Dragon Down, Yeti Down: What Stalks Animatronic Jungle?

A serial malfunction is preying on Disney's large animatronic citizens.

As Jason Garcia reported in a past edition of the Orlando Sentinel's Daily Disney, the Expedition Everest Yeti has become even more elusive in recent months, perhaps due to the creature's historic distaste for 'man and all his puny inventions', but more likely due to a failure by Disney Imagineers to fully embrace the stupendous (and expensive) technology required to build and maintain the company's massive menagerie of mythical beasts.

The Yeti no longer swipes his tree-trunk arm at passing park guests, as he did when I rode the ride in its early days, but now merely glowers from behind flashing lights.

In further grim news, I commented on the collapse of Disneyland's Murphy the Dragon during Saturday night's performance of Fantasmic.

Both the Yeti and the Dragon are colossal. It's hard to comprehend their construction. That they worked at all is a heady achievement for the Imagineers. But Jason Garcia raises a point made by others that Disney is slow to fix the Yeti (and presumably now the Dragon) because doing so would cost money, lots of money. I disagree. It would cost even more money not to fix them, given the huge investment already made in these twin titans that would be lost if they were left to languish.

I think, as usual, Disney is taking its time. I have faith in Imagineering.

And that leaves us to wonder: what (or who) is next? Will the peaceful, leisure-loving constructs in Splash Mountain suddenly stop singing and just... stare? Will Barack Obama in Hall of Presidents start to speak in glowing terms of the Bush years? Suddenly, it's scary to be animatronic.