Gnarly: The military asked Walt Disney to build real IRON MAN SUITS.

The military. Have to hand it to them. They have pretty much the nation’s entire budget to spend, and they’re always looking for creative ways to smoke motherfuckers. One of the ways they envisioned doing such things back in the day was with real-life Iron Man suits. Forged by Disney himself.

In 1965 the American military approached Walt Disney for a very special project. They wanted Disney engineers to build them an exoskeleton—basically a real-life Iron Man suit.

The Navy sent a request for proposals to WED Enterprises—Disney’s design and architecture shop, now called Walt Disney Imagineering—hoping that they’d jump at the opportunity. But unfortunately for the U.S. military, Disney had no interest in the project.

Disney collectibles dealer Phil Sears has two internal Disney memos talking about the RFP up on his site. Despite the fact that there could have been considerable overlap with Disney’s research and the military’s needs at the time, there was a tremendous amount of skepticism by the big man himself. You can see Walt Disney’s own handwritten “NO” scrawled in thick red pencil.

[Gizmodo]