disney built the biggest and most expensive animatronic ever in their history and then built a mountain around it and it BROKE a couple of months after the ride opened and it’s impossible to fix it without dismantling the entire mountain structure and that’s honestly the most hilarious verified disney fact™
ever
the second most hilarious being that the chum animatronic on the finding nemo ride at epcot used to pop out of the barrel to scare guests but one time a cast member was walking past it during an opening/closing procedure and it popped out and smacked them clean in the face so now it’s turned off permanently
TL/DR version: the structural layout of the Expedition Everest attraction is so complicated that Disney had to use a technique called “previsualisaton” to construct it – essentially a four-dimensional blueprint that specifies not only how the structure should be put together, but the exact point in time that each step should occur. That precision in timing is actually kinda critical, because if certain parts of the structure are subject to stress too early (e.g., before the concrete is fully cured, before additional supports have been installed, etc.), they’ll be permanently weakened.
Well, long story short, when the ride went into action, Disney’s engineers quickly discovered that the numbers weren’t adding up: the internal stresses the ride was producing every time they turned the animatronic yeti on were literally tearing the whole mountain apart. It’s clear that something got screwed up during construction: either somebody performed a step with the wrong timing, or in the wrong order, or the previsualisaton was messed up to begin with. The trick is, they have no idea what the actual error was – and the ride can’t be repaired until they figure out what went wrong in the first place.
So now they just point a moving strobe light at the motionless yeti to create the illusion of motion, which is why it’s been nicknamed the “disco yeti”.
When companies have too much money and need to chill
here’s an example of what the yeti looked like when it actually worked.
