alt Hacker NewsThis is cool, but it will almost definitely never end up in a park, outside of some promotional situations.
Disney's been doing awesome work with "Living Characters", like a Mickey that moves his mouth or a BB-8 that can roll around. But for various reasons, they never tend to make it into regular usage.
If you have a few hours over Christmas break and want to watch a 4 hour YouTube video (I promise if you're on HN on a Sunday, you'll be delighted by it), I highly highly recommend this video:
"Disney's Living Characters: A Broken Promise" by Defunctland https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyIgV84fudM
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It’s not as technically impressive, but my toddler was very impressed by the R2D2 that was making its rounds in the park. Not part of a show; you could go right up to it. Probably the only character where the theme park robot is really indistinguishable from the real thing.
A lot of it just seems to be marketing. Present the shiny new toy, get the news headlines, people book their stays, and then it doesn't really matter if they ever actually make it into the parks.
4 hours is an awfully big investment... Especially for those of us with multiple young kids and who no longer own their own free time. Care to give the gist?
That bot is cute, but every kid is going to kick it over. Its not realistic to have in a park.
They literally sell BB-8 toys that can roll around and say on the blog that the Olaf robot is coming to Disneyland Paris and special appearances at Disneyland Hong Kong.
> Mickey that moves his mouth
The Disney wiki has a pretty comprehensive list of usages for the "articulated heads". It's more than I remember it being.
https://disney.fandom.com/wiki/Disney_Characters%27_Articula...
Why do you say this? I don't have 4 hours right now and would appreciate a TLDR.
I watched a bit of this with my 8 year old and he kept asking to come back to it over the week. We watched the entire thing and he kept bringing up interesting thoughts and had good questions. Felt like it was his first “wow this lecture is actually super interesting” experience.