Talking Mickey Being Tested in Disneyland

[1FoolishMortal]

That's pretty amazing. I kinda expected them to do something like this eventually, because I think I recall seeing a show at MK on YouTube which used animated faces for the characters. But this goes even further than that, because it definitely doesn't appear to be synced up to pre-recorded audio. I'd bet that it's a live voice actor who is able to do the voice well, kinda like Turtle Talk.

They might've even pulled the official voice, Bret Iwan, since this was apparently just a test.

As cool as this is, though, I couldn't see this working on a regular basis at Mickey's House unless this works through a voice converter. If it needs a live actor, they'd have to have at least two if not more working at all times. With Toontown regularly open 12+ hours during the busy seasons, they can't keep the same voice actors working all day. They'd have to work REALLY hard to find enough people that sound similar enough to Mickey to pull this off in this scenario, since Mickey's voice isn't nearly as easy as Crush or Stitch.

[refurbmike]

Also, I'm sure they have control to force the eyes open or closed. For instance, would be cute for Mickey to have his eyes closed for a few seconds if he's talking about some cookies, "Yuuuuum!"

Agreed. They probably do have something to manually control in addition to the automated sequence.

With regards to the coordination, I'm sure there are also quite a few different scenarios that they practice with and repeat often so that the character will know after a few seconds what the voice actor will be saying and can act naturally.

Good call. They've probably got keywords to work with.


Gotta love how we're totally destroying the magic, eh?

[dlfreak]

With Toontown regularly open 12+ hours during the busy seasons, they can't keep the same voice actors working all day. They'd have to work REALLY hard to find enough people that sound similar enough to Mickey to pull this off in this scenario, since Mickey's voice isn't nearly as easy as Crush or Stitch.

I would say Mickey's voice is just as difficult to pull of as Stitch. Even Crush isn't super easy to pull off. I don't know that it would be terribly difficult to pull off keeping it staffed with quality people... the problem is that staffing the position instantly increases doubly since it takes two people to perform one role. And considering that Mickey's house is potentially staffed with two to three Mickey's at once it makes it a pricey investment.

Gotta love how we're totally destroying the magic, eh?

So much fun to try and guess what Disney is doing though... who knows we could be completely wrong! But yeah it makes sense to have a bunch of in-the-can scenarious that they can go to... calling a group of girls princesses would be something pretty common that they could do once per group session etc.

[tcsnwhite]

Mother of God...

That is AMAZING!!!


I had a feeling this was eventually coming.
I would save those videos...they might get pulled by Disney.

[TsWade2]

Finally! We have a articulated character. Now we just we need a new stageshow at Fantasyland Theatre witht the articulated characters.

[Bob38dizfan]

Awesome! I wanna hear Goofy and Donald now!

[Goin2Disneyland]

... who knows we could be completely wrong!

Yup.

[duckie fan]

OMG!

[1FoolishMortal]

An article from the "Around Disney" blog. Not much in the way of new info, but it does confirm the testing is being done:

http://ocresort.freedomblogging.com/...aracter/43547/

[dlfreak]

Wrong link?