Ray Douglas Bradbury was an American fantasy, science fiction, horror, and mystery fiction writer and author, who was best known for his 1953 dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 and for the science fiction and horror stories gathered together as The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man.
Ray Bradbury and Walt Disney were close friends throughout the 1950s and 1960s and Bradbury was a strong supporter of Disneyland and Imagineering's efforts. He was particularly intrigued by the development of Audio-Animatronics, with his essay The Machine Tooled Happyland going into the technology's potential to bring the past to life in exciting new ways. Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln would inspire his 1969 short story "Downwind in Gettysburg", where a robotic Lincoln is shot.
He wrote the 1962 novel Something Wicked This Way Comes, which was adapted into the 1983 Disney film of the same name. He also wrote The Veldt, which the Disney Channel movie Smart House is based on. He also helped design Spaceship Earth as well as worked on an early version of what became Mission: Space and an unbuilt Carousel Theater show for Magic Kingdom's Tomorrowland titled The Yestermorrow Time Machine. Additionally, his story The Halloween Tree has been honored in the form of an actual Halloween Tree at Disneyland's Frontierland that has been decorated every year for the Halloween season since 2007.
In the backstory for the 2015 Disney film Tomorrowland, Ray Bradbury is listed as a member of Plus Ultra and one of the last celebrity inductees in the 1960s.