In part one of this series we saw how Disney offered its design services to corporate America to build attractions for them to install in the New York’s World Fair at Flushing Meadow Park. One of the companies that took up the offer was General Electric.

The plans for an abandoned walk-through attraction called Harnessing The Lightning (that would have gone in Disneyland’s never-built Edison Square area) were revived, adapted and offered to General Electric as The Carousel Of Progress. Imagineer John Hench and Walt came up with the idea of combining the scenes of the attraction in a revolving theatre in order to fit the maximum number of visitors and the biggest show possible into the relatively small area that General Electric had been allocated.

While it is the best remembered, the Carousel of Progress wasn’t the only Disney created attraction in General Electric’s Progressland pavilion. The building was a huge flattened three-storey illuminated dome that contained five separate shows.

A huge ‘Kaleidophonic’ display that pulsed with coloured starbursts in time to music and narration led to the Carousel of Progress entrance. The Carousel itself was much like we see it today at Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom, with the four stages of electrical development introduced by the father and his dog.

This show probably has more of Walt in it than any other Disney attraction ever built. It’s filled with nostalgia for his Midwestern youth. He personally picked the voice actors, added large chunks of the script, and showed the animatronics programmers how the characters should move. Even the idea of having a dog in each scene was Walt’s idea, using it as a humorous link while the father emphasised the sponsor’s message of household progress through electrical appliances.

The Carousel of Progress could host 3,600 guests per hour, with each section of the theatre holding 250 people.

After exiting the final theatre guests boarded an escalator to the top level of the building which housed a 160-foot scale model of Progress City, the city of the future. This became part of Walt’s original plan for Epcot (at the time when it was still planned as being a working Experimental Prototype City Of Tomorrow), and a portion of this original model can still be seen at Walt Disney World, from the Tomorrowland Transit Authority as it passes through Space Mountain.

Heading back down to the lowest level, guests could watch an actual demonstration of controlled thermonuclear fusion. This might seem surprising to us today, but in the 1960s nuclear power was seen as cheap, clean and safe. Thankfully, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission had declined the Fair’s organisers’ request that they take a real mobile nuclear fission plant to the show grounds.

The Fair had an adult entrance cost of $2, with many of the pavilions charging an extra entrance fee. However, General Electric’s Progressland pavilion was free and became one of the most popular exhibits at the Fair.

After the World’s Fair’s closure the Carousel of Progress was removed from the Progressland pavilion and transported back to California where it opened at Disneyland on 7 July 1967.

While Disney’s exhibits for Ford and G.E. were corporate deals, Great Moments With Mr Lincoln would get it’s funding from a public source. The President of the New York World’s Fair, Robert Moses, visited Walt in 1963 and was shown the designs and prototypes for an attraction called One Nation Under God. This had been planned for the abandoned Liberty Street area of Disneyland and was to have culminated in an audio-animatronic Hall of Presidents. Marc Davis and his team of Imagineers had gotten as far as producing a rough working model of Abraham Lincoln, who was to have been the centre-point of the show. This was shown to Moses, and he was so impressed that he declared that he wouldn’t open the World’s Fair without the Lincoln model being there in one form or another. He immediately set about finding a sponsor to allow Disney the funds to speed up development.

Moses first approached the Federal Government with an ambitious plan for the full Hall of Presidents show, now re-titled We The People. When he met refusal in Washington, he took a cut-down version of the attraction to the State of Illinois, and offered them the chance to back their most celebrated son. They agreed, but it took a visit from Chicago-born Walt to his home state to calm fears that the show was going to trivialise the great statesman.

Walt had always wanted to create a realistic human figure, seeing it as an extension of his two dimensional animation. He had tried an early test with actor and dancer Buddy Ebsen, translating his movements to a simple dancing man figure (which can now be seen in One Man’s Dream at MGM Studios). A small Barbershop Quartet was also built as an experiment in movement and sound co-ordination. But the construction of Mr Lincoln was a much more elaborate task and was, to put it bluntly, a rush job. He only passed his performance test at the Disney studios one week before the opening of the Fair, and was flown across the country the very next day. Unfortunately on arrival he was beset with problems. He got stuck in traffic for the opening of New York’s new Shea Stadium, causing another day’s delay before he could be assembled at the showground. And that’s where the electrical problems started…

The damp New York air affected his wiring in a way that the drier climate of California never had, causing minor power losses which in turn gave the figure spasmodic, jerky movements. And when a creation that powerful starts malfunctioning, it can cause damage. On one occasion he went to sit on his chair. He sat down successfully, but then simply carried on lowering himself, shattering the wooden chair completely as he pushed himself to the ground. Other times he would flail his limbs, causing everyone to scurry for the power supply. Nobody wanted to receive a blow launched by 500 pounds of hydraulic pressure.

Also the huge amount of energy required for the showground caused brownouts, which again resulted in unpredictability in the stately gentleman’s movements. Marc Davis commented on the constant problems: “Do you suppose that God is mad at Walt for creating man in his own image?”

On 20th April 1964, just two days before the Fair was scheduled to open, Walt was to give a preview of the show to 500 assembled press and dignitaries. Unfortunately the Lincoln figure wasn’t co-operating and Walt had to cancel the entire presentation, telling the crowd, “There isn’t going to be any show. It’s not ready, and I won’t show it to you until it is”.

The World’s Fair opened on 22nd April without the Abraham Lincoln exhibit. Then suddenly a week later he began to work perfectly. Some have suggested that Walt held him back deliberately to increase media and public interest, and to make Lincoln appear to be the star of the show by arriving fashionably late. Whether this is true or not, there was huge media and public attention when the State of Illinois pavilion’s Great Moments With Mr Lincoln finally opened on 2nd May 1964, and there was nothing else new to detract from it. The show was a huge success as everyone wanted to see the magnetic tape-driven 16th US President read excerpts from his letters and speeches. When the crowd first saw him he was seated and appeared to be a normal waxwork. But the guests gasped with amazement when he stood up, cleared his throat and began to speak.

When the Enchanted Tiki Room had opened at Disneyland in 1963 its birds and flowers were the limit of audio animatronics at the time. The figures created for Flushing Meadow just a few months later were a massive technological leap forward, with Abraham Lincoln being by far the most elaborate. Even his features were realistic, as Disney had managed to get hold of an actual cast of the great man’s face.

In the winter of 1964 the figure was replaced with a more reliable version and on 18 July 1965 Great Moments With Mr Lincoln opened at Disneyland’s Opera House. This is noteworthy in that it was the first time that a Disney attraction had appeared in two locations at the same time.

We’ve now seen how Disney provided the World’s Fair with the Magic Skyway, Progressland and Great Moments With Mr Lincoln, but there was one late request to build another attraction.

And of course that will be the subject of the next, final part of this series.