Tomorrow-Land by Joseph Tirella Page A

Audio-Animatronic American presidents. Moses was sold. He was convinced that the Hall of Presidents should go in the US Federal Pavilion. Disney had the same idea. He had even flown down to Washington, DC, with Charles Luckman, the architect of the pavilion, to meet with the Commerce Department and sell them on the idea, but they didn’t bite. Moses used his personal influence to convince Undersecretary of Commerce Franklin Roosevelt Jr. to change the department’s mind, but he got nowhere, too. Moses then tried to convince Disney that WED should construct its own pavilion for the exhibit, but Disney didn’t want to foot the bill. Undaunted, Moses pressed on, believing that the exhibit was “too important to the Fair and to Walt Disney to drop this without exhausting all possibilities.”
    Then in April 1962, while hosting Moses at Disneyland to review progress, Disney asked Moses if he would like to meet Abraham Lincoln. It seems Disney hadn’t completely forsaken his Hall of Presidents concept, devoting a group of Imagineers to work on an Audio-Animatronic version of American’s sixteenth president. He quickly ushered Moses into a secret room in his studio’s Animation Building, and there a robotic President Lincoln offered his hand in friendship. Moses was completely astonished. “I won’t open the Fair without that exhibit!” he shouted. Disney said it would take his team of Imagineers years to perfect Lincoln. It didn’t matter; Moses wanted Lincoln at his Fair, and no was not an option.
    Eventually Moses convinced the State of Illinois—Lincoln’s and Disney’s home state—to host a pavilion entitled “The Land of Lincoln.”It would take months of intense work from a small army of Imagineers and dozens of failures before it worked properly; Disney’s team would complain that all the traffic due to Moses’ highway construction in Queens contributed mightily to the machine’s delay. But eventually the Audio-Animatronics would meet Disney’s high expectations. “I’d like to not be able to tell them from real people,” he said.
    It would also take a unique financial arrangement between Moses, Disney, and the State of Illinois to ultimately bring the exhibit to the World’s Fair, an arrangement that would eventually blow up in the Master Builder’s face. When it came time to negotiate a fee, knowing how badly Moses wanted the robotic Lincoln at his Fair, Disney played hardball with the Illinois legislature, which was allocating the funds for its state pavilion. Disney wanted $600,000 just for Lincoln; more money would be needed to create the entire pavilion. The legislature balked. Although Moses pleaded with Disney, the Imagineer-in-Chief wouldn’t budge. He eventually made multiple concessions on various fees for the pavilion and secretly paid the legislature a $250,000 subsidy—an arrangement that no other exhibitor was offered. It worked. On November 19, 1963—the one hundredth anniversary of the Gettysburg Address—Moses and Disney flew to Springfield, Illinois, to announce the Lincoln exhibit beside Governor Otto Kerner. Disney promised a skeptical Illinois audience that Lincoln would seem alive, “maybe more alive than I am.”
    The last ride that Disney created at the 1964–65 World’s Fair was for a special exhibit in the Pepsi Pavilion that was sponsored by UNICEF, the United Nations children’s charity. With opening day less than a year away, Disney accepted the commission. While his crews were busy finishing their creations of the Ford, GE, and Illinois pavilions, he gathered his WED staff and told them that he had one more project for them: a “little boat ride that maybe we can do.”
    Using the same Audio-Animatronic technology as his Abe Lincoln, Disney’s concept dovetailed seamlessly with UNICEF’s mission and the international flavor of the Fair. On