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Imagineers defend new Walt Disney robot
- lawlessone 1y agoIt's cute now, but will people like it so much when it adopts Walt's uh... views on things...?
- tetris11 1y agohe had other facets of his personality which they will try to capture, and lessen the others. I do agree that you can't pick and choose parts of a person, and claim it's still them, but here we are
- AStonesThrow 1y agoI mean, people somehow came to regard Mickey Mouse as a beloved and endearing mascot, despite showing his true colors in "Steamboat Willie" as a malevolent, obnoxious, violent asshole who steamrolls anyone/anything who gets in his way. After viewing that again, combined with a few other "early roles" I am unsure how Disney became a popular children's brand, except Mr. Rogers' lament begins to sound in my ears.
- xeonmc 1y agoI dunno, “The Mouse” has become a euphemism for the faceless corporate drive to profits and milking every intellectual property to the maximum extent, personified by the South Park portrayal.
- schlauerfox 1y agoin the 80s AVG built a robotic Andy Warhol but he was enthused about it. Abraham lincoln is an American icon. Not sure someone who still has family in living memory is the same category despite being a sort of icon for a big corporation and a big emerging ethical concern of the 21st century seems to be bodily autonomy and consent. I see a lot of AI generated 'animated' photos, of the living and the dead. I tend to see a lot of people ignore someone's consent like they ignore media piracy, with a disinterested immoral hand-wave.
- givinguflac 1y agoI’m seriously blown away that you equated a person’s consent for their own autonomy and legacy to media piracy. What?
- schlauerfox 1y agoI live in America so 'moral rights' aren't a thing, but in europe it appears to give artist/creators rights over how their work is portrayed. How our legacy is carried forward of our own likeness or our work is a moral question, and cultural, and defines our values.
- ronsor 1y agoIn America, the implementation of "moral rights" would unquestionably be a First Amendment violation.
- stickfigure 1y agoWalt Disney is unquestionably an American icon.
- bombcar 1y agoThere's some fuzzy line somewhere - building an animatronic person just after they passed against (what would have been) their will or that of close relatives seems wrong. But at some point personalities and people themselves fade into history, and it becomes a historical figure (such as Lincoln).
- Isamu 1y ago>Yet soon a social media missive critical of the attraction from Walt's granddaughter would go viral. It raised anew ethical questions that often surround any project attempting to capture the dead via technology, be it holographic representations of performers or digitally re-created cinematic animations, namely debates surrounding the wishes of the deceased and whether such creations are exploitative. Exactly the same reaction happened when Disney developed the first Abraham Lincoln animatronic for the New York World’s Fair in the 1960’s.
- tough 1y agoFunny how history likes to rhyme eh
- ryanhecht 1y agoGreat exploration of this in Defunctland's latest piece: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjNca1L6CUk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjNca1L6CUk (There's a "part 2" on Disney's "Living Characters" coming this year!)
- dehrmann 1y agoIt also hints at what his reaction would be. It seems unfair for the family to criticize them doing to Walt what he did to Lincoln.
- Retric 1y agoDead for 10 years vs dead for 100 is a meaningful difference to me. Namely how many people alive actually knew the person.
- krunck 1y agoCan't help thinking about the Kier Eagan animatronic statue in Severance.
- nharada 1y agoYeah the quote “the goal .. is to capture what it would have been like to be in Walt’s presence” sounds like it could be straight out of that show.
- RajT88 1y agoI have seen this one before. The robot ends up trying to to eat Elian Gonzalez.
- amiga386 1y agoSo Robot Chicken wasn't lying to me! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LymbI4Dxj4c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LymbI4Dxj4c
- aetherson 1y agoSurely if there is one person in history who we would be pretty sure would be thrilled to have a posthumous animatronic version of himself, it is Walt Disney.
- havblue 1y agoThe problem I see with this is just the lack of originality. Disneyland originally focused on subjects like early America, the frontier or the future. This robot is about the guy who built a company that focused on that. It's very self referential. Couldn't they do something new like a Louis Armstrong robot that plays trumpet?
- gopher_space 1y agoI feel like any discussion of where the idea came from or how it developed would trigger disparagement clauses. I bet everyone's notebooks are full of better ideas.
- Electricniko 1y agoMost of Disney's works are protected by IP law, but Disney himself is public domain.
- n3storm 1y agoWait what? yahoo.com exists? XD
- sandspar 1y agoInteresting to see how the news works. "Imagineers make a Walt Disney robot": not newsworthy. "Imagineers make a Walt Disney robot... And it's controversial": newsworthy. It really seems like they want us at each other's throats.
- 1ncunabula 1y agoWeirdest headline lol