Things You're Just Supposed to Know

Most of the time, Long-Forgotten assumes that readers are already familiar with basic facts
about the Haunted Mansion. If you wanna keep up with the big boys, I suggest you check out
first of all the website, Doombuggies.com. After that, the best place to go is Jason Surrell's book,
The Haunted Mansion: Imagineering a Disney Classic (NY: Disney Editions; 2015). That's the
re-named third edition of The Haunted Mansion: From the Magic Kingdom to the Movies (NY:
Disney Editions, 2003; 2nd ed. 2009). Also essential reading is Jeff Baham's The Unauthorized
Story of Walt Disney's Haunted Mansion (USA: Theme Park Press, 2014; 2nd ed. 2016).

This site is not affiliated in any way with any Walt Disney company. It is an independent
fan site dedicated to critical examination and historical review of the Haunted Mansions.
All images that are © Disney are posted under commonly understood guidelines of Fair Use.

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Monday, July 19, 2010

The Pet Cemeteries

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Yes, there are two.  Imagineer Kim Irvine (daughter of "Madame Leota" Leota Toombs) came up with the idea for the first one in the early 1980's.  Not a lot of time and effort went into the project.  Kim just purchased off-the-shelf yard statues of a dog, cat, skunk, and frog (complete with mouth hole for squirting water) and had Imagineer Chris Goosman compose some macabre epitaphs for the pedestals.  They were put in the vacant yard on the north side of the HM, alongside the wheelchair access path, reportedly to give them something to look at over there.

(pic by Monstersgoboo)


BIG JAKE
Here lies my good dog Jake.
Chasing a toad down a well was his one mistake.


In memoriam MISS KITTY
After losing eight lives you still had no fear.
You caught a snake in your ninth and that's why you're here.


R.I.P. BULLY
You didn't drink, you didn't smoke.
I just can't figure what made you croak.


In loving memory of our pet STRIPEY
You may be departed,
But your presence will always linger on.

Everyone seemed to like this little HM secret, so in 1993 they put another one in the front yard.



It has proven so popular that they subsequently added similar pet cemeteries to the WDW and Tokyo HMs.

And so on.

Those are the well-known facts, familiar to most Mansionites, if not to the general public.  Beyond that basic history, no one has bothered to say much.  But Long-Forgotten readers are a tough and discriminating audience.  They ask, nay, demand more.  Pry up those rocks and see what's crawling around underneath.

A new addition came to the original pet cemetery in the summer of 2016. They needed to add another exhaust vent for the train tunnel going behind the HM and decided to make a virtue of necessity by disguising the vent as a crypt. So far so good, but the crypt is in the pet cemetery, and they made it up as a goofy, elephant grave. The crypt itself is tolerable, falling within the wide embrace of Victorian eccentricity (which, after all, gave us elephant foot umbrella stands), but that trunk looks absolutely awful. How can anyone over the age of eight, let alone Disney Imagineering, look at the exterior and landscaping of the Anaheim HM and conclude that it is an appropriate venue for this sort of zany kookiness? Barf. This looks like a refugee from the execrable queue in Orlando, disaffectionately known in these parts as PLQ:


Sometime around October a plaque appeared on the front:


More cutsie-wootsie stuff, ill-suited to the dignified exterior of the HM. And I hadn't noticed the mouse in previous photos, so I'll point to it now as part of the whole package. Anyway, bleahh. I'm only glad all of this is in a place generally unseen and easily ignored. I look forward to spending a lot of time forgetting it exists.

As I said in the last post, I'm not a huge fan of the PC.  I think most purists and traditionalists see it as an unwelcome intrusion of sheer fantasy before the attraction even begins and would happily see it gone.  That's more or less been my position too, and yet I can't get worked up about it.  Something about the pet cemetery is okay, and it's time to figure out why.  Let's take a closer look.

Much of the front yard version simply repeats the formula of the old one.  Once again you've got a lot of store-bought statuary sitting on pedestals with macabre epitaphs.  In fact, two of the statues (the frog and the skunk) are virtually identical to their back yard counterparts, although they have new names and texts.  The main difference out here is that some dates are attached.  The frog is "Old Flybait" ("He croaked, August 9 1869") and the skunk is "Beloved Lilac" ("Long on curiosity...Short on common scents, 1847").  There's also "Rosie" ("She was a poor little pig, but she bought the farm, 1849") and a dog named "Buddy" ("Our friend until the end"). The dating formula is obvious in the case of Old Flybait; it's exactly 100 years before the HM opening day, and this suggests that the other dates are really cryptic references to 1947 and 1949, probably the birth years of the Imagineers involved.

There's nothing terribly out of place in any of these examples.  They are all of a piece.  We can easily imagine one or several family members in the mansion's long history being animal lovers and burying their pets out front, complete with whimsical epitaphs.  Even if the choice of animals is eccentric in some cases, there is nothing surreal involved, not even anything supernatural.

In one case, however, these conventional statues are arranged in such a way as to suggest that the animals involved have business to conduct in the afterlife.


There is a clever thematic continuity between this cluster and some of the relationships you encounter inside the house.  Imagine the graveyard executioner, a man who in life wielded the power of death but who has now followed his victims into the grave.  It's called irony.  Better still, imagine the cat as Constance and the birds as her husbands, and you can feel the same chemistry at work.  No one forms a partnership with Death so powerful and so lasting as to avoid the same fate as Death's other victims.  It's a classic statement, made at least three times in the attraction, starting with this tableau.  I think the cat-and-bird set is perhaps the high water mark of the pet cemeteries.

There is, however, a whole other set of grave markers.  These are original WDI designs, and they have a more fantastical flavor.  I suspect that it is these that rub some fans the wrong way.  There's Fi Fi the dog, with her cruciform tombstone made of crossed bones and her portrait with crossed-X eyes (like in the funnies).  This piece is significant for reasons that have nothing to do with the intentions of the designers.  It represents a change in the general culture between 1969 and 1993, but that will be the topic of another post.  For the moment, I'll simply note that it is the only cross-shaped headstone in the entire attraction, including all of the scale models and all of Marc Davis's concept art.

The other weird monuments are for a snake, a bat, a rat, a fish, and a spider.  The pieces are nothing if not stylish.




It's a good deal harder to imagine these as simply the products of animal lovers in the Mansion's history.  The style of the monuments themselves is too bizarre.  Perhaps we are to imagine not merely animal lovers, but insane animal lovers, if we want to keep these within the imaginative realm of a real house with a history of real occupants—which is the starting point of the HM voyage. If imagining these pet monuments as items designed by crazy family members seems a stretch, then these freaky-deaky things simply don't belong here.  For me, there are enough tales of nutball Victorians to keep it all just barely within bounds.

As if to illustrate exactly that point, Craig Conley sent me in November of 2016 the following clipping from a 1913 edition of Popular Mechanics, noting an 1855 grave marker for a fish.


Edit October 2019: And did you know that the famous cemetery in London's Hyde Park has a hidden pet cemetery, closed to the public since 1903?

Okay, even if we are not necessarily in the realm of fantasy, you still wonder what the original Imagineers were shooting for.  In one of the Long-Forgotten threads at Micechat, someone argued that pieces like Freddie the Bat were inspired by Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas, which would eventually take over the whole Mansion every Fall and Winter, of course.  If you compare concept art for Freddie with typical NBC artwork, the similar look and feel is indeed striking.



But the dating is against it.  NBC was released the same year the pet cemetery was installed: 1993.  Better to look elsewhere for inspiration for this fantastic and surreal streak.  [Edit: But see new evidence below.]  As a matter of fact, the original HM Imagineers did kick around some lunatic pet ideas for the HM.  Ken Anderson toyed with having a man-eating octopus in a pit in the middle of a room in his 1957 Ghost House.  Which is pretty . . . out there.


Then there's this delightful but unused Marc Davis gag:


But if we're looking for justification for adding an element of the strange and fantastic to the Haunted Mansion, the obvious place to look is in Rolly Crump's unused "Museum of the Weird" designs.  Do I detect a whiff of the Museum in the pet cemetery? (Or *sniff* is that just a dead fish?)


Very, very few people know this, but Rolly actually designed some bizarre tombstones for the HM.  Where they would have been used, I can't imagine, but it must be admitted that Freddie the Bat has nothing on Velma Wingspan when it comes to eccentricity, and isn't the spidery lettering style used on the pet cemetery stones just a teeny weeny bit reminiscent of Rolly's "Museum" font?


"But even if Ken, Marc, and Rolly kicked these kinds of ideas around, they ultimately decided NOT to go in that direction, so even if the pet cemetery Imagineers were drawing inspiration from those guys, they also overrode their judgment by going ahead with this kind of thing."

Yeah, I hear that, and it's a good point, but I still take some comfort in the idea that the newer Imagineers respected and revered the original masters and sought to draw inspiration from their work.  And anyway, since the pet cemetery, even at its most surreal, can be placed within the imaginative orbit of the Mansion, I've decided to call a truce on this one.

New Evidence for Tim Burton's Influence

One of our "Anonymous" commenters directs our attention to a short 1984 film by Tim Burton, Frankenweenie, produced by Walt Disney pictures.  Reportedly, Disney fired Burton after making it, claiming he had wasted company resources and had produced a film too dark for Disney to use.  It later had video and DVD releases.

Well, SOMEONE at Disney liked the film.  There can be little doubt that it was a direct influence on the front yard pet cemetery. [Edit: According to "Anonymous," the imagineer who designed these Burtonesque grave markers was Jimmy Pickering. See the Comments.]  The film is a parody/homage to Frankenstein, so there are important graveyard scenes—in a pet graveyard.  It appears also in the film's opening titles.




Fifi's tombstone at Disneyland is obviously taken almost directly from this movie.


There are several bone-cruciform tombstones in the Frankenweenie 
cemetery, but "Sparky" is the main animal character in the film. 


 Even the shape of Fifi's head and the "X's" for her eyes may have
been inspired by various other tombstones seen in the film.


Then there's "Earl."


There are also tombstones for a goldfish and a snake in the Burton graveyard.

This raises the distinct possibility that Imagineers (or at least Kim Irvine) were aware of Burton's work on Nightmare while it was in production and saw some of the models, and so possibly that artwork was an additional influence on the style of the 1993 HM pet cemetery.

A big thanks goes to "Anonymous" for the tip.
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18 comments:

  1. Do you know if any real pet cemeteries existed or was this a reference to the Stephen King story?

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  2. Pet cemeteries have been around a LOT longer than the Stephen King novel. Just a couple of random examples: There were vast dog cemeteries in 5th c. BC Ascalon (in what is today the Gaza strip), and there's an old dog cemetery for the soldiers at Edinburgh Castle in Scotland. Here's a pic:

    http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/26/Dog_cemetary.jpg

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  3. There's a sizable (5 acre) pet cemetery in Hartsdale, NY that's not only more nicely groomed than some human graveyards, but home to some stones that wouldn't look out of place at the mansion--http://www.petcem.com/monumentsinterest.html#sculpture

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  4. I like to think of the pet cemetery as a transitional area that helps guests adjust from the sheer happiness and whimsy of Disneyland into the more macabre setting of the Haunted Mansion... I agree that the tone of the pet cemetery does not exactly match the interior of the Haunted Mansion, but I do remember as a child, it did a lot to put me at ease while I nervously waited in line.

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  5. I do find it odd that the cat has 5 birds and Constance has 5 (some argue 6) husbands. Coincidence? Probably. It's odd none the less.

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  6. Perhaps the 1894 on the Pig's stone is a veiled reference to George Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984.

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  7. Tim Burton could actually have a connection to the pet cemeteries after all. In 1984, Tim Burton made "Frankenweenie" for Buena Vista. It wasn't released until several years later for being "too intense" for young kids. In truth, there is no onscreen violence, it promotes tolerance, and has a happy ending. Totally Disney standards. Anyway, you can view the whole film on youtube. Check out the pet tombstones early on, they're very reminiscent of the ones at the Mansions. Watch at 2:40 for a bone cruciform and later on there are two more, including Sparky's( Frankenweenie himself) tombstone. Could Kim Irvine and the other designers have gotten a few ideas from this film? Anyway, love your blog! Insightful AND fun!

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  8. Good catch! The tombstones in that film are indeed strikingly similar in tone and in some cases in looks to the HM pet cemetery. I'm updating the post to reflect this. Thanks!

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  9. You are very welcome on the Frankenweenie/ pet cemetery connection! I've been a Burton fan (and a Anaheim Mansion fan for even longer) and reading some biography books on him is where I learned about Frankenweenie. I gave it a watch on youtube and wasn't impressed. The second I saw the pictures of the pet cemeteries on your post, I knew that the movie had inspired those tombstones (the early '80s and 1993 timeline sealed it for me). Did you hear that a remake of Frankenweenie is in the works? I guess one decade's trash is another decade's popularity cash-in. Anyway, thanks for putting the info up!

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  10. "one decade's trash...." Yep. No cartoon from the 60's-90's is too lame to get the multi-million dollar CGI treatment and a big screen debut. Or an embarrassing live action retread.

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  11. You're the best to share us about this redesign. Trust you won't get tired on making posts as useful as this. Amazing Pet Expos

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  12. At one of the Disney parks pet cemeteries there is a dug up grave and the name on it is sparky

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  13. Many of the photo links are now dead on this page. Can the webmaster address this, and perhaps renew the content?

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  14. I thought I remembered seeing Sparky's grave added to the park around the time Disney released the full length Frankenweenie film to the theatres, and a little digging online confirms it. Not sure if it was just for that year or if it comes back during the Holidays every year, but here's a link https://twitter.com/disneyland/status/256188363487465472

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  15. I know a few facts on the Pet Cemetery design that seem to need clarifacation...as I was working in the WDI design office when the project was designed and installed. The Tim Burtonesque designs were original designs by Imagineer Jimmy Pickering, whos own personal style was very close to Burtons...the dates on the stones and plaques are meaningful dates to people on the project....and Buddy the dog was not a nod to Buddy Baker....but the name of one of the Imagineer's dogs whopassed away right before the project was completed.

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    Replies
    1. Thanks for that great background information! I'll do a little editing to the post.

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