The 2,000-pound Walt Disney animatronic at Disneyland weighs 10 times as much as the average American man and a thousand pounds more than the 9-foot-tall Frankenstein’s monster animatronic that just debuted at Florida’s Epic Universe theme park.
“It’s a lot of machinery,” according to Walt Disney Imagineering’s Jeff Shaver-Moskowitz. “It’s 2,000 pounds of an Audio-Animatronic figure that steps and rises during its performance.”
Shaver-Moskowitz revealed the new details about the “larger than life” Walt Disney Audio-Animatronic figure at Disneyland during “The Happiest Story on Earth” special on ABC’s “20/20” newsmagazine TV show.
The $5 million “Walt Disney — A Magical Life” animatronic show debuted in July in the Main Street Opera House as part of Disneyland’s 70th anniversary celebration.
Imagineering vowed to create the “most life-like animatronic ever” and succeeded with the world’s first robotic figure of Walt Disney.
“That was a huge feat for the team to accomplish,” said Shaver-Moskowitz, an Executive Creative Producer at Imagineering.
The impressive Walt animatronic appears to walk toward the audience as he puts his hands on the edge of the desk, leans forward and takes a couple steps.
The robotic Walt weighs 10 times as much as the 199-pound average American man, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.
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The Walt animatronic weighs more than five times as much the 375-pound Shaman of Songs animatronic in the Na’vi River Journey at Disney’s Animal Kingdom and more than twice as much as the 800-pound Frankenstein’s Monster animatronic in Universal’s new Monsters Unchained dark ride.
The 2,000-pound robotic Walt is by no means the heaviest animatronic ever built.
The 8,000-pound Yeti animatronic in the Expedition Everest roller coaster stopped operating shortly after debuting in 2006 at Disney’s Animal Kingdom. At the time, the 25-foot-tall Abominable Snowman was the largest and most complex animatronic figure ever built by Disney, according to Orlando Park Stop.
The temperamental Maleficent animatronic dragon in Disneyland’s “Fantasmic” nighttime spectacular — mockingly nicknamed Murphy by fans after Murphy’s Law — weighed 18,000 pounds before it was destroyed in a spectacular fire in 2023.
The 55,000-pound King Kong animatronic made by Italy-based EOS Rides is the centerpiece of a 2018 spinning roller coaster at Carthageland in Tunisia, according to Blooloop.
The new “Walt Disney — A Magical Life” animatronic show will initially run solo before playing in rotation with “Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln.”
The original Abraham Lincoln animatronic created for the 1964 New York World’s Fair weighed 140 pounds, significantly lighter than the 180-pound U.S. President, according to a memo from WED Enterprises, the precursor to Imagineering.