By David Haldane
June 30, 2025
Itโs among the most vivid memories of my childhood.
Growing up in Southern California, we lived just 20 minutes from Disneyland, the worldโs first Disney theme park. One day in 1956, the year after it opened, my parents took me there to see it.
I was seven and completely enchanted by the place. We had just entered the front gate when a train stopped on the track overlooking it. A jaunty man with an engineerโs cap pulled down over his eyes jumped from the locomotive and hurried toward the fire station across the town square.
โOh goodness,โ my mother said, โI think thatโs Mr. Disney.โ
Before I could react, the great man himself stood staring down at me from what seemed like an enormous height. โHello young man,โ Walt Disney said in the familiar grandfatherly voice I heard weekly on TV. โAre you enjoying the park?โ
I donโt remember howโor ifโI responded. What I do remember is him hurriedly scribbling his name on the E-ticket we proffered. Had I kept it, I probably could have retired early.
It wasnโt until decades later, as a newspaper reporter, that I learned of Mr. Disneyโs destination on that distant afternoon; the tiny secret apartment he maintained above the firehouse featuring a large picture window from which, park historians later said, he often gazed out over the crowds gathered in the square.
Disney died in 1966, five years before his magic kingdom took its first step towards global prominence by expanding into Floridaโs Disney World. There probably arenโt too many of us left in that world who actually shook the old manโs hand. That could change this summer, however, if Disneyland planners get their way. The idea: to mark the parkโs 70th anniversary this coming July 17 by unveiling an animatronic version of its famous founder to greet, converse with, and, yes, shake the hand of anyone close enough to say hello.
โWhy are we doing this now?โ one longtime Disney Imagineer mused aloud to the Los Angeles Times. โI grew up watching Walt Disney on televisionโฆyou felt like you knew the man. But a lot of people donโt know Walt Disney was an individual.โ
Not everyone, however, is thrilled by his eminenceโs forthcoming reincarnation as a robot. โDehumanizing,โ is how Disneyโs granddaughter, Joanna Miller, 69, described it on Facebook. Later she expounded on her motives to a reporter: โWhen you get older,โ she said, โyou just get pissed off. And you get tired of being quietโฆโ
Personally, Iโm curious whether the new Walt will be as kind as the old one, or just stiff, mechanical, and, well, rudely robotic.
Lately, I hear the line between those two types is becoming uncomfortably thin. The Wall Street Journal recently reported on an alarming experiment conducted by a prominent nonprofit lab; In 79 out of 100 trials, it seems, an AI program independently chose to edit its own script, permanently disabling the shutdown command. โThe gap between โuseful assistantโ and โuncontrollable actor,โโ the paper concluded, โis collapsing.โ
Which has led some to speculate that what science fiction has long warned us about is finally happening: artificial intelligence taking possession of its own autonomous consciousness. Willful robots โare our own progeny,โ predicts Manuel Blum, a professor emeritus at Pittsburghโs Carnegie Mellon University. โDown the road,โ he says, โmachines like these will be entitiesโฆwhen we are no longer around.โ
None of which has dampened my enthusiasm for Disneylandโs upcoming 70th anniversary. I was actually present at the 50th in 2005, a gala celebration featuring then-California-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, among many others.
My favorite memento of that event was a commemorative set of golden mouse ears that sat proudly on my Northern Mindanao bookshelf until Typhoon Odette brutally removed it four years ago.
Which is why Iโm utterly determined to attend next monthโs 70th anniversary bash. My only question is whether this yearโs mouse ears will be platinum.
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David Haldane is an award-winning American journalist and author who divides his time between Mindanao and California, where he once covered Disneyland for the Los Angeles Times. His latest book, Dark Skies: Tales of Turbulence in Paradise, is available on Amazon. This column appears weekly in The Manila Times.