In 1949, while visiting New Orleans, Walt Disney bought a mechanical bird. Imagining the possibility of three-dimensional animation, he sent the bird to his machine shop to see how it worked. This was the start of audio-animatronics, the robotic devices that provided the illusion of reality at Disneyland and the 1964-1965 New York World's Fair. From the bird, he moved on to a dancing figure and then to a barbershop quartet. At the beginning, these were crude devices, capable of only simple, repetitive movements. They rested on cabinets containing large drums. As the drums turned, cams moved levers that in turn connected to the wires that moved the figures. A movie projector on the cabinet's floor moved the drum while providing a synchronized sound track. The first major application was in Disneyland's Enchanted Tiki Room, where birds, flowers, and tiki gods performed. A convincingly real robotic robin sang along with Julie Andrews in Disney's 1964 hit musical Mary Poppins.

By then, audio-animatronic figures had become popular features of the New York's World's Fair. Disney's Abraham Lincoln, created from an 1860 life mask, rose, gestured, and spoke; he was the most sophisticated such figure to date. Solenoid coils inside the head governed facial expressions, hydraulic and pneumatic valves controlled body motions, and Duraflex created a realistic skin. Frames of movement were recorded on reel-to-reel audio tapes, which, when played back, triggered mechanisms that caused the figure to move. Words, music, and special effects were synchronized. (Audioanimatronic figures were computerized after Disney's death.) Other audioanimatronic figures appeared in the Pepsi/UNICEF It's a Small World show and General Electric's Carousel of Progress. It's A Small World took boatloads of spectators through different regions of the world where children, modeled to look alike except for skin color, played and sang representative songs. The General Electric exhibit featured a stationary stage around which the seated audience moved. The audience saw four households set in the late 1800's, the 1920's, the 1940's, and the 1960's, each demonstrating how electricity has improved everyday life. The WED way People Mover, Disney's proposed mode of mass transportation, transported spectators in automobiles through a series of scenes from prehistoric times with audio-animatronic dinosaurs to a space city of the future.

Audio-animatronics had already proved successful at Disneyland. The popularity of the World's Fair exhibits guaranteed the success of the Orlando, Florida, theme park, then being planned at the time of Disney's death.

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