My Favorite Conspiracy Theory Confirmed

Read to the end a funny video and some good music

Hi! Sorry it’s been a couple weeks since I last posted. It’s a combination of a lot of life events, but I’m excited to get back to writing, because this one’s a good one, and I have some more good ones in the chamber. As ever — I am not going to charge for this substack, but paying for a subscription allows me to do it more regularly! Either way, thanks for reading.

Last week or so I had a tweet go modestly viral, and if you’ve never shared that experience, it is possibly the worst experience Twitter has to offer from a user standpoint. Your notifications are incessant, there are a million empty calorie replies to your post (tweets along the lines of “THIS ☝️” and “OMG LOL”), and worst of all, people love to map some belief system or ulterior motive onto the tweet itself and use it as a way to attack you. Generally, once my tweets reach escape velocity from people who follow me and land among strangers, I give them about 12 hours before I delete them. And that’s precisely what I did with my viral tweet. In this case, though, the tweet paid unexpected dividends that I could not be more excited to share with you.

If you did not see it, I posted about one of my favorite conspiracies. The conspiracy goes like this: in 2016 the folks in charge at Disney, much like large swaths of the country, believed Hillary Clinton would win, and even before she was elected were hard at work on a Hillary animatronic for the Walt Disney World Hall of Presidents attraction. When they were surprised by a donald trump victory, they were forced to hastily repurpose the Hillary animatronic as a Donald Trump one, to comedically grotesque effect.

Left: Trump from The Hall of Presidents. Right: Clinton from real life. (image source: Brandon Marshall/REX/Shutterstock/disney)

I know you all want to get to the meat of this article, but first a little bit on The Hall of Presidents. If you’ve never been, it feels like an anachronism, the theme park equivalent of handing a kid in 2023 a toy without batteries. To be honest, it has felt anachronistic for at least 30 years, because I remember finding it chintsy and boring in 1990, when my grandparents forced me to sit through it as an 11-year-old.

The attraction, which debuted in 1971, is housed in a theater meant to evoke Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, where both the Declaration of Independence and The Constitution were debated. When you sit down you are treated not to a thrill ride, but to a staid 20 to 30 minute exegesis on what it means to be an American, a script that would not feel out of place in a high school play were it not for the voice acting and the robots. It’s a sanitized Cliff’s Notes history of the American Presidency with a bit of uncanny valley sprinkled in.

You can watch the entirety of the Trump-era show by following this link and the Biden-era show by following this one, but I defy you to actually make it to the end. It feels like sitting waist deep in a bath of kitschy, warmed-over patriotism. Even the history contained therein isn’t anything you haven’t absorbed through osmosis by high school. The only real draw is that every president from Bill Clinton onward has provided their own voices to their respective robots.

A bunch of old guys (image source: wikimedia)

Every time a new president is elected, the show is closed for several months to accommodate their animatronic, sometimes being significantly rewritten in the proces, and conspiracy that Trump’s animatronic was originally meant to be Clinton began almost immediately after its unveiling in December of 2017. It has been incredibly well documented, having been subject of a million chumbox articles and tweets and reddit posts. But it makes intuitive sense immediately. I’m not a phrenologist or anything, but there’s something uniquely hillary-esque about robo-Donald’s face. It’s especially apparent in the eyes, which feel much brighter and more open than Trump’s typically are, and around the mouth. The HoP Donald has an upper lip, which is more than one can say about real life Donald, and the way the skin forms along the jawline on either side of the chin is very, very Hillary. Hillary also has a much rounder face than Donald does, as does the Trumpamatronic.

More than anything there’s something uniquely and deeply off about the animatronic that caused static in my brain orders of magnitude beyond the uncanny valley. It triggered in me the same revulsion and confusion that I felt the first time I saw Tom Hanks in The Polar Express. It looked like something—someone—I recognized, but it was broken, fractured, bodysnatched, reconfigured in a way that didn’t make sense. And that static and revulsion suddenly resolved the moment I saw someone say “ok, but what if it was meant to be Hillary?”

(Image Source: Quartz)

(Image Source: My nightmares)

As I said in my opening graph, viral tweets are terrible, and mine lasted maybe a day before I nuked it (I delete all my tweets pretty regularly anyway), but I did end my tweet with an ask that any imagineers with information on the veracity of this theory to reach out. Imagine my delight when one did.

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Important disclaimer: I have done my best to vet the person who sent me this DM, and as near as I can tell they are the real deal, but I have no proof they are the person they say they are, and I am relying on them as a single source for this article. Please take all of that into consideration in regards to everything that follows. I do believe them, but I also want to plant the seed that I don’t have multiple sources or documentation.

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I am keeping this imagineer anonymous for obvious reasons, but they told me they worked at Disney during the 2016 election season. Here’s what they told me (I have introduced paragraph breaks for legibility):

Every time there's a new president that gets elected to office, the hall of presidents has to close for several months at a time in order to get the new president animatronic installed in the hall. The whole show has to change, and it ends up being a bit of a shit show. In 2016, the Disney executives were adamant that they were going to have as little down time as possible before reopening the show.

The problem is they backed the wrong horse. Everyone was positive that Hillary was going to win so much so that they created her animatronic, then they got caught with their pants down when Trump won. It can take months if not years to design a new animatronic. I remember seeing the facial designs for the Hillary animatronic at least six months before the election and an intern asked the 3D artist what would happen if Trump won, and he laughed and just said, “Then, we’re screwed.”

I mean, honestly, we all laughed. The thing is that [Disney CEO] Bob Iger was a really big Hillary supporter. I think there was just a real urge on the part of the executives overseeing the HOP project to please him, and I think it all ended up just blowing up in everyone’s faces. Whenever a president gets elected, they record a little spiel that gets used in the new Hall of President’s show. It can sometimes take months to get recorded with everything that a new president has going on during their first year in office. I’d be willing to bet that Hillary had already recorded her spiel even before the election.

So, yeh, the animatronic was originally meant to be Hillary. I think the thing that made it obvious to everyone was that it had Hillary’s facial structure. And, that’s the thing that can take the longest and be the hardest to design on the animatronics. My guess is that they probably originally tried to salvage the animatronic by keeping Hillary’s skull and putting Trump’s skin over top of it.

So there you have it. The attraction closed for six months after Joe Biden’s inauguration, and when it reopened, eagle-eyed Disney fanatics noticed that the Trump animatronic appears to have been “fixed” to look less like a Donald Trump mask hastily streched over Hilary Clinton’s skull.

The perfected Hall of Presidents Trump (image source: blogmickey.com)

The imagineer closed with a fascinating bit of Disney animatronic trivia

Alot [sic] of people hear that Disney has a new animatronic, and they think it’s getting designed somewhere from scratch in a Swiss lab. For some of the more advanced ones, that’s definitely the case but for most of them, it’s much more like Dr. Frankenstein’s lab. They’ll repurpose and put together existing heads and appendages for new rides or if they need spare parts. There’s an old attraction called Ellen’s Universe of Energy. It was a really long ride, and I’ll bet there were at least a dozen Ellen Degeneres animatronics. After the ride closed down, they didn’t throw out those Ellens. They repurposed them. I know they put a beard and probably an eyepatch on at least one and moved it into one of the background scenes of the Pirates of the Caribbean ride.

So just because it appears Hilary is no longer hiding underneath a latex Trump mask in The Hall of Presidents, it doesn’t mean she couldn’t be hiding elsewhere in the park, spliced together with bits and pieces of the surplus Ellen Degeneri. Oh my god, I have just written the logline for a fantastic horror movie.

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I can’t remember precisely what reminded me of this video, but I found myself revisiting an ancient YouTube video, Driving on Salvia, and finding it even funnier than I remembered. Stick around for the end, it’s absoluetly worth it. And don’t worry, no one actually drives while they’re on Salvia.

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This week in the jambox, some catalog music, a song inspired by the video game Jet Grind Radio, and lots of instrumental techno junk in celebration of the return of Aphex Twin at the end of July.