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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Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Whistling Past the Graveyard: The Stretching Portraits

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This will be the first in a series of three posts dealing with the stretching gallery portraits.  This first one will deal generally and more abstractly with the whole set, and the next two will look more particularly at the artwork itself.

I mentioned 'way back here that what we are frequently doing at Long-Forgotten is explaining jokes, which is usually a bad idea since the jokes are killed in the process.  But let's face it, the Mansion jokes are so familiar by now that for most of us they hardly even function as "jokes" in the usual sense.  We enjoy them in a different way, and no amount of annotation at this point is going to spoil them.

So let's get out the scalpel and have at it.

Jokes are serious business, ironically.  Every joke is based on irony, and every joke can therefore be explained by pointing to that irony.  I'm not exaggerating.  Even a third grader's fart jokes are explicable in this way.  Don't believe me?  With bathroom humor, the irony consists in the fact that we humans aspire to something beyond our animal natures, but our bodies constantly betray us, rudely reminding us that while we live here below we are very much animals.  We may speak of noble things and have eternity in our hearts (cf. Eccl 3:11), but we still have to take a dump a couple of times a day.  In fact, to be even minimally polite and civil, it is virtually required that we pretend that these animal functions don't even exist.  But they do, so opportunities for bathroom humor never end.

As for irony, I define it as a perceptible gap between appearance and reality.  All jokes, then, are based on the perception of this kind of gap.  You doubt it?  I dare ya, I double-dog dare ya, I triple-dog dare ya to post a joke in the Comments that cannot be explained convincingly as predicated on a gap between appearance and reality.  Remember though, explanations typically ruin jokes.

With that long preamble out of the way, let's take a look at the artwork in the stretching galleries.

Marc Davis's four portraits are supposed to make people chuckle.  Very well then, they are jokes.  Where is the irony?  Or better, what is the irony?


For three of the four, the joke is clearly the same:  a normal, confident-looking person is revealed to be in imminent danger of sudden death.  (We'll deal with the exception presently.)  Why does the trio work so well as a set?  I think it's because they represent three classic strategies for denying the reality of death, and even though everyone knows they're false strategies, their popularity remains undiminished.  Ironically.

If you could have anything you wanted, what would it be?  Yeah, I know, world peace, blah blah blah; now cut the crap and tell me what you really want, as betrayed by your actions.  We can discuss and discuss, but sooner or later we're going to come around to these:

  • Beauty
  • Wealth
  • Power

Sneer all you want, you know you'd take 'em if you could get 'em.  If someone from Mars were to judge what is most important to humans, based on what they strive after most consistently, those might well be the top three answers.

I can imagine two objections.  First, are these three really separable?  Don't people want to be beautiful so they can get rich, etc.?  Admittedly, these goals often bleed into each other, with one of them pursued as a means to the others, but at the same time there are whole throngs of people who lust after one of those three as an end in itself.  Each one of them commands the ultimate allegiance of a sizable chunk of the populace.  Second, some of you might have other candidates that you think have a better claim to the Top Three.  I imagine that many would put "fame" on the short list, but here's the deal:  there are a lot of people who would not want to be famous, whereas far fewer people would actually choose not to be good-looking, or wealthy, or in a position to give orders and be obeyed.  So I'll stick with beauty, wealth, and power as the top three idols in the public square.  [Edit: Check out some interesting discussion about "love" in the Comments.]

And that's what you get here in the stretching gallery, before the stretch.  You've got a lovely young lady, representing beauty; a political figure of some kind, representing power; and a well-dressed businessman, representing wealth.

I admit up front that my interpretations of the Dynamite Guy and of the Quicksand Men are not self-evident, but I think they're correct.  The Dynamite Guy has got a sash, which hints at official position or official recognition, and he's clutching a Very Important piece of paper.  It is true that an early show script by X. Atencio refers to him as "Alexander Nitrokoff...an anarchist who came to us with a bang one night," but with all due respect, I think X misinterpreted Marc's painting.  Neither the sash, nor the formal, claw-hammer coat, nor the Very Important piece of paper suggest the identity of an anarchist.  To me, those clues point to a high-level diplomat or political figure of some kind.  As for the Quicksand Men, I note that they are well-dressed and well-groomed, but not too much so, as if they had no practical dealings with everyday affairs.  They come across to me as successful men of the world, as prosperous businessmen.

So anyway, the joke?  What people think are the most important things in life are in reality weak and ephemeral.  People act as if power, wealth, and the things that go with beauty will protect them from mortal ills, and yes, in most cases it may be conceded that they do help you to avoid the Grim Reaper for a season.  But only for a season.  Furthermore, there's no guarantee of even that much.  For all your money and/or power and/or physical charms, you may still perish in a moment, in a ridiculous moment, in an unheroic and an undignified moment.  We know this is true, but we ignore it best we can.

Whistling past the graveyard, it's called.

Marc Davis would probably have balked at this analysis.  I hear an irascible voice from beyond the grave, "They're just jokes, dammit.  JOKES.  I wasn't thinking of any of that...stuff!"  But as usual, we're not dealing with conscious thought but inarticulate artistic hunches.  Whether it's a symphony or a painting or a limerick, when someone hits the bulls-eye you know it, even though you may have a hard time defining the target in so many words.  Imagine if instead of the Quicksand Men you had a young lady with a train bearing down on her.  Somehow, the set as a whole would not have been as good.  You would have felt that you were seeing the same gag twice (with Alligator Girl), and the repetition would have been unwelcome, despite the fact that you ARE seeing the same basic joke three times as it is, and yet it feels very satisfactory.  I submit, then, that the threesome works because Davis's comic sensibilities intuitively settled on three classic vanities that people chase after in their attempts to avoid the reality of death.

What about the fourth portrait, the widow?  That one is different.  She's now been retconned as Constance, but the original joke remains intact.


Instead of an unsuspecting victim of sudden death, she is herself the agent of sudden death for other unsuspecting victims.  And to judge by her portrait, she has evidently succeeded in this role.  She represents a more complex strategy for evading death, namely, forming a partnership with it.  The prize in this case is not wealth, or power, or beauty, but cunning, a cold-blooded, ruthless intelligence combined with a survivor mentality.  It's as old as the Bible:  "We have made a covenant with death, and with hell are we at agreement; when the overflowing scourge shall pass through, it shall not come upon us" (Isaiah 28:15).  Of course, this too is vanity.  In the end you find that the Reaper brooks no rivals, cuts no deals, honors no contracts.  You have been a dupe, a tool in the hands of something far colder and more ruthless than you, and all of your cleverness will not prevent you from following your victims into the grave.  As we saw in our discussion of the pet cemeteries, there are at least three places in the Mansion that illustrate this dynamic (Constance, the Executioner, and the Cat-and-bird set in the garden).



The widow portrait takes its place in the gallery quartet as a more interesting strategy, but a vain strategy nonetheless. "Your covenant with death shall be disannulled, and your agreement with hell shall not stand; when the overflowing scourge shall pass through, then ye shall be trodden down by it" (Isaiah 28:18).

I will agree with Mr. Davis's ghost about one thing:  the paintings should not be interpreted literally.  I mention it because there is a persistent tendency among some Mansionites to try to find a way to wrap a story around the depictions exactly as they are (beginning with X. Atencio's reading of the Dynamite Guy!), but to me any such effort is absurd on its face.  I don't know of any diplomats (or even anarchists) who stand around on TNT kegs in their underwear, or businessmen who go out into the swamp and form human totem poles.  These are jokes, and that's where they stop.  If you absolutely MUST carry the portraits beyond that threshold, then I suppose you can interpret them as allegories.  A sheltered young woman who behaved as if she were somehow immune from the dangers of life pays a steep price for her foolishness.  A crooked politician is assassinated in the middle of embarrassing circumstances ("caught with his pants down," get it?), robbing him of his dignity as well as his life.  A business enterprise goes south, ruining all partners in the venture, even those with little responsibility for the fiasco.  That sort of thing.  But in my opinion even this degree of literalism is unnecessary.  Even in the case of the widow (now Constance), you obviously cannot take things too literally.  You don't really suppose she commissioned a bust of George with a hatchet in his head for his gravestone, do you?

Long-Forgotten posts will be approximately one per month for awhile.  HBG2 is a busy boy.

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38 comments:

  1. Hm, interesting points for sure.

    As a European, I naturally tend to comparing the portraits to their Phantom Manor equivalents:
    http://www.doombuggies.com/images/phantom_stretch.jpg
    While the joke is essentially the same for those four, I think the mood is much darker and rather melancolic - maybe the fact, that they all show the same beautiful girl adds to this impression. While this clearly states that the pictures can't be taken literally, it gives the feeling of an unescapable fatality.
    On the other hand, I always thought that they were kind of redundant - usually, I only gaze at the flower girl, which is my favourite.

    When you have examined the Haunted Mansion portraits, could you maybe also tell your views regarding the Phantom Manor ones? I would be very interested!

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  2. I have to say that I don't think that much of the Phantom Manor versions. As you mention, they're redundant. They almost have to be, because they are all in service to the same backstory of PM. Unlike the HM originals, they are consciously intended as allegories, but it's simply one, character-specific allegory repeated four times: "Young Melanie's life is about to be ruined forever by malevolent and deadly events."

    Humor can be profound. Davis's originals speak as a set, expressing in an amusing way a genuinely universal insight into human nature. PM's? Not so much.

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  3. You make a great case for the widow portrait, but I'm wondering if there's a fourth wish in addition to Beauty, Wealth, and Power - namely, Love.

    The widow, with her pink rose and sweet smile, could be seen as the embodiment of the kind of romantic love we think will last us a lifetime and protect us from all the evils of the world. But that's shown to be as much of a false sense of security as that we derive from Beauty, Wealth, and Power.

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  4. Interesting idea. If it's valid, then the portrait is still a sort of reversal of the other three. In the other three both the subject and the observer are innocent fools. You think, "Ah, beauty (or wealth, or power); wish I had some of that." You're deceived, you're in the same boat as the three people you're looking at. But in the case of the widow, it is only the observer who is an innocent fool, NOT the subject. You see her as her suitors saw her, something that seems to offer love (which proves to be yet another vanity in the sense that it serves as a distraction from your consciousness of your own mortality). However, what looks like love is in this case death wearing a mask.

    To put it another way, in the widow portrait the alligator/TNT keg/quicksand is on TOP, in disguise, rather than on the bottom, waiting to be revealed.

    The idea has merit. It would explain why Davis's original widow is not old but still somewhat attractive (certainly not the old lady of later versions). This allows you, the observer, to see and feel a little bit what the smitten suitors saw and felt. At least you can believe that some guy might look at that and think "love."

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  5. Oh, and thanks, Mat. High praise indeed.

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  6. Interesting discussion. In an interview in the mid 90's with Marc (Davis) he mentioned he had explored other portrait subjects such as a sea captain who's gag would reveal a sunken ship, with the captain straddling a ships figurehead/prow protruding from the water around it. Also a Fire Captain surrounded by the remains of a burned down building. But Walt and everyone really liked the ones used. Has anyone ever seen renderings showing Marc's alternate portraits? When the attraction first opened, the prop portraits were refined paintings done very similar to Marc's concepts. later it was decided to create more realistic 19Th Century type portraits that were done by Clem Hall. these are basically the styles seen in the mansions today.

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  7. I've heard of other Davis stretching portrait concepts too, but I've never seen any artwork. Incidentally, both of those you describe fit in with the analysis of this post. The vanity in both cases would be "virtuosity," or "accomplishment." Both speak of pride in one's expertise in keeping lethal natural forces under control, forces which in reality cannot be fully controlled. As for your further comments, you've anticipating things I talk about in the next two posts (which are already "in the can"), so shut up! ;)

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  8. Very nice analysis. The stretching portraits are some of my favorite gags in the HM, and I really have to agree with your assessment of them. I feel like if you're creative enough, you could come up with a plausible story for why these people are in the predicament they're shown (and who they're supposed to be). But it's true; these portraits are simply to add to the big picture of the place. No matter what we do or what we prize, death comes for us all, and it doesn't always give us a dignified leave. Looking forward to the next article!

    P.S. Don't know if I said before, this is "Rabbi" from the Doombuggies boards!

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  9. Verry interesting post indead.

    I love both of the portraits, the ones in the Haunted Mansion and the ones in the Phantom Manor. And I know that the PM ones are there to just be part of the Melanie's story. But is interresting to notice how similar they can be to the original in the HM, if they are side by side.

    Like for exemple:
    Melanie with the umbrela or walking in the water - the young lady on the rope;
    The monster on the water - the aligator;
    The waterfall - the quick sand
    And for me the most similar: Melanie with the flower upon a grave - the widow.

    This can show how faithful they are to the originals even with a diferent story.

    But this post was very good... I've never imagine this kind of "interpretation" for these portraits. Congratulations.

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  10. This thought is still half-formed, but let's see where it goes and if it leads you to anything.

    While I was reading your list of top human goals: beauty, wealth, power, I was thinking there is a another goal that often trumps all three. In fact, the desire for those three goals is often as a means to acquiring the fourth: love (and/or sex).

    And then I realized the fourth painting (the black widow who has been retconned into Constance) deals with this very subject. Now whether Constance ever loved George we don't know (and I doubt it), but I'm betting he loved her, and certainly lusted after her.

    That didn't save him from death either.

    This still doesn't 100% fit with the other three as George isn't the initial subject of the painting, but the presence of the rose at least suggests the subject of love. Not a perfect match, but helps out the idea of the set a bit, I think.

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  11. Been thinking about "love," and why it didn't hit me originally as one of the top "must have's." I guess it's because I distinguish between selfless love that seeks the good of the beloved and selfish love (which includes lust) which seeks to possess for one's own benefit. When I go into an abstract discussion of "love," I gravitate toward the former as the pure expression of the word, and see the latter as a distortion or counterfeit. I wish the same word were not applied to these two radically different things. But having said that, I agree that the desire to possess another person for one's own emotional gratification would certainly rank very high on the list of things people crave, and I agree that the widow portrait is speaking to that. In this case, the object of gratification is booby trapped: it seeks to possess you, or better, your possessions. You've fallen in "love" with death, fool.

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  12. Love both this blog and this discussion, especially since it really challenges me to analyze the images that make up my favorite Disney attraction since I first glimpsed it through spread fingers-over-eyes at 4 years old. It may be too basic of an observation, but what has always struck me about the stretching portrait "jokes" is how the whole stretching room format allows these jokes to play out. You enter a gallery with seemingly normal, posed portraits. Then, the room stretches, and things get weird, revealing the first layer of each of the four jokes. The pretty posed girl is not in a garden, but balanced on a tight-rope. The pompous and grumpy official is formal from the waist up, but in his underwear from the waist down. The smug, arms-crossed business man is actually sitting on the shoulders of a more distressed-looking partner (shades of the Jungle Cruise pole?). And the smiling older women sits on top of a tombstone. Then, through futher stretching, the jokes become darker still, all death-related. The tightrope is frayed, with alligators snapping underneath. The disgraced man stands on a lit keg of dynamite. The lowest businessman on the totem pole is in panic as he sees his quicksand demise. And the tombstone on which the woman revealed as a seemingly-grief struck widow sits shows a man with a hatchet in his head. Is there a more cinematic, more layered reveal to any joke (let alone four jokes in multiple parts) in any theme park attraction anywhere? We laugh at the first reveal, then laugh, while questioning our own laughter, at the second, darker and deadly reveal. And none of this would be accomplished without the need to just disguise an elevator and get the guests under train tracks. Genius.

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  13. Excellent observation! Hadn't thought about it, but you're right. There are indeed multiple steps to the revelation. You go from (1) straight and serious to (2) ludicrous to (3) macabre. It's "here's an impressive specimen of humanity," then they get a pie in their face, and only then do we see why they kinda deserve the pie (viz, they appear to be in denial about their mortality). Again, the widow is sort of a reversal: she's an impressive sight, then we see that's she's more eccentric than she looks (sitting on a tombstone!?!), but we don't immediately know why she's there, and only as the portrait continues to unveil do we see what the nature of her eccentricity really is.

    Again, for the scoffers, all we're doing here is plumbing some of Marc's comic intuitions, not his "thoughts" but his instincts. It's enjoyable because everyone seems to nod in agreement whenever someone says, "Marc Davis was a comic genius," but explaining exactly why we are convinced of it is a different matter. I'm glad if posts and discussions like this one help us to see and articulate more explicitly why these examples of Marc's work have always smacked of comic genius.

    It's not that we're overexplaining a joke, it's that good jokes generally go underexplained, partly so that they'll stay jokes, and partly because this sort of thing takes effort and sustained observation.

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  14. Great, thoughtful and interesting observations all! @Dan - I agree with you - I can just hear Marc saying in his distinctive, gruff voice, "You're over-thinking this. They're just a bunch of gags!"

    That said - there is much more at work here - whether or not Marc would have agreed. The observations about the three step reveal, "Love" & that the gag itself would have never been needed had it not been for the elevator are all great points of discussion.

    You need to publish a book of all these posts!

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  15. Retconned as Connie? Wait - I thought a bunch of HaunTards were already trying to make the Birthday Girl ghost into the previously unnamed character in the portrait - via the specious reasoning that they both have their hair in buns, so they MUST represent the same character. How can the subject in the portrait(who looks nothing like that attic disaster) simultaneously be both Constance AND the Birthday Ghost? Hint: she isn't supposed to be either of them....

    Wasn't there also already some ridiculousness surrounding that painting where people were trying to say that the rose the figure is holding is the same as the fresh rose which could be seen laying on the "Gracey" tombstone in the queue line?

    PLEASE make them stop.

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  16. Truthfully, I've never heard of either of those fanfic fantasies. But the widow very definitely, very officially, is Constance. Remember the obvious: this is a ride, and all of it is made up. The only "reality" in there is what WDI says is in there. There is no other. Theoretically, Disney could rename Mickey "Mortimer," and if they were suicidally stupid enough to do such a thing, then Mortimer would be his name, like it or not. As I discussed in an earlier post ("Here Comes the...Never Mind, She's Here: Constance and the Hatchet Man"), I may not like the Constance stuff, but there's nothing inherently absurd in identifying her with the widow in the portrait.

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    1. Pardon me, but I think there IS a "reality" that is slightly more important than what TODAY's Imagineers say. And this truth is what the Original Author of the Work we're Talking About Intended (O-A-W-T-A-I). O-A-W-T-A-I-lly speaking, retconnection, if performed by someone else than the Original Author, seems to me as a rude and disrespectful process. In other words, it'd bad manners against poor old X. Atencio to arbitrarily say this woman is named Constance Hatchaway when Original Author X. Atencio had named her Abigale Patecleaver. Acting as if this name had never existed is unfair. And the same goes for practically any change and retcon in the Mansion, in my opinion. I suppose the Imagineers, for the new attic, intend us to think that the attic was, storewise, always that way, that there were never any Blast-up Spooks or Wandering Brides up there. Well, I don't. I can include the Constance addition without contradicting the OAWTAI, but ONLY if we openly state that there was previously another group of ghosts in this room, but that another ghost, Constance, kicked it out or something to have somewhere to haunt herself. But the Stretching Room Constance and the Stretching Room Abigale are nearly impossible to OAWTAIIly put together. Unless you say, of course, that the first, middle-aged woman of the original paintings is Abigale, and the older one of the new portrait is actually a distinct character who just happens to look like Abigale: Connie.

      But seriously, I don't know why the Imagineers went to contradict everything on that point when it was so easy to name their new Bride Abigale instead of Constance !

      (Although even there I guess Marc Davis never intended his Abigale character to have ever killed anyone else than George, instead of killing 4 more husbands as Constance officially did, so EVEN changing Constance's name to Abigale doesn't entirely right the wrongs).

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    2. If you want it to be *fill in the blank,* you may. But it's your private "reality" and you have no right to insist that anyone else accept it as their own. In contrast, every Imagineer knows that what they create for Disney belongs to Disney and not to them. Don't worry about poor old X; he knows the rules. In the present case, "Widow Patecleaver" was part of a proposed script and never officially part of the show, therefore never officially her name. Someone got ahold of it and related it in—I believe—a Disney News magazine article, which amounts to semi-official sanction. Absent another name, it would pass for the lady's "real" name, but any official WDI designation immediately overrules it. You can hate it all you want, but her real name is Constance, as of 2006.

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    3. You answer mainly to my "Abigale versus Constance" point. However, there is also the fact that Marc Davis didn't intend his Black Widow to have killed more than one husband. And indeed, since as you say the portraits are not literal but allegories, why do we only see only one husband ?

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    4. To resume my point in a sentence, retconnection appears to me as being a hatable orwellesque "Doublethink" that should be avoided whenever possible.

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    5. Unless you're privy to some documentation I don't know about, you don't know what Marc Davis intended. And it's perfectly reasonable to suppose that this particular portrait depicts only her last (and maybe "greatest"?) conquest, not necessarily all of them. The new identification of the portrait as Constance creates no logical difficulties with what is already there.

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    6. I don't know what Marc Davis intended, but even if the present retconnection doesn't create real inconsistencies, you must admit that it's more likely that he never thought of his widow having killed more than one husband. It is POSSIBLE in the absolute that he has, but not likely.

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    7. All they're doing is expanding the storyline envisioned in Davis's joke. "See the nice, smiling, grandmotherly old lady? The reason she's smiling is this 'nice old lady' killed her husband with an axe and got away with it, and doesn't feel a shred of guilt." All they've done is add to this: "Not only that, but this wasn't the first time! By the way, her name is Constance and her motive was greed." There's nothing there that "goes against" Davis's intention; it simply goes beyond it, expands it. By the way, naming her "the Widow Patecleaver" was an example of exactly the same thing. Davis didn't name the subjects in these paintings. Not only that, but in the case of "Alexander Nitracoff," we have a genuine contradiction of Marc Davis's intent. The man is some sort of dignitary or politician or diplomat, not an anarchist.

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    8. You're right. Although when it comes to Alexander Nitrokoff, I know that some fans have tried to put the two things together, by saying that he is a Russian ambassador actually named Nitrokoff (although not an anarchist). Well, I think they're on the right path, personally. But it's all a matter of opinions and preferences. Thank you for answering all that. And for all your wonderful posts in general, of course !

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    9. It said "ambassador" in the Disney Magazine, not "anarchist." Another mistake in Jason Surrell's book.

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  17. I always liked the fact that if you swap the roses for the axe in the widow portrait,her hand positions/grip wouldn't change.

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  18. Before the retconning of the widow as Connie, I thought the widow was just mourning her husband, not celebrating a successful murder. I think that she may not have been originally thought of as a Black Widow Bride until Connie. This gives the "love" idea more credibility.

    -Mel

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    1. There's never been any doubt that the widow on top of the tombstone killed George. Without that, there is no joke. And she clearly isn't sad.

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  19. The first three are indeed hard to take literally. But the Widow, given that we are in a ghost house… The bust may be like the Changing Portraits: normally it was just a bust of George, but then the ghost of George make it change to expose to everyone her bride's horrible crime (taking the same role as the one you give to the Hatbox Ghost in your post about it). And please this time answer me !

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  20. "But in my opinion even this degree of literalism is unnecessary."—> Well, the Ghost Host does say that on the paintings we see "some of our guests as they appeared…" blah blah blah, so that means that those people really existed and now their ghosts haunt the Mansion. The paintings can't be ONLY allegories.

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    1. he's talking about the normal "unstretched" versions of the paintings

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  21. I'll take your dare:

    I am a gamer, and some of my games call for funny dice. Not just cubes with funny symbols on them, but other polyhedral shapes as well. This makes thing like a 20 sided die, or a 12 sided die. In the games though, we use abbreviations such as d20 or d12. (Yes, I know this set up is taking a while, but the punchline's worth it, but it only works if you know the gaming terms.) I often also use a coin as a 2 sided die. What I would like to do is get a pair of two sided die with pictures of a certain blue and white android from Star Wars. I could then say they are 2d2.

    Now smarty pants, where's the irony?

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    1. It's a visual pun. Puns occur when language put to a normal use resembles something completely unrelated so closely that it is difficult to avoid noticing the secondary track. With puns, the "unintentional" secondary meaning is quite intentional, and the joke is that you thought the point was X when it turns out the only reason for creating X was to point to a totally other Y. We expect language to be clear, but ironically it can create contrary cross-currents. In your case, the design of the die argues that the usual explanation of the nomenclature is "wrong" in this case, that in "reality" it is based on something totally other (i.e. names of Star Wars characters). The "argument" is insincere, however; you're only foolin'. The resemblance is accidental. There's a gap between appearance and reality, in other words.

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  22. So here's my take on the story behind the stretching portraits. It's a belief I think I've always had, subconsciously, but only recently brought it to the front of my mind to analyze. And that is this: each of these portraits were meant to look the way they did before the room stretches. That is to say that during each of the four's lifetimes they commissioned a from-the-shoulder-up portrait of themselves that they then decided to have hung inside this gallery (or the master hung them, or whatever). It was the Mansion itself that took these normal portraits and turned them into humorous depictions of how that particular guest would eventually die. To me this is what's profound about the portraits; that the Mansion itself displays this humor and pranky-nes towards death. This sets the mood for the rest of the attraction: that the house itself is the power responsible for everything that happens within it, and it sure is having fun with it! This is the main purpose of this gallery, not necessarily the individual joke of each painting.

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  23. RIP AliceDavis, who was always at Marc’s side
    Creating, loving, and there to remember
    Until they both had died
    Their arts live on within us now
    April thru December.

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  24. That proposed sea captain stretching portrait which showed him on the bow of a sunken ship...that sounds a LOT like Jack Sparrow's introduction, doesn't it?

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  25. When i was younger before all the altering of the attraction i thought the stretching room had a little longer narration talking about the portraits

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