The Disney company has announced plans to create an animatronic version of famed founder, Walt Disney, but the original imagineer’s granddaughter says Walt never wanted to be turned into a robot and she opposes the plans, calling them “dehumanizing.”
Disney plans to feature a robot Walt in a new attraction to be entitled, “Walt Disney — A Magical Life.” The show will feature archival film of Disney and historical displays to remind visitors of just who their founder was, before he completely fades into history.
The company notes that the number of people left alive who actually knew Mr. Disney is dwindling quickly and they want to create an attraction that will present Walt Disney as a flesh-and-blood person, not merely the sanitized, legendary figurehead he is quickly morphing into with the passage of time.
But Joanna Miller, who was almost eleven years old when Walt Disney passed away in December of 1966, vociferously opposes the plan for the new animatronic version of her grandfather and even insists he did not want to have such a robot made of himself for his parks, according to the L.A. Times.
Joanna insists that Walt does not belong to the Disney corporation. “He’s ours,” she says. “We’re his family.”
Joanna Miller (Rob Latour/Variety/Penske Media via Getty Images)
Miller is the daughter of Diane Miller, Walt’s natural-born daughter [Walt and his wife also adopted a girl, Sharon, in 1936]. Diane is a one-time president of the board of directors for the Walt Disney Family Museum and died at the age of 79 in 2013. Joanna’s father, Ron Miller, eventually became Disney CEO and served in that role from 1978 to 1984. Like his wife, he was also one of the presidents of the board of directors for the Walt Disney Family Museum. Ron died at 85 in 2019.
Joanna says the whole animatronic scheme is “dehumanizing” her beloved grandfather and claims she does not want to see a “robot grandpa” being exploited by the Disney corporation.
“People are not replaceable. You could never get the casualness of his talking,” Miller says. She also insists that Walt never wanted his parks to create an animatronic of him under any circumstances.
Miller has been an intensely private person for all of her years close to the bright spotlight of the Disney corporation. She eschews being photographed and generally shuns notoriety. But now she feels compelled to speak out.
Walt’s granddaughter told the paper that “When you get older,” you sometimes have to speak up about things, and “you just start to get pissed off. And you get tired of being quiet. So, I spoke up on Facebook. Like that was going to do anything? The fact that it got back to the company is pretty funny.”
She also said that years ago, when she was on the board of directors for the Walt Disney Family Museum, there was discussion of creating a Walt animatronic for their facilities. But Joanna says her mom firmly nixed the idea and said that Walt had told family members that he never wanted such treatment. Joanna adds that her mother said, “Grampa deserves new technology for this museum, but not to be a robot himself” and that they “wanted to show him as a real person.”
The corporation has reached out to Miller since she posted her Facebook message and invited her to their workshops designing the Walt animatronic. And she says she is appreciative of the effort, though it did not change her mind one iota. Indeed, when she saw what they were creating, Miller says, “I think I started crying. It didn’t look like him, to me.”
But the company points out that it really does not have to abide by her wishes, regardless. Firstly, they note that there is no archival or historical evidence that Walt said he did not want to be turned into an animatronic figure. And nearly all the people who might have ever heard Walt say such things in private have already passed away.
Secondly, the Miller family actually sold all their rights to Walt’s name and likeness for $46.2 million in Disney stock back in 1981. So, in the end, the last remaining direct family members of Walt Disney have no legal say at all in what the company does in portraying their grandfather.
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