Last month, Disneyland unveiled a fancy new audio-animatronic in the original Pirates of the Caribbean attraction, and not everybody is impressed. Todd Martens of the Los Angeles Times calls it “misplaced” and “distracting.” Bloggers say it has “muddled” and even “gutted” the original ride. The Instagram post that announced the new addition has attracted almost uniformly negative comments: it’s “absolutely terrible,” “cheap and horrible,” and “the opposite of magic.” Fans are unhappy online: can you believe it?
They have a point this time, though. The new pirate figure is the kind of buzzy tech advancement Disney loves to roll out in its theme parks, but it’s been added to what might be the company’s most beloved attraction, and in the original version of it, to boot. Disneyland’s Pirates of the Caribbean is the last ride Walt Disney himself oversaw, although he died before it was open. Fans are sensitive to any changes to it, especially ones that undermine its atmosphere—which this new animatronic does.
Change, of course, is a constant at Disney parks. Walt Disney once said that Disneyland will never be “finished”—and if you pay attention to theme parks, you’ve heard that quote dredged up every time Disney changes anything. What the old man meant is that Disney will keep adding to its parks, expanding and tweaking them, in order to keep them fresh, relevant, and exciting. And it’s not always about creating entirely new things to do; sometimes it means adding new elements to existing attractions, a process Walt called “plussing.” Plussing can be relatively minor—a fresh coat of paint, an updated screen—or something major. Disneyland “plussed” the Haunted Mansion when it added a Hatbox Ghost animatronic in 2015. Magic Kingdom “plussed” Big Thunder when it completely rebuilt its track and added a variety of new effects and theming. Two very different changes, but both are considered plussing. Almost any changes can be sold to the public as a plus—even ones that are ultimately more of a minus.
The new pirate animatronic can be found in one of the scenes in the Dead Man’s Cove section, that early sequence where the skeletons of dead pirates litter old abandoned hideouts. Some of the ride’s most indelible images are found here, from the skeleton manning the helm of a wrecked ship, to the endless stream of rum pouring through a skeleton’s ribcage at a dusty bar. The last of these scenes shows a skeleton sitting atop a massive pile of gold—Disney wallops guests hard with the “you can’t take it with you” hammer—and it’s our last glimpse of the inevitable fate of all pirates before the ride takes us back in time to when they were alive and roaming the Caribbean Sea. Traditionally there’s been one last skeleton after that, shortly after that scene, that’s crucial to understanding the ride’s story; it’s a skeleton in a cage, and as the ride vehicle floats past, it turns into a living pirate before our eyes. It’s a simple effect but incredibly effective, making it clear that the past has come back to life.
The update upends all of that. The new pirate at the top of the pile of gold starts as a skeleton, but his skull is quickly replaced by the face of a living pirate, cartoonishly aglow at the riches that surround him. Suddenly he looks worried and his skin bleaches of color; his features are replaced once more by a skull as his body ages centuries in an instant. The animation of his face plays in a loop, the pirate reviving and dying once again several times an hour, dozens of times a day.
In a vacuum it probably sounds like a cool little upgrade. It expands on this particular character’s story while injecting some new tech into a venerable attraction. It doesn’t really fit, though. Pirates is one of the older rides still running at Disneyland, dating back to 1967, and although it’s seen numerous changes over the decades, it still feels like a relatively low-tech classic throwback compared to newer rides like Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance. This new animatronic, which projects an animated face onto an articulated animatronic head, stands out from the less complex legacy animatronics found throughout the rest of the ride, but not necessarily in a positive way.
I haven’t seen the animatronic in action yet, but based on video clips, the new face seems wildly out of place in a couple of ways. It doesn’t really look like the many other animatronics in the ride, which often show slight exaggeration, but are largely realistic and lifelike. They look like real people, and not like cartoons. This new pirate is all cartoon, though. He literally has the animated face of a cartoon character, and it over-emotes in a way the classic animatronics can’t. The projection technology used for that face is a next-generation follow-up to the one that brings the characters in EPCOT’s Frozen Ever After ride to life, and those animatronics have long been controversial among people who take theme park design seriously. In trying to give characters a more emotive, expressive face, it sacrifices much of the realism of an animatronic. It might be a creative decision that makes sense when bringing animated characters like Elsa and Anya into the real world, but it’s a weird call to use it with precisely one of the dozens of animatronics in Pirates. It simply doesn’t fit; it’d be like if one character in Frozen was drawn in a completely different art style than Elsa, Anya, and the rest—or if a perfectly on-model Mickey Mouse was superimposed on Starry Night or Nighthawks.
Beyond the art style, the new figure is conceptually a bad fit for this particular scene. Its presence in the pirate’s hidden lair disrupts the ride’s story. For almost 60 years Pirates has followed a basic structure: You start in modern-day New Orleans, and the two drops early in the ride represent your voyage to the Caribbean. Dead Man’s Cove shows you what’s happened to the pirates who used to rule these seas: They’re dead, forgotten, just a bunch of bones and dust left over in a world that never really cared about them. And then, as you pass that skeleton hanging in a cage and watch it return to life, you enter the past, and sail through a port town as a band of pirates plunder and pillage it into the ground. Now, though, an earlier skeleton flickers back to life before the one that has always signaled the time change, just long enough to undermine the timeline the ride has always observed.
For Disney there’s not really any risk to an upgrade like this. They’ll get a wave of press for one of its oldest rides for a few days (which is exactly what happened), and the average guest, one who may not notice or think too deeply about a ride’s story or the cohesion of its design, will just think it’s a neat little trick. Any mainstream coverage of the criticisms will dismiss them as just more entitled complaining from never-satisfied super fans—the bleatings of those “Disney Adults” that the media loves to mock. But if you believe these attractions are works of art, and care about the stories they tell and the deliberate decisions made in how to tell them, you’ll understand. This new robot pirate doesn’t feel like a part of the world it’s been put in, detracting from the atmosphere of the attraction, which is a pretty significant flaw for theme park design—and the very opposite of a plus.