Ever since a mouse named Mickey tooted his way to stardom in the first cartoon with sound four decades ago, the Walt Disney world of entertainment has revolved around making inanimate things move.
There was Mickey, of course, and a whole galaxy of his celluloid co-stars: Donald Duck, Goofy, Pluto, Chip ’n‘ Dale etc. And then came the feature film animated classics, from the revolutionary Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to the newest and perhaps funniest, The Jungle Book.
Along the path from Snow White to Jungle Book, a whole new idea – a “new door,“ as Walt Disney was later to call it – began to open up a whole new field of entertainment. It was called Audio-Animatronics, and though it belongs, technically, to the space age, its roots are in the distant past.
As Walt Disney said:
“Our whole 40 some odd years have been in the world of making things move, from a drawing through all kinds of little props and things. Now we're making these human figures, dimensional human figures, move . . . making animals move making anything move through the use of electronics. It's a dimensional thing. . . it's a new door. . . and we hope we can really do some exciting things in the future."
All of Disneyland, of course, is a “living legacy" to the life and works of Walt Disney. But even in this Magic Kingdom, where creative concepts and mechanical marvels are combined in ways never before envisioned, the PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN is an extraordinary achievement.
As Life Magazine has reported, the Pirates of the Caribbean is "the costliest and most technologically sophisticated adventure ever conceived as a permanent entertainment attraction, within or beyond the gates of Disneyland.
This is its story, from the “golden age” of piracy centuries ago, to a present day journey in pictures with “the wildest crew that ever sacked the Spanish Main."
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