So... Let's pretend that this post is merely a month later than the last, rather than a year and a month. Reading the previous post, I see that I told myself I would write about San Francisco's Musee Mecanique. Despite visiting San Francisco several times throughout my life, I was unaware of this fantastic museum on Pier 45. I don't even recall now what brought it to my attention, but I was eager to visit, once I learned of its existence. The Musee is a warehouse filled with orchestrions and other mechanical music machines and many antique arcade machines, such as fortune tellers and animated dioramas. One can (and I did) spend hours walking around the room with a pocketful of quarters, listening to music, watching odd little scenes like bodies writhing in an opium den or a hanging, and delighting in a farm full of moving animals or a carnival full of rides and barkers.
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| I bought three CDs of music recorded from the Musee's orchestrion collection. I rock. |
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| Yes, really. |
Would you like a Disney connection? How about two? Mechanical toys, or automata, have been around for centuries. (I have a couple books on the subject I'll get around to reading someday.) A mechanical bird, owned by Walt and Lillian Disney, was supposedly the inspiration for the development of audio-animatronics, as seen first in Walt Disney's Enchanted Tiki Room. Disneyland is also home to three automated music machines on public display. There's an orchestrion in the Main Street train station, a wall-sized orchestrion in the Penny Arcade, and a band organ next to the Dumbo ride. These antique instruments are often overlooked, but their familiar music adds to the pleasant, nostalgic atmosphere of a turn-of-the-century American Main Street and the fantastical carnival inhabited by a fleet of flying elephants and that old stand-by, the carousel.
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| On display in the Walt Disney Archives |
