Disney Animatronic's Hand Fell Off in Mid-Show
Disney World ain't what it used to be. Attendees at the Disney World theme park in Orlando, [...]
Disney World ain't what it used to be. Attendees at the Disney World theme park in Orlando, Florida, recently got a surprise that's either horrifying or hilarious, depending on how you look at it. This week, park visitors at the Carousel of Progress attraction saw something Disney definitely didn't want to them to see, as one animatronic figure ("John") had his hand fall off in the middle of the show. Unfortunately for Disney, the moment was captured by someone who then uploaded it to Reddit, where the post went viral and got picked up by news outlets in Florida, and is now spreading to the larger Internet news sphere.
This isn't the only time that Disney World has broken down on guest - far from it, in fact. As you can see in the video above, there are entire supercuts of Disney World attractions breaking down and messing up.
To be fair, at the moment Disney's theme parks are in something of a transitional phase. New attractions like Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge or the various new Marvel attractions (Avengers Campus) which are being installed at parks all over the world. While all that newness is taking shape, the old Disney attractions just look that much older. It's certainly a sliding scale for things like the Carousel of Progress, as the amount of entertainment the attraction provides to parkgoers can't possibly keep up with the cost of maintenance and upkeep.
John’s hand fell off during our show. from r/WaltDisneyWorld
Shows like The Simpsons have mocked the inevitability of animatronic shows breaking down in some hilarious segments - such as one where Bart Simpson gets a birthday serenade from an animatronic animal band - only for one character to fall apart and catch on fire, mid-act. While animatronics was an awe-inspiring piece of technology in the 20th Century, it simply cannot hold up in this current digital age. A few more years, we'll all be explaining to our kids what these sorts of attractions used to be - and they won't understand how we could've ever been so lame as to love them at all.
Naturally, the reactions to this photo have been great - like this little Disney World-style poem from a Reddit user:
"There's a great, big, beautiful Horror
Like being in the Shining every day
There's a great, big, beautiful Horror,
and tomorrow's a bad dream away
Man has a nightmare and that's the start
His hand falls off and it stops his heart
And when it becomes reality
His nightmares come true for you and me"
