President won’t share stage with Robama
Animatronic exhibit walks off stage in jealous rage
The President’s animatronic replica stormed off the stage during a Christmas performance at Disney World. Visitors and Disney staff claim the newest exhibit has performed erratically since its inauguration, but this will be the first time an animated character walked away from the show.
The display was so unpredictable the animation team named him “Roving 45.”
Roving 45 debuted a week ago after unexpected delays. Rumors on social media said Disney wanted to keep the unpopular President off the stage. Disney staff blamed the delays on problems acquiring voice recordings from the real President.
Even with extra time to prepare and debug, however, Roving 45 tended to, in the words of Disney executive, “go off the rails. The team would install the character in the morning and pull it offline for testing every night.”
Disney executives ordered the animation team to install the President and fix the bugs on line. “They told us, ‘how bad can it be?’” admitted an animator. “My mother said the same thing when she voted for him.”
Executives ordered the animation team to install the President and fix the bugs on line. “They told us, ‘how bad can it be?’ My mother said the same thing when she voted for him.”
The bugs in testing were minor compared to the deviations the live exhibit displayed.
Exhibit won’t stick with script
E.G. Head, the animation team supervisor, told the Haven, “We first noticed the problem on the first performance when 45 announced the audience was the hugest in Hall of Presidents history and that millions of Disney World patrons jammed into the theater just to see him. The audience loved it. They didn’t know it wasn’t part of the show.”
The morning after the first performance they pulled the display and wiped its memory. One team member said the operating system was “scrambled, as though the CPU got dumber the more it ran.”
Under pressure to keep the exhibit running, the team repeated the process of install and repair every day last week. It was only when they staged the last two Presidents together for the Christmas show that they discovered the biggest bug. Head claims, “45 refused to share the stage with Robama. The closer we positioned him, the quicker he moved elsewhere. And when Robama talked, 45 talked louder.”
45 refused to share the stage with Robama. The closer we positioned him, the quicker he moved elsewhere. And when Robama talked, 45 talked louder.
At the Christmas Eve performance, Roving 45 creeped Robama the way the real President creeped Hillary Clinton during the Presidential debates. “We expected to hear the Jaws shark theme,” said one audience member. “Which is stupid because Jaws is Universal Studios theme park.”
When Robama finished his part, 45 left the stage and walked up the center isle, even stopping to shake the hands of any audience member with a MAGA hat. 45 escaped from the theater and into the park where he terrified dozens of children, caused one family’s grandfather to suffer a heart attack, and sent a pregnant mother into premature labor.
Disney’s animation team remains baffled. “At first we thought 45 might be showing emerging Artificial Intelligence,” Head admitted. “But AI developers from MIT, Carnegie Mellon and Stanford examined him and found no intelligence at all.”
Wry noir author Phillip T. Stephens wrote Cigerets, Guns & Beer, Raising Hell, and the Indie Book Award winning Seeing Jesus. Follow him @stephens_pt.
