Olaf Is Back Up And Running, But The Memes Are Still Flooding In

A couple of weeks ago, before he made his debut at Disneyland Paris, I got to “meet” Walt Disney Imagineering’s Olaf robot. It’s an incredible piece of technology that, thanks to major leaps forward in design, is able to battle many of the issues that might cause the Olaf to fail while iterating with guests. But that doesn’t mean that Olaf can’t fail at all, as we recently learned.

Olaf had his first, though certainly not his last, public failure this week when the robot collapsed in front of guests at Disney Adventure World at Disneyland Paris. The memes went viral, but good news, everybody. Olaf is just fine, as a recent video showed.

Of course, just because Olaf is fine now doesn’t mean that fans are done with the jokes. The comments and quotes on the original Twitter post are all reactions to how the snowman is handling his traumatic incident. Some of the best include…

• Good to see Olaf is out of concussion protocol. - @ScottGustin
• I can tell he has no recollection of the incident and that’s what’s so scary.. - @aallleeexxxxxx1
• Acting like nothing f—ing happened - @esjesjesj
• And on the third day he rose again, ascended into Arendelle - @xrachaelxoxo
• Even in the face of great tragedy one must keep living - @w1lld0mk3

Watching Olaf’s quiet walk across World of Frozen at Disney Adventure World, knowing about his recent… incident, which saw him completely freeze and fall backward, with even his detachable carrot nose falling to the ground, does feel very strange. He has the same smile on his face, but he knows what happened…he knows. You can just tell.

Of course, the actual truth is that we don’t even know if this is the same Olaf robot that collapsed. Exactly how many exist is unclear, but I’m guessing Disneyland Paris has more than one snowman robot specifically to deal with the situation where one of them doesn’t work for some reason.

Olaf is the most technologically advanced of a new breed of mechanical creations from Walt Disney Imagineering. Over the last couple of years, we’ve seen a new generation of traditional audio animatronics, including an audio-animatronic Walt Disney at Disneyland.

That said, it's been a rough week for animated Disney characters. The same week that Olaf "died," the audio-animatronic Rapunzel at Tokyo DisneySea was attacked by crows. It's not a good time to be a Disney robot.

Olaf is the first of what will certainly be a series of robot characters walking around all the Disney parks and interacting with guests. While the technology is already quite impressive, the fact that Olaf is the first means there will be some challenges to overcome, likely some that Walt Disney Imagineering is only now beginning to understand, now that Olaf is out in public.