Chris Lee — Industry Briefings
Theme Park Animatronics Briefing
Weekly intelligence on theme park animatronics — the technology, the projects, and the companies building them.
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September 15, 2026
Universal's King Kong animatronic goes down with no reopening date, and a Boston Dynamics veteran wants to replace the whole category
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September 8, 2026
Disneyland preps its animatronic droidsmiths, and Olaf's audio-animatronic debut is a week away
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September 1, 2026
Halloween Horror Nights debuts a full-scale animatronic Demogorgon, and a 25-year animatronics veteran steps into the spotlight
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August 25, 2026
Scar becomes Disney's first-ever villain Audio-Animatronics figure, and Freddy Fazbear's Pizza turns real in New Jersey
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August 18, 2026
D23 delivers a Yeti fix, a Harrison Ford robot, and Dreamfinder's return — the biggest animatronics week of the year
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August 11, 2026
A massive animatronic King Kong just opened in Seoul, and Disney wants its figures to start listening to actors
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August 4, 2026
Disney pulled Waldorf and Statler's animatronics from its new Muppets coaster, and nobody's saying why
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July 28, 2026
EPCOT's newly upgraded Frozen animatronics are already glitching, five months after their debut
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July 21, 2026
Disney and Universal filed patents the same week for animatronics that can change faces mid-show
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July 14, 2026
A quiet loss for Imagineering's technical bench, and a paper trail on who's building the next Carousel of Progress
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July 14, 2026
Disney is building robot manta rays and dolphins for its lagoon shows
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July 8, 2026
Disneyland's new transforming pirate broke down on the Fourth of July. It was running again by morning.
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June 30, 2026
Disneyland’s Pirates debuts the first projection-mapped animatronic face, and Imagineering shows off robots that leave the track
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June 23, 2026
A homebrew high-torque actuator falls short on the bench, and a survey maps 20 years of realistic robot faces
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June 16, 2026
New robotics papers: a soft swimming robot, a self-correcting tendon muscle, and a 3D-printed origami arm
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June 9, 2026
On Epic Universe’s first anniversary, Universal details the 161 patents and robotic figures behind the park
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June 2, 2026
Sally Dark Rides and Alterface break down the tech behind Kings Island’s revived Phantom Theater
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May 26, 2026
Rock ’n’ Roller Coaster reopens as a Muppets ride, moving Statler and Waldorf in from the shuttered Muppet*Vision
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May 19, 2026
A taxonomy of how robot hands are actuated, and a data-driven model for a tendon-driven ‘snake’ arm
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May 12, 2026
Universal patents figures that crawl over your ride car, plus three advances in character-robot motion
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