Document details

Meet Lucky. He's one year old, weighs 450 pounds, and is nine feet tall. He's also very green and scaly. But that's to be expected, because he's a dinosaur. And he could very well become the hit of Disneyland.

Lucky is not just any dinosaur. He's the latest in a long line of increasingly lifelike robotic figures at Disneyland and Disney World that Walt Disney dubbed "Audio-Animatronics" back in the early 1950s.

Disney had purchased a mechanical bird while vacationing in Europe, which would be the initial inspiration for Audio-Animatronics. The earliest experiments, which predate the opening of Disneyland in 1955, utilized simple mechanical devices - cams and levers to animate miniature scale model human figures such as Dancing Man, a nine inch tall tap-dancing vaudevillian, who was programmed to mimic the dance steps of the late Buddy Ebsen.

[…]