I know, we’ve tried to remove as much time from our collective memories as possible, but if you go back to Donald Trump’s Presidency and 2017 specifically, you can Remember one of the weirdest stories that came out was one involving Disney, an animated robot, and Hillary Clinton.
That was never confirmed, but shortly after Disney revealed their weirdly deformed version of Trump to the Presidential Hall, people look at it and think:hrm, I guess they made a Hillary Clinton robot, assumed she would win, then had to quickly change to Trump after his surprise.
Then a series of other horrors, pandemics, and constitutional crises followed and we all forgot about it. Until this week, when podcaster Alex Goldman — after speaking with a former Disney employee who was there at the time, but asked to remain anonymous — published a report stating that… that’s pretty much what happened.
Source (a former Disney “Imagine”) said that, in an effort to keep the screening open for as long as possible—often closed for months while a new Presidential robot was built and recorded its lines—operators of the Disney in 2016 hedged their bets and had a Hillary taken ahead of time.
They recall, “I remember seeing face designs for animated Hillary at least six months before the election,” and one intern asked the 3D artist what would happen if Trump won, and he We laugh and just say, ‘Well, we’re screwed again'”.
While this employee says they knew about the decision to make Hillary early on, which is interesting enough in its own right, they can’t confirm that the Trump cartoon we ended up seeing was exactly the same. same robot. “I guess they probably tried to save the animation at first by keeping Hillary’s skull and putting Trump’s skin on top of it,” they concluded, covering Hillary’s build-up in 2016 and his last freaky face now looks like 99.99%. but as we learned from 2016 polls, 99.99% is not 100%, so keep that in mind.
(Note that after President Biden won the 2020 election, while the attraction closed to build his animation, Trump has also been salvaged to appear much more realistic).
Oh, and before you stop thinking about Disney’s animatronics of the day/month/year, you should definitely check out Goldman’s full blog for one more anecdote about “at least a dozen Ellen Degeneres cartoons”.
