The Carousel of Progress Cast

I promised readers that if they were interested in stories about The Carousel of Progress that I would share a few more of them.

Obviously, there are a great many fans of this attraction, as I discovered last December, when I did an hour-long presentation for more than 250 appreciative fans at Disney's Contemporary Resort and then we walked over to the Magic Kingdom and rode the attraction. I always see or hear something new.

For this column, let’s look a little more closely at the characters in the show. Like the rest of you, I am puzzled by the extra younger daughter in Act One and I have no good answer why she doesn’t appear in any of the other scenes—even though the other characters do.

Of course, scenes have changed throughout the years including one of the teenage daughter, called “Jane” in the original versions, on the verge of canoodling with her date on the front porch until mother wisely flicks on the new electric lights. That scene does not exist in the Walt Disney World version and today the daughter is called “Patricia.”

“The actors, well, they are not real people but they are a talented and interesting cast. We call them Audio-Animatronics and they talk and act like human beings,” Walt Disney says with a smile in a 1964 General Electric promotional film for the attraction.

General Electric sponsored the attraction for the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair, because it wanted to clean up its public image. In 1961, the United States Justice Department convicted the company of price fixing and rigging bids, resulting in GE having to pay back millions of dollars, three GE top executives being sent to prison, and several others forced to leave the company. Basically, all GE wanted was a family happily buying lots and lots of GE products as a model for its captive audience.

The Disney Company has always been purposely vague as to whether the story of the attraction represents one family living through several decades or whether it is similar families. There is no indication in any of the scripts or in any of the supplemental material to confirm either assumption.

However, using the same voice for the father throughout the show seems to suggest the audience is watching the same family through the decades. The original concept for The Carousel of Progress was inspired by Thornton Wilder’s stage play, Our Town, that also follows the same characters through the years including courtship, marriage and death.

By now, most people know that the live-action model for the father was actor Preston Hanson. Besides having a “life mask” cast, Hanson sat several times for sculptor Blaine Gibson. The father’s voice was done by Cowboy singer Rex Allen. When his son first saw the attraction at Disneyland, it took until Act Three for the boy to recognize his father.

“That sounds like you but why doesn’t he look like you?” the puzzled teenager asked his father sitting nearby who just shrugged his shoulders.

The arms for the mother and the daughter were originally made from molds of the arms and hands of Imagineer Harriet Burns. She shaved all the hair off her arms and later complained that you never realize how much you miss that hair until it is removed. For many years, she kept extra sets of arms in her basement and used them at Halloween.

The original model for mother, who was a professional artist model, insisted on posing completely nude for Gibson because she knew the difficulty of sketching the human body with even the slightest amount of clothing with creases. Gibson has said that when he sketched her, he became instantly popular with people at the studio constantly coming into his room to check on his phone, the lighting, etc. to make sure everything was working correctly.

The original voice for the mother was supplied by actress Rhoda Williams, who had been the voice of the ugly stepsister Drizella (the brunette) in Disney’s Cinderella.

The son and teenage daughter were based on Disney designer Chuck Myall’s 8-year-old son and 18-year-old daughter, both of whom were interviewed personally by Walt Disney. In addition, Disney Imagineer Richard Irvine’s daughter also posed for the daughter.