As i've told you last week in my Robin Williams tribute, Robin was part of the now extinct WDW Magic Kingdom attraction "From time to Time", known at Disneyland Paris as Le Visionarium, also extinct unfortunately. Robin did the english voice of the Timekeeper character for the WDW version but WDI Imagineers originally envisioned to give to the Timekeeper robot the face of Robin Williams. For different reasons the Imagineers changed their mind and in the show the Timekeeper only had reminiscences of Robin's face and didn't looked totally like him.
Back in the early 90's when DLP Imagineer Tim Delaney was designing Discoveryland, Tim did a great artwork showing the Timekeeper with the face of Robin Williams. Last week i couldn't find back this early concept-art, but i've found it finally, and here below is this never-seen-before Tim Delaney rendering!
But i've also found another never-seen-before document and it's the picture of an amazing WDI small study model of the Timekeeper in which the face was also inspired by Robin Williams face. The scale of it is 2 inches equals 1 foot and this represents the first step after the color rendering, that had to take into account the mechanism for the Audio-Animatronic.
In the WDW version of the attraction the english voice of the Timekeeper character was Robin Williams' voice and for those of you who've never seen it, here is a video showing the full WDW "From Time to Time" attraction, including the pre-show.
In fact, From Time to Time has not been the only Disney attraction which had Robin Williams participation. There was another attraction in the 90's that some of you might remember and it's the one which was part of the Disney Mgm Studios Animation tour, a great short film with Robin Williams and Walter Cronkite called "Back to Neverland". And to end this tribute to Robin, here is the full movie!
Pictures and videos: copyright Disney
Did you know DLP's timekeeper AA is still in use today. They use it as a programmable stand-in for full sized AA's that are broken or are due for maintenance. Last time I was behind the scenes they used Timekeeper as a stand-in of one of the AA pirates in POC. And the Attraction AA was being worked on behind the scenes.
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