to slaughtered hogs—to transport human riders in pirate galleons over a moonlit London. For the Matterhorn, engineers borrowed technologies developed for railway signaling and industrial conveyor belts to keep toboggans from slamming into each other on the high-speed coaster.
Perhaps the park’s most groundbreaking and signature use of automation, however, came in the engineers’ and artists’ development of Audio-Animatronics, a technology that gave life and voice to all those macaws and parrots in the Enchanted Tiki Room and powered the robotic star of Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln. Betancourt remarks, “There’s a display of bravado in the technology that I find really fascinating. The fact that Lincoln is able to get up from his seat and stand up just completely ruptures your expectation of what these types of things can do.”
Amazing technologies aside, the book is full of compelling stories about the all-too-human creators behind the scenes. There’s William Schmidt, whose innovative braking devices and control systems made Disneyland’s rides infinitely safer, but whose personality was so disagreeable he was ultimately cast out (one Disneyland researcher of the time described him as a “mean bastard” who constantly belittled Disney). And then there’s Minoru Yamasaki, the original architect of the Magic Skyway attraction at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, who quit the project soon after Disney came aboard, complaining about Disney’s outdated and “undignified” vision for the ride (the design would be repurposed for Disneyland’s PeopleMover and portions of it adapted for Jungle Cruise attractions).
Of course, Disney’s ambivalence toward his own workers probably contributed to his enthusiasm for the possibilities of human-replacing automation. In 1941, a long and bitter animators’ strike at Walt Disney Productions shook Disney to his core; seven years later, while testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee, he would blame the strike on Communist infiltrators. “There was so much discourse about this newfangled automation and how it was going to create fully automated factories, and I think the idea really seduced him,” Betancourt says. “[But automation] was such a hot-button issue that of course he wasn’t going to go out there and say, I’m going to make a fully automated park.”
Early in the book, Betancourt posits that “the theme park attraction layers together two experiences at once: that of the narrative being spectated and the mechanical ballet of the track, sensors, and machines.” So the next time we ride the Matterhorn, are we supposed to consciously take in all those bumps and jerks and track noises as part of the fun? “I think if you talk to an Imagineer, they would probably tell you, No, we don’t want you to notice any of that,” Betancourt says. “But I think we do! It’s part of the narrative. So much of it is speaking to us in ways that, if you’re aware of what’s going on, we can read another language there.”•
DISNEYLAND AND THE RISE OF AUTOMATION: HOW TECHNOLOGY CREATED THE HAPPIEST PLACE ON EARTH, BY ROLAND BETANCOURT
Robert Ito is a journalist based in Los Angeles. He writes about film, television, and theater for the New York Times.
