Long-Forgotten

Claude Coats: The Art of Deception and the Deception of Art

2011-12-30T00:14:00.000-08:00

.(Edit: Feb 2012, new artwork added)

Of all the major contributors to the creation of the Haunted Mansion, the most elusive is Claude Coats (1913-1992). That is primarily because no interview with Mr. Coats on the subject has ever been published, to my knowledge, and not a great deal of his Mansion-related artwork has been out and about either, at least in comparison with guys like Ken Anderson and Marc Davis. What is well-known is that (1) Coats is the man responsible for the creepy, moody atmosphere felt most heavily in the front half of the attraction, and (2) Coats is usually named as the chief advocate for the "scary" approach, as opposed to the "silly" approach championed by Marc Davis (although I have argued elsewhere that this dichotomy is exaggerated). Beyond those two factoids, most Mansion fans run out of things to say about Coats rather quickly.

One way to understand and appreciate Claude Coats' contribution to the HM might be to review what exactly it was that he did in his 54-year career at Disney and to see how those special skills are showcased in the finished attraction. This is not by any means a full survey of Coats' work, of course; there are other places to find that.

A Career in Quick Review

No question about it, Coats belongs on the short list of all-time greatest Disney Imagineers. He joined Disney about the time that work on Snow White was beginning to accelerate. Coats was a background painter, eventually becoming a color stylist as well. He was happy to stay in that area, which seems appropriate, since he was a quiet, polite, self-effacing guy, showing little inclination to call attention to himself. They called him the "gentle giant" (he was a little over 6' 6"), and people who worked with him recall a gifted, amiable, and exceedingly generous colleague and mentor.

As background artist and color stylist, he worked on every Disney animated feature from Snow White to Lady in the Tramp, plus innumerable shorts. Dude. Already with Pinocchio and Fantasia, his concept sketches and backgrounds were widely admired around the studio.

(Hat tip to my delineated life )

Of course, a high percentage of Coats' paintings were less dramatic affairs:

(Hat tip to the marvelous blog, Animation Backgrounds)

But even in these, the use of color, perspective, and simple architectural details creates an instant illusion of space and depth. The clean designs, muted tones, and carefully controlled color palettes result in a perfect balance: the paintings are attractive without attracting attention to themselves. A neat trick, that. These are the stages upon which the actors will perform, and it is they who are supposed to occupy your attention, not the scenery. Coats always understood this. He was a master of "stage design." When Eyvind Earle's backgrounds for Sleeping Beauty were criticized as too dazzling, threatening to upstage the characters (and in places this is almost true), he was essentially being criticized for departing too much from the just-right Claude Coats look.

Coats was one of the artists Walt pulled out of the studio to work on Disneyland as it neared completion. He had studied architecture as well as painting, and he seemed a natural pick for designing the interiors of dark rides, starting with Mr. Toad's Wild Ride. Among other things, Coats had a knack for squeezing an amazing amount of ride into a ridiculously small space. He and Ken Anderson must be given the lion's share of credit for Mr. Toad.

(Coats concept art for Mr. Toad's Wild Ride)

The precise extent of Coats's contributions to the other two 1955 originals, Snow White and Peter Pan, is less clear, but there seems to be little doubt that he participated. Later dark rides in which he was heavily involved include Alice in Wonderland and Adventure Thru Inner Space (which was practically all Coats; notice that there are no characters in ATIS).

From the original Snow White's Adventures. The whole skeleton wiggled

while the skull extended toward you as you headed straight for it.

Anderson's and Coats's use of fluorescent paint was far more sophisticated than anything previously seen. They used darkness and black lighting to create a continuous flow of convincing spatial illusions.

As a background artist, Coats found that he was now doing pretty much the same thing in these dark rides, except on a larger scale. For the man who had already done so many beautiful background paintings for Peter Pan, scenes like these would have been a natch:

Besides the sheer scale, another difference in this work was the mixture of 2D and 3D. Coats was now doing background paintings with bulges, a sort of bas-relief. He quickly showed himself a master of this technique. This Peter Pan shot is modern (hat tip Daveland), but it preserves the illusioneering Coats and Anderson pioneered at Disney, layering shallow, three-dimensional models against flat paintings:

From Designing Disney's Theme Parks (ed. K.A. Marling; Flammarion: NY, 1997) 127.

(This rarely seen sketch is thought to have been done by Coats and is dated 1955. It has been suggested that it shows interior sets

for Peter Pan, but that seems extremely unlikely to me. More plausibly, these are concept sketches for Fantasyland itself, before

they realized that they were running out of money and went for the less-expensive, "Medieval Faire" look instead. It is fascinating

to compare some of these drawings with some of the ride façades created for the New Fantasyland in 1982-83.)

This ability to create convincing environments by cleverly blending 2D and 3D was put

to good use in designing "diorama" attractions like the Sleeping Beauty walk-thru . . .

. . . the Grand Canyon Diorama . . .

. . . and Primeval World . . .

"Run for your lives! It's a CLAUDASAURUS REX!"

(I was lucky enough to see the original Primeval World, a segment in Ford Motor Co.'s Magic Highways

exhibit at the NY World's Fair. The sets were spectacular, much taller than the Disneyland versions.)

The Submarine Voyage was another Claude Coats masterpiece. The seductive sets

(there is no other word for it) create an illusion of vast space within a confined area.

His six-foot-six frame is easy to pick out in photos:

Yet another Coats masterpiece: the Rainbow Caverns portion of the original Mine Train ride, a tour-de-force in creating atmosphere through black lighting and creative use of limited space. Among yesterlanded Disneyland attractions, this one sits at the very top of my most-missed list:

It had a swell soundtrack too. I've added the sound of waterfalls and fountains, for a more virtual experience. As I recall, the water sounds were at least as loud as the music.

Rainbow Caverns with Water Sounds

(Photo by Thomas Nebbia © National Geographic Society)

Butt ugly to unearthly beauty with a flip of the switch.

As you look at some of those Coats backgrounds up above, like Gepetto's cottage and the Sorcerer's Apprentice interiors, you almost wish you could step into them and look around, so inviting are they. With Rainbow Caverns, Coats finally enabled you do just that: ride right through one of his moody, atmospheric paintings.

Coats was paired with Marc Davis in the development of Pirates of the Caribbean. In general, Coats created the sets and Davis created the characters (although that's a bit of a simplification). Coats was very much the architect in charge, very hands-on.

The smashing success of the Davis-Coats team with POTC made it an obvious choice for the Haunted Mansion. In a rare comment on the latter attraction, Coats said, "Marc Davis had made a whole lot of interesting drawings, so many that we weren't able to use them all. The best ones seemed to drift to the top, and everyone seemed to be satisfied with the final selections.... Marc would work up drawings and I'd find space to put his ideas into the show."

Marc's comments on Claude seem to echo this analysis: "He was a background man, and he studied architecture at USC. His work was very commendable. He would do the settings for things, the environment within the attraction. I guess he did the framing, and I did the dancers within the frame. He was a nice fellow." ("Commendable" seems a bit stingy for an artist of this caliber, but that's Marc for you.)

(Quotes taken from Jeff Kurti, Walt Disney's Imagineering Legends [Disney Editions: NY, 2008] 58)

Coats was never an animator. He rarely drew characters, and when he did, they were generic. He did sketch a few ghosts for the Mansion, but they have no individual personality:

The wraith figure on the right actually did make it into the finished attraction, in the (original) Séance circle and in the Graveyard (i.e., the shrouded figure in the crypt). But this was an exception. Coats was much more involved in the physical architecture of the ride. In fact, the extant blueprints for the attraction have Claude Coats as the top Project Designer (with Vic Greene added second).

So, is that it? Coats was the architect of the house; Davis created the characters unliving in it. Somehow that analysis seems insufficient. There is such a different set of vibes coming from the two Imagineers that something more seems to be involved. It's not just spooky vs. kooky either.

The Painting as Gateway

Marc Davis produced umpteen haunted portrait concepts, not only changing portraits, such as you see in the final product, but talking portraits, portraits in which one character moves to another, and other varieties. For a time, it seems they were thinking of including that hoariest of haunted house clichés, the portrait with shifting eyes.

(gif animation by Jordan Manchester)

The original "Sinister 11" portraits at WDW featured a passive version of this gag.

If you think about it, any artist like Davis or Coats who paints in a representational style is already engaged in illusioneering. You feel as if you are looking through a window into a real, dimensional world; or if it's a portrait, you feel as if you are in the presence of an actual person. It's so fundamental that we normally don't even think about it, but it is true nonetheless that paintings can be downright eerie, without them even trying for that particular effect. It's no wonder that enchanted paintings are a stock item in the annals of the supernatural. You already find one in The Castle of Otranto, the first Gothic novel, written by Horace Walpole in 1764. In it, a figure steps right out of the frame of a painting.

The gag has often been recycled since. W. S. Gilbert (of Gilbert and Sullivan fame) used it in Ages Ago, an 1869 stage musical, and again in Ruddigore (1887). Notice how this 1870 London Times illustration of the scene in Ages Ago (right) even mimics an old illustration of the similar scene in Otranto (left).

At one point, Marc Davis played around with this concept for some of the haunted paintings in the Mansion.

Being the character animator par excellence, Marc Davis's natural inclination was to see a haunted painting as a portal through which a character comes from there to here, interacting with us on this side. That's the tradition, going back at least to Otranto. There would seem to be little interest in the world on the other side of the painting once the character has left it. Look what's left of that pirate portrait once the pirate has stepped out of it.

Claude Coats, in contrast, was the background painter par excellence. He spent almost two decades painting stages without actors. Background paintings all tend to have a silent, Edward Hopper feel to them. (Here's a typical Hopper. And here.) By necessity they're ghost towns, deserted landscapes. They are still waiting for their residents to arrive. And like I say, you almost want to step into some of them and snoop around.

Some of Coats' published Haunted Mansion artwork is quick-study stuff. There's a mood, but you don't necessarily feel . . . , you know, sucked in.

But there are other sketches depicting guests within the environment. Those guests are often empty shells. You the viewer are invited to imagine yourself on the other side of the frame (the opposite dynamic of Davis). You see yourself as the character in the landscape. Though never intended for public display, those sketches are among the most beautiful and seductive examples of Mansion art. Who wouldn't want go exploring in this?

Let's step inside, as best we can.

After examining the Fantasyland dark rides, with their blend of 2D and shallow 3D, bathed in the magic of black light, is there any doubt how this scene would have been accomplished? So cool. And this:

Who would not love to see how this would have been done? The whole drawing depicts a dissolve between there and here, inside and outside, human artifice and wild nature. This is not an exit point for characters stepping over into our presence; this is a place that invites you to enter.

When Marc Davis tried to depict this same sort of erasure of the boundary between inside and outside, he was far less successful. Too much focused on the characters, I imagine.

In this one, he's even got a literal picture frame floating in the limbo. No matter. The clouds,
the inky blackness . . . sorry, Marc, but you should leave this sort of thing to Claude Coats.

And finally, there's this breathtaking ballroom sketch, from 1966.

We can't walk in, but let's do the best we can.

As we saw previously, this organ is a direct lift from Ken Anderson:

I imagine this band appeared behind a scrim, perhaps like the sideshows in Carousel of Progress.

The chandelier may have been the source for projecting little blobs of light that turn into faces...

Look at that draftsmanship and subtle sense of color.

These faces are too, too creepy. Some of them have an almost jellyfish quality.

Was this next section an inspiration for the Grand Staircase at WDW?

Hmmm...could be.

Note how the teapot gag in the graveyard was originally intended as a ballroom gag, with wine. Makes more sense. The teapot ghost is the only ghost at the graveyard jamboree who is still completely invisible!

Again, the draftsmanship. Look how well the tricky shadows of the dancing ghosts are rendered. And here's the detail in this familiar sketch most easily overlooked: dozens of orange footprints, left by the dancers all over the floor.

And now we must leave.

Every time you feel that strange urge to wander into the labyrinthian depths of the Haunted Mansion and be lost (the pull is especially strong in the first half), that's Claude Coats the background painter, leaving your very self to supply the missing character cel.

Snow White Looks upon Death

2011-12-19T16:37:00.000-08:00

.
I apologize for the long wait since the last post (long by Long-Forgotten standards, anyway). This isn't "the next post" so much as a snack to tide us over until dinner. It's a visual coincidence, an oddity, something that stimulates imagination, if not investigation.

I'm going to be discussing Claude Coats in the next post, and in my Coats file is this curiosity. We start with a magnificent and well-known concept sketch for the ballroom that Coats apparently executed when the attraction was still going to be a walk-thru.

Not to tip my hand too much, but we'll be looking more closely at this sketch in the upcoming post. For now,

I would direct your attention to the ghostly faces and death's heads floating about in the darkness on the right.

Now let's move a world away. Let's visit one of Disneyland's finest "quiet

spots," the Snow White Grotto adjacent to the Sleeping Beauty castle. Lovely.

Here's a very different view, taken (I believe) by Brett Garrett of Visions Fantastic fame.

Very nice. Now look at Snow White's reflection in the dark waters below her.

You can probably see already where I'm going with this. Let's add a few

of Claude's phantom faces to the reflections on the water's surface...

If this were part of a film, we'd call it foreshadowing, seeing as how Snow

White is headed for the Sleeping Death in a glass coffin. Glass. So like water.

This accidental poignancy reminds me of a well-known visual pun with a sombre

purpose, "All is Vanity." As you know, they attempted to replicate this artwork (of

which there are many versions) in the bride's boudoir at Phantom Manor in Paris.

But I prefer the accidental one. It really isn't that obscure, you know.

You needn't fish around for peculiar photos of the Snow White grotto,

nor comb through Haunted Mansion concept art. Invert any number of

photos of Snow White, and you'll see the death's head, trailing a veil.

I'm not in a position to run over to Disneyland and check, but I would suppose her reflection

in the moat presents the image any time the lighting is right and you care to look for it.

Is the See-Saw Just So-So?

2011-10-20T17:27:00.000-07:00

If I were asked which full tableau in the Haunted Mansion has attracted the least interest, I would have to pick the royal playground scene—the king and queen on a teeter-totter and the duchess on a swing. That duchess, poor thing, is the lowest of the low, since most people speak of the scene with reference to the royal couple or the see-saw without even mentioning her. She's a smart choice for the audio-animatronic ghost least likely to occupy the #1 slot on anyone's list of favorites.

Alas, no love for the royal playground.

And yet, no one seems to hate the scene either. It's not even disliked. I may never have heard anyone rhapsodizing over it, but I've never heard anyone put it down either. So weird. The scene is practically long-forgotten even though it's still there!

One reason I myself have never done anything with it is that it's another one of those Marc Davis gags that went from sketch to maquettes to finished production figures with very little alteration, much like the opera singers, so there isn't much to say about the scene's development.

If you think those look alike, here's another shot of the maquettes placed within the scale model, and below it is a photo of the real

deal, taken from the 1969 pre-opening film footage shot by WED. You need more than a casual glance in order to tell the difference.

Naturally, the presentation gains in spookiness with more realistic photography of the scene as it appears under true show conditions, but in truth I haven't seen very many such pix. The photogs don't seem any more interested in this tableau than do the fans in general. This shot by pantheragem is frankly one of the few decent ones I've come across.

There is one interesting note about the history of this stunt (that's what darkride professionals call it; most of us laymen would call it a "scene" or a "tableau," with "gags" in it). Marc wanted the royal couple to appear and disappear as they teetered on their totter. It's on the sketch:

Reader Volt made a good observation about this piece in the Comments. He suggests that Davis literalizes the term "see-saw" so that of the two forms, at any given moment, one you can "see" and the other you "saw."

Marc typically thought up these things and then handed them off to Yale Gracey, the special effects wizard par excellence. It was his job to figure out a way to make the gag work, not Marc's. "Yale will think of something." In this case he didn't, or couldn't, but everyone thought it looked good enough anyway. Seems to me that the trick would have had to be achieved with lighting, with the mostly-transparent figures dropping down into a deep shadow, blocked off from the black lighting. As was the case with the famous Hat Box Ghost, such lighting tricks just won't work in there. All of it is too close to the track, and there is too much ambient lighting.

I know some people have wondered about the duchess on the swing, whether she's supposed to be young or old. What she is, is middle-aged. This piece of concept art isn't seen very often, so here ya go. Gotta give those Forgottenistas something they haven't seen before, or they might get restless. Actually, there is a flaw in this character concept that contributes to her overall blandness. We'll get to that eventually.

Incidentally, I don't consider the Hell Hound to be part of this scene. I think he's

an isolated figure in the background between tableaux. Everybody likes him.

Arooooo....

But let's get back to our royal playground. It's an amusing scene. What more is there to say? It's not as if there is a rich heritage of ghostly teeter-totters to explore. But it is a joke, right? And as soon as you ask the question, "Why is this joke funny?" (assuming that it is), ah, then the door creaks slowly open...

Step all the way in, please, and make room for everyone.

* lights a pipe, leans back in his chair, forehead becomes slightly furrowed *

(puff) There are two jokes going on here, in my opinion. (puff) The first one is American but not European, so you readers from across the pond may not get it. You see, there is creepy but amusing irony in finding a children's playground located in a crumbling old graveyard at midnight. It's the last place you'd expect to find such a cheerfully innocent environment. In America. In places like England, old churchyards and cemeteries are so common that I don't suppose anyone pays much attention. They're all over the place, and you have to put your playgrounds somewhere, right? If Reggie's soccer ball goes bounding into an old boneyard, well, what of it? (puff)

Trust me, the Americans are all looking at that photo and going, "Ewww."

The more substantial joke emanating from the Mansion tableau is the ironic contrast between the stuffy dignity of the royal threesome (especially the king and queen) and the childlike behavior they now gleefully exhibit. Once they are dead, they evidently don't have to worry about decorum and can frolic about like kids. How droll to see a haughty old king and queen acting like seven-year olds. It's another example of Marc Davis's astounding ability to tell a joke in .032 seconds. What is strange, though, is how unusual this status reversal is at the Mansion.

Marc Davis produced a lot of concept art that essentially shows ghosts carrying on with their earthly pursuits as if nothing had happened. There are ghosts of boxers, of coffin makers (cute idea), of Spanish soldiers—all still engrossed in their occupations as if unaware that they're dead.

This motif did make it into the finished Haunted Mansion, but most of the examples are musicians. You've got the organist (if he's meant to be taken as a professional), and there's the graveyard band (of whom two at least are definitely professionals—the bandsmen in uniform), and of course there's the opera couple. Why are they still plying their trades? Because musicians are needed at the ghostly gathering you are witnessing. They also need someone to bring some of the ghosts here, so the coachman gets to drive his rig as in life. What we need most of all is a good medium to bring the ghosts on over, so the ghost of Madame Leota keeps her daytime job as well. We don't need boxers or carpenters or soldiers, so those gags ended up in the circular file. Such identifiable professionals as you do see but whose skills are no longer required are emphatically not carrying on with their earthly occupations. They're just whooping it up. The headsman is not gearing up for an execution (where's the block?), and the knight has no rescuing to do. Since the afterlife appears to be an egalitarian paradise, the royals have no subjects to rule.

It's no surprise, then, if we find that the king and queen aren't kinging and queening, but that still leaves the undeniably childlike behavior unexplained. After all, there's another king at the table in the ballroom, and he isn't ruling anything anymore either, but he's not playing hopscotch; he's getting drunk like a responsible adult. If you think about it, this is a joke that could easily have been used elsewhere, but it's pretty much unique to the royal playground. The closest thing to a parallel would probably be Pickwick, the fellow swinging around on the ballroom chandelier like a naughty boy; but actually, we don't know how sedate that ambiguous character might have been in life, so it's hard to measure the contrast. He could have been a "mad duke," a Mr. Toad type of guy, and this kind of behavior might not be so categorically different from the sort of stunts he pulled while alive.

Come to think of it, maybe that's why he's not alive. There are also the merry graveyard bicyclists, but again, we don't know if that is activity which was beneath their dignity while they were still among the living. Bicyclists die too, you know. The royal playground, it seems to me, is a bit of specific whimsy without a clear parallel elsewhere.

Before getting into the question of why a king would wish to act like a kid, we might first ask the question: how immature is this? How thick is the irony? Well, to answer that, you need to first ask, How much of a kiddie thing is the see-saw? If you wish to explore the psychological place of the humble teeter-totter in the consciousness of the general culture, it doesn't take long to amass a wealth of visual data. I'm giving you here much more than is really necessary to get a feel for it, but the pictures are so delightful that I don't suppose many of you will mind.

First thing to note: teeter-totters are old.

Anachronism is probably not part of the irony.

You get the idea pretty quickly. See-saws are definitely for kids, and especially for little tykes. As nostalgia pieces, they recall a bit of distant childhood (which seems to be the point of many of these artworks). Adults only use them if they're parents helping out the little 'uns. As it happens, the up and down rhythmic movement makes this simple contraption ideal for the singy-songy nursery rhyme, and you'll find the see-saw in at least two traditional children's verses:

I came across only one departure from this otherwise uniform presentation in older artwork, and it is the exception that proves the rule.

The 18th century French artist Jean-Honoré Fragonard is best known for his rococo masterpiece, The Swing:

It was popular, and Fragonard, no fool he, followed it up with further

examples of the hedonistic and frivolous ruling classes merrily at play.

None of them matched the popularity of The Swing, but before he got tired of

the theme, he did give us our one solid example of adults playing on a see-saw:

These works today are sometimes pointed to as inadvertent portraits of the decadence of the leisure classes in

late 18th c. France, the Ancien Regime, all dimpled and plump and ripe for La Revolution. Guillotine bait.

A pretty clear picture emerges. Royalty and nobility cavorting on see-saws in life would be considered decadent, embarrassingly juvenile, something which betrays a serious lack of gravitas, that sense of sobriety appropriate to the responsibilities of high governance or to noblesse oblige. And that's important; even we toothpick chompin' Americans don't really want our President to show up at the Oval Office in jeans and a tee shirt (Andrew Jackson's muddy boots notwithstanding—oh, google it if you don't know what I mean).

We're all agreed, then. While they're alive, kings and queens have to act like adults. After they're dead, we smile in gentle approval because we see in this case that they're finally free to have some fun, perhaps the kind of fun they were never allowed in life, not even as children. This sort of whimsy works well with royals but not quite as strikingly with lesser mortals.

Incidentally, that's precisely what is wrong with the duchess, in my opinion. She's drinking a cup of tea and not even holding the ropes. She can't be swinging very hard, that's for sure. She's more or less using the swing as a chair, which a duchess might actually do in a pinch with minimal loss of dignity. Ho-hum. Still behaving like an adult. Little irony, and consequently not very funny.

Why do we assume that royal obligations cease at the grave? Such an attitude hasn't always been the case, you know. We can contrast our figurines of deceased monarchs with other figurines of deceased monarchs, ones who were expected to carry on in their roles even beyond the grave. Those ones aren't funny and aren't supposed to be. The best known examples are probably the Egyptian pharaohs, with their lifelong preparation for the afterlife, where they carry on in their exalted roles. Kings need courtiers and servants, so a whole slew of them get the maquette treatment and crowd into the tomb with the big guy.

Those are shabti figurines, servants of the pharaoh in the afterlife (in this case king Tut). No see-saws for him, just work work work. Upon death, he gets further divinitized and expects to do adult, pharaoh stuff, keeping all these helpers busy in the process.

But the Egyptians had nothing on the Chinese Emperor Qin Shi Huang (d. 210-209 BC). He was so sure that he would just keep on doin' his emperor thang after death that he had a full-sized terra cotta army buried with him. Thousands of figures. The existence of Qin's breathtaking army was unknown until it was discovered in 1974.

The Emperor himself drove a chariot and four-horse team of bronze.

Pretty amazing.

It's not completely silly to compare these deadly serious funerary figures with our comic teeter-totter royalty produced solely for light entertainment: that contrast is precisely the point. What makes the difference? At bottom, I'd say it's the notion that "king" is what you do rather than what you are. The ideals of democracy and equality pretty much did away with the notion of divine kingship, and we understand our rulers and leaders to be human beings who are fundamentally no different than anyone else, performing the act of ruling, filling an office and nothing more. That means that their royal responsibilities end at the grave.

Not to get overly theological, but I will venture the suggestion that this way of thinking has its ultimate roots in the Judeo-Christian worldview. The eastern Roman empire segued with hardly a ripple into the Byzantine (Eastern Christian) empire, where you had an emperor in the succession of the Caesars and as autocratic as any pharaoh, but one custom that was different called for the Patriarch of the Church to plop a handful of dirt into the emperor's hand at one point during his coronation and remind him that he too is dust, and to dust he shall return. Over here in the west, to cite but one example, the burial service in the Book of Common Prayer is the same for everyone. As an old Episcopal priest I knew was fond of saying, "The queen and her gardener get the same treatment." I suppose that as you become acclimatized to the concept that there is one God, and to him, "Even the nations are like a drop in the bucket, and are accounted as dust on the scales" (Isa 40:15), this demythologized view of human kingship becomes an increasingly natural perspective.

And yet. And yet...

We can never repress old concepts entirely. One of Disney's most successful films evah, and the first to feature an original story, was The Lion King. And what do we find there? Simba is born to rule. He can't run away from it: it's in his blood. The most important point of tension in the whole film is Simba's resistance to his destiny. It's not just something he may choose to do or not to do, like the tasks which fall to ordinary mortals. He must recognize who he is, come out of the playground, and get onto the throne. Because we all agree: he's living a life that is beneath him. There is even a hint that the pharaohs and old Qin Shi were right, as Simba's father Mustafa appears in the stars as no ordinary constellation. But this remains the exception rather than the rule.

We have explained why kings and queens shed those roles in death: they are only humans, and their earthly responsibilities die when they die. We can understand that the ghosts of these royals might want to kick up their heels a bit, like the king in the ballroom, but why the specifically childlike behavior of playing on a see-saw? I think it's because there's a natural analog between king/peasant and adult/child. You see both dynamics at work in Sleeping Beauty. Aurora would choose the life of a peasant (where she mistakenly thinks her true love lies), but she acquiesces to her "royal duty" as a princess. This happens precisely as she is making the transition from childhood to adulthood, her 16th birthday. She accepts it, but she resigns herself to it as if it were a prison sentence.

From fairy tales to Shakespeare, there persists a tendency to wax romantic over the supposedly simple and happy life of the peasant, free from the "peril of the envious court" and unaware of how lucky he is not to be the king. A classic expression of this idea is in Bernard Mandeville's poem, The Fable of the Bee (1705). The list of things monarchs must worry about is particularly good.

Had the meanest and most unciviliz’d Peasant leave Incognito to observe the greatest King for a Fortnight; tho’ he might pick out several Things he would like for himself, yet he would find a great many more, which, if the Monarch and he were to change Conditions, he would wish for his part to have immediately alter’d or redress’d, and which with Amazement he sees the King submit to. And again if the Sovereign was to examine the Peasant in the same manner, his Labour would be insufferable, the Dirt and Squalor, his Diet and Amours, his Pastimes and Recreations would be all abominable; but then what Charms would he find in the other’s Peace of Mind, the Calmness and Tranquillity of his Soul? No Necessity for Dissimulation with any of his Family, or feign’d Affection to his Mortal Enemies; no Wife in a Foreign Interest, no Danger to apprehend from his Children; no Plots to unravel, no Poison to fear; no popular Statesman at Home or cunning Courts abroad to manage; no seeming Patriots to bribe; no unsatiable Favourite to gratify; no selfish Ministry to obey; no divided Nation to please, or fickle Mob to humour, that would direct and interfere with his Pleasures.

In precisely the same way, an adult is wont at times to look on the carefree play of children with a sort of envy. Don't be in too big a hurry to grow up, kid. Yeah, we get to drive cars and other neat stuff, but it's not all it's cracked up to be.

The joke of the king and queen ghosts on the teeter-totter works well because it combines a cluster of related ideas: (1) Sorry Tut, sorry Qin, beg to differ; we're all just human beings, and death reduces us all to the same state, whether king or commoner. (2) The life of a king is a mixed blessing; the palace is also a prison. Therefore, death may be a kind of release. (3) As a king might envy the simple life of a peasant, so too the adult envies the child. In that sense, we can all empathize with the royals frolicking about unselfconsciously in a ghostly playground.

Put it all together and you've got the source of both your amusement and your approval at the sight of these ghosts.

Humor is complicated, isn't it?

From Creepy Old Flicks...Part Two

2011-09-28T12:43:00.000-07:00

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Thanks to our ever-vigilant readers and friends, new material (which is really old material) necessitates the need for new posts (with things that really belong in the old posts). Blogging allows that sort of thing nicely.

Some time ago, over at the Long-Forgotten Thread, TheHatboxGhost suggested another example of influence on the Haunted Mansion from old movies. THG thinks that the Hatbox Ghost was inspired by the Man with the Beaver Hat in the lost 1927 Lon Chaney film, London After Midnight. At the time, I was only half convinced, but after seeing a lot more stills from the film, I think THG is right. Whether you look at the original Marc Davis concept sketches or at the prototype figure or the real deal, the resemblance between the HBG and the Chaney character is often striking. it's hard to resist the conclusion that we're dealing with a source of inspiration.

In most of the stills, the Chaney character is paired up with a female spook, a vampiress apparently. She looks nothing like the Attic Bride in any of her incarnations, but the mere fact that ol' Smiley is continually seen with a lovely young thing standing by is certainly agreeable to the Mansion motif of the two characters with a kind of bride-and-groom karma going on. In one still they're even in a scene reminiscent of an attic:

Add a heartbeat and a bridal gown and ta da, welcome to Disneyland

You'll note that more often than not, ol' Smiley poses with a lantern in a hatbox-hoisting style:

London After Midnight is one of the most famous of all lost films. The last known copy perished in a fire in 1967. (Say...isn't that just two years before the Hatbox Ghost appeared and then immediately disappeared?) Film buffs, especially Lon Chaney fans, keep hoping that some day, oh some day, the film will return. Perhaps a copy will be found in somebody's private collection, or on a dusty shelf in the closet of an old theater. Hey, maybe in an attic. By a curious twist of fate, the Man with the Beaver Hat has come to occupy the same psychic space as the Haunted Mansion character he helped inspire. He's out there somewhere, and some day....

A big tip o' the hat goes to Mr. Fenwright for this next one. It's the 1920 Harold Lloyd film, Haunted Spooks. This is another flick that is perhaps most famous for a fiery accident. During a publicity photo shoot in the middle of production, a prop bomb went off in Lloyd's hand, taking two fingers with it and burning the comic actor's face, temporarily blinding him. He fully recovered and wore gloves in his films from then on. His salary also doubled. The finger thing was kept secret. Lloyd didn't want people feeling sorry for him when they're supposed to be laughing.

Anyhoo, Fen draws our attention to this title card and wonders if it may have inspired the phrase, "grim grinning ghosts":

"But wait a minute," say you faithful Forgottenistas, "hasn't it already been established that 'grim grinning ghosts' comes from line 933 of Shakespeare's 'Venus and Adonis' "?

"Hard-favour'd tyrant, ugly, meagre, lean,
Hateful divorce of love,"—thus chides she Death,—
"Grim grinning ghost, earth's worm, what does thou mean
To stifle beauty and to steal his breath,
Who when he liv'd, his breath and beauty set
Gloss on the rose, smell to the violet?

Yep, that's an exact match, but here's the mental calculus I'm using. You have to weigh the greater precision of the Shakespeare quote against the greater precision of the Haunted Spooks provenance. In other words, we know that the Imagineers (including X Atencio) researched old ghost films, and sure enough here we have a haunted house movie with "ghastly grinning ghosts" right there on a title card. The setting for the Shakespeare quote, on the other hand, is far removed from such things. The change from "ghastly" to "grim" is a natural move to enhance the alliteration (grim grinning) and could easily happen independently, without even knowing that by remarkable coincidence you're now quoting Shakespeare. Perhaps too the Shakespeare line was actually what inspired the Haunted Spooks screenwriter, consciously or unconsciously, so the Bard still sneaks in through the back door.

I also noticed how similar the artwork on that title card is to some Fantasia "Night on Bald Mountain" concept art, which is something that in turn may have inspired HM Imagineers. Besides, I'm sure lots of you have never seen this particular piece, and it's pretty enough to post even without a flimsy pretext.

See?

But I'm not going to push that one, since we're dealing with such obvious visual clichés here.

Our last film is not really an update to the Creepy Old Flicks post but rather the Death Coach post. Forgottenista ww12345 pointed out a movie that I must admit I had not heard of, a Swedish film from 1921.

It goes by various names in English; usually "The Phantom Carriage" or "The Phantom Chariot." I understand it's considered a real classic, a landmark among Swedish films, and it's received some fresh, recent attention with the release of a Blu-Ray DVD edition.

I watched it yesterday. It's essentially a morality tale in the tradition of Dickens' "A Christmas Carol," which is also a ghost story, of course. Enjoy, but don't expect any scares. It does have one particularly good line in it:

The Phantom Carriage catches our attention because it provides yet another definition of the Death Coach, reminding us of how flexible the image is, adaptable to any number of storylines. Here's how it works this time around:

So don't be that guy, because the gig sucks. Message received.

The Beginning of the Endless Hallway

2011-08-16T11:17:00.000-07:00

Life~by~the~Drop Jeff Fillmore

Once you've boarded your doombuggy, the Haunted Mansion almost becomes a different ride, doesn't it? The walk-thru portion has one feel and the ride portion another. You sit down in your omnimover, and there is an unavoidable feeling that the attraction has kinda hit the restart button. That's okay; it's really not a problem, but it does mean that the Imagineers who built the ride needed to follow some of the same show dynamics at this point that they would ordinarily use at the beginning of any other dark ride.

At Walt Disney World and at Tokyo Disneyland, the first full tableaux are low-key affairs. (I don't count either of the portrait halls as "full tableaux.") The music room and library are just as much about setting the mood as they are about intriguing special effects. By the time you get to the Endless Hallway, the subject of today's post, you're well into the ride. This is also true of Phantom Manor. Ah, but at the Disneyland original, the Endless Hallway is the first full tableau that you see after boarding your doombuggy, so it's far more important there. It has the responsibility of leaving that good first impression people are always talking about.

I think it succeeds very well. The tableau is low-key but gives you four distinct gags: the armor, the drapes, the candelabra, and the hall itself. Shameless gasbag that I am, I have something to say about all of these, plus a history lesson, plus a post-script.

First the armor. As it does so often, the story begins with Ken Anderson:

Yeah, it's a cliché, but it's a good one. Marc Davis seems especially to have liked suits of armor. You see them prominently in the concept artwork we looked at a couple of posts back (the "Weirder" one). Here's an unfinished Davis sketch that you've probably never seen. This was done after he had done the artwork for the Grand Hall (as it was called then), so you wonder what this was for.

They all look pretty normal, so you wonder how we got our odd-looking fellow. There is no shortage
of really bizarre medieval helmets out there, but I haven't found anything that looks quite like ours.
This is a case where one of you readers may know something the rest of us don't. If so, comment!

Now the billowing curtains (alas, often not visible due to the darkness). There are actually two doorways with the blowing drapes, the first one immediately on the left as you round the corner. It has the honor of being the first special effect you encounter up here, but it's easy to miss and hard to photograph, because your doombuggy immediately turns away from it, and the other buggies do their best to block it out.

(Just ignore the highlighted duct for the moment. We'll get back to it.)

In the Claude Coats concept art, notice the pink chair and its position. And did you see the ghosts in the drapes?

They're another cliché, but they represent an important idea. The Ghost Host has already saddled you with one unanswerable question: real or imagined? The blowing drapes pose another: natural or supernatural? Seems like every haunted house story has a character who tries to explain everything as natural phenomena. "It's just the wind. Someone probably left a window open somewhere. That's probably what made the armor rattle too. You're turning into a bunch of nervous Nellies." Characters sometimes internalize this conversation. After all, now that you're convinced that the ghosts are real—that this can't all be just a hallucination—there's still the danger of going to the opposite extreme. Your skeptical side may have admitted defeat with regard to the big question, but that doesn't mean it has utterly abandoned you. "Come on Jennifer, get a grip; every creaking hinge and every flickering candle isn't necessarily a ghost. Some of these things have a perfectly rational explanation. Good lord, next thing you know you'll be finding ghosts in the wallpaper!" Heh heh.

Then there are the other two gags, the candelabra and the hall itself. You've seen plenty of ghostly tricks up to this point, and you've heard plenty of eerie things, starting with the Ghost Host himself, but at Disneyland the first irrefutable ghost that you actually unsee is the floating candelabra. I mean, there's an invisible ghost standing right there, holding a candelabra. That's a real escalation in ghostliness. And finally, what can you say about that hallway? It's immense. It's incredible.

It's also scary. You look down that eerie hall, with all those doors, and you feel like you could easily get lost in this house forever.

Oh, it's all just perfect, isn't it? Hard to believe that what you're seeing is . . . a patch job.

That's right. This seemingly flawless scene is the result of some slapdash, improvised, last minute imagineering. The hallway itself is basically what was planned, but if you could back up just a few months before opening day and experience it as it was planned up to that point, it would have gone something like this:

Your doombuggy moves in front of the Endless Hallway and you are hit with a blast of cold air, which flutters the armor's feathery helmet ornament and explains the billowing curtain. There is no floating candelabra. The Ghost Host says, "Ssssssh. Listen!" and you hear the tramping of loud footsteps coming down the hall toward you. As the sound passes the suit of armor, its hand moves. The steps continue to travel toward you and pass right over you (or through you), only to continue on the other side as if you weren't there. There are other sound effects with the footsteps: panting and chain rattling, and it's possible that a smoke-like effect is also used.

Huh? What happened here? Let's go back to the beginning, the very beginning . . .

The original inspiration for the Endless Hallway could be found in the old Sleeping Beauty Diorama, the castle walk-thru that was beautifully re-done and re-opened just a few years ago. It's a hidden gem, recreating much of the look and feel of the 1957 original. (Thank you Chris Merritt and team.) One scene from the original that was not re-created and which perished in the 1977 Barbie doll make-over was the Bottomless Pit. It was located where the waltzing spinning wheels are found today. You could peer into what looked like a stone turrett, but it had no top or bottom. You couldn't quite get your head in there, but you could scrunch up pretty close and see a long way in each direction.

Way cool. It was done with mirrors, of course, one on top and one on the bottom, reflecting each other into eternity. Now if you think about it, this is exactly like the Endless Hallway, except that one is blue, vertical, round, and made of stone, while the other is brown, horizontal, square, and made of wood. Don't bother me with such trifling details. You might also object that the EH only uses one mirror, back there in the fog, while the bottomless pit uses two. That's true, but at one point the Mansion team did toy with the idea of using several mirrors for the EH. Here's a favorite piece of concept art, a watercolor by Dorothea Redmond:

Nice, eh? But how would they have done that? Well, the first vertical mirror, immediately in front of you, is a two-way mirror. It's relatively dark where you're sitting, and it's brighter inside what is essentially a box made of four mirrors and two wooden sides, so you see through it like glass, but from the inside looking back at you, it acts just like a regular mirror. How would you light up the inside, though? There's no place to hide fixtures. Simple, you just have these glowing orbs hanging down on very thin electric cables through holes in the ceiling mirror. If the wires are thin, they can't carry much current, and the lights will have to be of very low wattage. You'll compensate for that by having lots of them in there, as bright as the wiring will tolerate. Really, they're just like Yale Gracey's fireflies from the Blue Bayou. They can dance around like the fireflies too.

Anyway, you can see the Sleeping Beauty bottomless pit influence here. But of course, they didn't do it like this and elected to go for a more natural look. They settled for one mirror placed well back in the mist (i.e. multiple scrims). Here's a 3D. It may not be endless, but it's still a pretty long room.

The script for the "Story and Song from the Haunted Mansion" record album is based largely on an early script for the ride, as we've mentioned before. Consequently, with the record you can sometimes hear what they had in mind before they changed things, if they changed things. For example, when the hero and heroine, Mike and Karen, climb the stairs (sans doombuggy, the lucky ducks), they notice a change in temperature:

Appalling Cold

This effect was really going to be used in the ride, and possibly it was for a short while at the beginning. Two vents hidden on either side of the hallway entrance, probably in the steps, were going to blast you with cold air. An exhaust vent on the wall behind you was going to suck it out of there as fast as it came in. (That's the vent highlighted in the earlier photo.) WED engineer Paul Saunders, who worked on the HM in 1967 and 1968, thinks the cold air effect was actually used. I don't have any memory of it. If it was used, it wasn't for long. Perhaps it was difficult to confine and control the stream of cold air. So the scene has lost one special effect.

[Edit] Or almost lost. Several readers affirm that you can feel a slight blast of cold air about this point, especially at WDW. The effect is still there, but it seems like it's toned down quite a bit. The building is air conditioned, after all, and according to someone who used to work there, air conditioning vents are very deliberately arranged in that area to create a cold spot. It's soft enough for a guest to think without thinking, "Oh, that's the air conditioning" and fail to appreciate the "special effect." The blast of cold air coming out of the EH and hitting you full in the face – that's gone, perhaps never was. [Edit]

The traveling sound was more interesting. Once again, take it away Thurl:

Through the Dimly-Lit Mist

To accomplish this effect, they installed a string of speakers in the hallway on the left side wall, continuing up to the track, and continuing again on the other side. The sound would simply pan along this string of speakers.

They actually installed the speakers in the hallway, and they're still there today.

The red wallpaper has never been replaced, so it's no surprise that it's faded in some places. That's why the speaker cover camouflage paint is now too bright in some places. Otherwise, look how carefully those covers were painted! Speaking of the EH wallpaper, here's a tile so you can use it for your wallpaper, a fine freebie for faithful Forgottenistas. It's made from a photograph of the real thing.

If the "Story and Song" narrative is to be trusted, there were footsteps, screams and rattling chains. A sound file for the footsteps has been preserved. Here's a clip:

Footsteps (many thanks to Brandon, "GRD")

[Edit] As reader "Grinning Ghost" has pointed out to me, that's probably the full blend of footsteps and other sounds that you hear in the background on the Story and Song album during the "Corridor of Doors" sequence. [Edit]

These heavy footfalls are directly inspired by the 1964 film, The Haunting. There are two places in the film where the same kind of heavy, slow, marching, muffled footsteps are heard, and one of them is in the same scene in which the "bulging door" effect is used (although the footsteps don't actually start until after the door stops bulging). That effect, of course, is another idea directly borrowed for the Haunted Mansion.

Footfalls from The Haunting

The record also mentions some kind of "ghost-like figure." The only hint I have seen of a lost visual effect at this point is this peculiar but widely used publicity photo.

What's with the smoke? No one seems to know. I've been told that it's probably just something they threw
in for the photo shoot, but I don't buy it. Seems like a lot of bother for something you don't need at all.

It's really no mystery why these effects were never used: The sequence takes too damn long. So there go some more gags, right down the drain. Oh fine, that's just great. We're well into 1969 now, and that Endless Hallway tableau is going to seem pretty bare unless someone can come up with an idea, and whatever it is, they'd better come up with it soon.

What did they finally do? They moseyed down the hall to the Séance circle and stole an effect that was intended for that room and put it in the Endless Hallway instead. That would be the floating candelabra. It was simple, but it looked great in its new location. Problem solved.

They must have done this before they filmed the inside of the ride (July probably, maybe June), because you can see the candelabra in that film. (You will remember that the WED film was edited and has been re-used ever since as stock footage of the HM interior, so you see parts of it even today in Disney commercials, TV shows, etc.) There is our candelabra below on the left, but notice that in the scale model of the ride (below right), it isn't there.

Those scale model photos are mighty fine things. Besides being just plain fun to look at, you can see what made the cut and what didn't in the final attraction. Here's another shot of the EH model:

The blowing drapes, the suit of armor, and the overstuffed chair are all there. Even the large floor candelabrum is there in the scale model (see the blowing drapes photo above). That handsome, paneled wainscoting was going to be used throughout, but I suppose time and money considerations eliminated it.

One remaining curiosity is the wallpaper. The models show that they intended to use the Rolly Crump demon-eye wallpaper starting here and continuing all the way down the corridor to the Séance room. That is indeed how it is at Phantom Manor and at WDW since the big refurbishing of 2007, where it provides the basis of an impressive new gag, as the eyes appear before the walls do. But before 2007 all three Mansions (DL, WDW, Tokyo) had this yellow, off-the-shelf wallpaper in the EH tableau:

(1999 pic by Allen Huffmann)

Disneyland and Tokyo still have it. I don't know why they used this instead of the demon-eye paper, but whatever the explanation, I like the yellow stuff. I know I'm going well beyond the conscious intentions of the Imagineers here, but the fact is, that pattern serves as a good transitional step. It's not fake; it's real-world wallpaper. It's got a perfectly normal, old-fashioned design. In other words, it's not supposed to have faces in it, but like many intricate patterns, you can't help but find faces in it if you have any sense of whimsy, or if there's anything left of your kidhood imagination.

I guess it's possible that whoever picked it out noticed that the pattern lent itself to this sort of thing very easily, and that it would therefore be a good pick for the Mansion, but even that much is probably pushing it. At the very least, it's a happy accident.

A Post-Script: Pink Floyd and the Endless Hallway.

I'm a fan of early Pink Floyd, so this little example of synchronicity is a hoot. Skip it if you want.

Floyd was always a bold, experimental band, and in 1969 they were the first to use a quadraphonic sound system, with speakers placed in all four corners of the room. They had a home-made device, whimsically called the "Azimuth Co-ordinator," which enabled them to pan the sound around the auditorium with a simple joy-stick.

The first time they used it was at a concert on May 16th, 1969

What they did at one point in the show was play a tape of some heavy footsteps invisibly walking around in the audience, pausing now and then to jingle some keys (rattling chains!) and slam a door, all of it with lots of reverberation. It worked great, and it was an audience pleaser, so they used this gimmick in their concerts for the better part of a year.

In other words, a bunch of guys at Disney and a British rock band were creating exactly the same sound effect at exactly the same time, with no apparent knowledge of each other. Here's a clip of the Floyd effect from a concert on September 17th, 1969. Compare it with the HM version.

Pink Floyd

Haunted Mansion

Of course, at Disney they added further sound effects to the footfalls, but then, they never used any of it anyway.

At these concerts, the Floyd played a lot of material from their third album, released in the US on . . . wait for it . . . August 9, 1969.

LOL, as the kids say.

You Just Gotta See This. Oh, and This.

2011-07-21T17:00:00.000-07:00

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7-11 is indeed a lucky combination.

Some startling new photography appeared July 9 and 14 of 2011, necessitating a revision of the early history of the attic bride. Accordingly, I'm letting you know that two earlier posts, Here Comes the Bride: Part Two and Here Comes the Bride: Part Three have been renamed and rewritten, with smaller changes to Part One and to the Hat Box Ghost post. I also redid the Bride and Leaping Skull post. This is one way in which a blog can be superior to a book.

July 9 saw the appearance of some home movie footage from August of 1969, probably taken during the opening week of the Haunted Mansion, or not long after. There is a murky but important shot of the original attic bride, lasting about three seconds, and some much better film of the Hat Box Ghost, which is the real prize, of course.

This historic footage was discovered by Todd J. Pierce and posted at the Disney History Institute blogsite. Being the anal old cuss that I am, I have a few quibbles with the narrative that accompanies the edited film. The photograph Todd mentions as appearing "40 years" after the Mansion first opened has actually been up at the Doombuggies.com site since October of 2001, and I am a little skeptical whether "dozens" of people ever claimed to have seen the original Hat Box Ghost. To get really picky, the sign hanging at the entrance went up in late 1964 or early 1965, not the "late 60's." But forget about those nit-picks. This is about as close to a Holy Grail for Mansionites as you're ever likely to see.

While we're on the subject of film, another video you just GOTTA see if you haven't already is the Martin/Warren ride-thru video of the WDW Mansion, filmed in 2009. It sets a new standard for this sort of thing, miles above anything else out there, including official Disney product. It's about an hour long, intending to give you every tasty detail of the ride. The sound quality is also excellent, so be sure to listen with headphones sometime.

The Haunted Mansion WDW 2009 HD from Martins Videos on Vimeo.

For many Orlando fans, the three-and-a-half year interval between the major refurb of September 2007 and the disastrous new additions in April 2011 represents the gold standard, the best any Mansion has been since 1969 (notwithstanding the addition of Constance). It is our good fortune that the Martin/Warren video was made during this period.

Getting back to 7-11, as luck would have it, July 14 saw the publication of an October 1975 photo of the Disneyland attic bride, proving that the "Corpse Bride" variety was indeed used at Anaheim. That, plus the newly discovered HBG footage, led to the revamping of our early history of the attic bride. We can thank the Major at Gorillas Don't Blog for that one.

A Weirder Haunted Mansion

2011-07-01T10:40:00.000-07:00

It's not too hard to visualize what the Haunted Mansion would have looked like if Ken Anderson's pioneering labors had been realized. We have an abundance of concept art, plus show scripts and interviews. We even have a floor plan. Likewise, for the final phase, with Marc Davis, Claude Coats, and X. Atencio at the controls, we have artwork to admire, interviews to read, history to discuss, and the actual product to look at. When it comes to the middle crew, however, things are a bit murkier. That would be Rolly Crump and Yale Gracey, in charge of the Haunted Mansion project from 1959 until 1963. We've talked about them before, and no doubt we'll talk about them again. Very important team.

The purpose of this post is to make the Crump-Gracey interlude a little less obscure. The raw data for that chapter falls into two categories, with the New York World's Fair dividing the two. Both sets leave unanswered questions. First, we have the colorful recollections of Rolly Crump about those pre-Fair years. We hear, for example, about a spectacular tableau featuring a ghostly sea captain haunted by his murdered wife, made wondrous through a sophisticated application of Pepper's Ghost. Everyone who saw this thing was blown away by it.

Rolly Crump on the "Sea Captain" Tableau
(from "The Haunted Mansion Story volume one" Extinct Attractions DVD)

Rolly also talks frequently about how it happened that Yale invented such things as the Leota effect and the follow-you busts, how they read ghost stories and experimented with Pepper's Ghost and other ways of creating ghostly illusions, and so on. The surprising thing is that there seems to be no concept artwork to show. That's very strange. Rolly's artwork from the '59-'63 period, if it exists, has either gone unpublished or has been unrecognized as stemming from those early years. Yale was an artist, but what we have from him are things like notebook sketches for gags.

(sketches published in E-Ticket Magazine #9, summer 1990)

We also have a wonderful working model of what would eventually be the Grand Ballroom scene; however, it's not clear when Yale built this model. It could come from the post-Fair years, when Davis-Coats-Atencio were running the show. So in the end, it's hard to tell just what the Mansion would have looked like inside if Rolly and Yale had had their way and it had opened in 1963, as originally planned when they took charge. What kind of show would you have seen, step by step? We know it would have been a walk-thru. In fact, the reason there are two stretching rooms is that in the Crump-Gracey years they were planning two complete walk-thru attractions, exact duplicates, side by side, in order to handle the crowds. Between the sea captain character and the guided walk-thru format, it also sounds like they were planning to continue using Ken Anderson's basic template. Beyond that, it's sketchy. This 1962 brochure, announcing a 1963 opening, isn't much help.

"Gathering the 'world's greatest collection of ghosts' is no easy task...most people are kind of reluctant to admit they know any! But Walt Disney has had his 'talent scouts' searching for several years...and in 1963, the HAUNTED MANSION will be filled with famous and infamous residents."

Our second batch of data for the middle team is the abundance of Rolly's "Museum of the Weird" artwork, which—according to Rolly—comes from after the World's Fair, when many Imagineers found that they now had time on their hands. Rolly returned to the HM project and turned out 20 or 30 imaginative but extremely strange sketches. Fellow Imagineer Jack Ferges also had some extra time, so he helped Rolly make maquettes of some of these.

Wowzers. Suddenly we've got concept artwork out the wazoo. (That's where the other Imagineers thought it came from, too.) By this point, Walt had added Davis, Coats, and Atencio to the team. All of them had their individual ideas to pitch to Walt. Then came that infamous episode in late fall, 1964 (summarized two posts ago), in which Walt made it crystal clear to everyone working on the attraction that he really liked Rolly's nightmarish creations and wanted them incorporated into the finished project in the form of a "Museum of the Weird." The Museum never happened, of course, and it's difficult to know exactly how all of this surreal material was going to be used in the house itself. Heck, Rolly freely admits that he himself didn't know, which is why Walt had to find a solution to the problem. So you wonder, would a 1963 Mansion have included things like this? Or did these 1964 creations represent a fresh departure after the Fair? Or . . . well, it's not clear.

Recall that the Museum was Walt's idea, but it really wasn't what Rolly had wanted. Rolly wanted a weirder Haunted Mansion, not just a spill area before or after the main attraction. He has repeatedly said that he wanted to avoid the usual haunted house clichés ("corny") and to go for something more fantastical. As discussed in an earlier post, he was particularly intrigued by the castle in the Jean Cocteau 1946 film, La belle et la bête, and he wanted something similar for the HM, with the entire building enchanted and alive, and with things like human body parts merged into the very architecture, as in the Cocteau film.

It's interesting that some of Rolly's artwork does not seem to reflect a museum setting but was probably intended to be used in the Mansion proper (or its grounds), such as these very rarely seen tombstone sketches, one of which I've posted before:

I wonder. Could these be from before the Fair? Notice how the Gay one is pretty straight (at least by Crumpian standards), while Velma looks like M. de Weird, and yet they look like they were produced at about the same time. It's hard for me to imagine simple tombstones on display in the Museum, however strange the epitaphs.

Things to Think About

Okay, with all of that as a rambling preamble (or an ambling preramble—take your pick), here are five points to ponder as we try to imagine a Crump-Gracey version of the Haunted Mansion.

Point One. The Victorian "spirit theater" atmosphere would probably have been even stronger and more obvious than it is today. In an earlier post, I argued that it was the Gracey-Crump team who gave the Haunted Mansion the unique feel of a 19th-century magic show or house of illusions, using tricks and gimmicks taken from that era. Judging by the feedback I've received, this "magic show" analysis seems to have set well with some veteran Imagineers. Also, in looking through the materials, I keep finding things that confirm that Rolly and Yale did indeed conceive of the HM in this way. Jason Surrell says that "many of the gags Rolly and Yale developed were inspired by some of the grand illusions and stage magic created by 19th-century magicians," citing Rolly in this regard: "The illusions Yale and I were perfecting were based on the 'black art boxes' and 'spirit cabinets' that had been used for many years by magicians" (Surrell, The Haunted Mansion, p. 20). Don't know how I missed that quote the first time around.

(from the cover of an 1864 book, Spectropia)

Elsewhere, Rolly speaks of testing their illusions on magicians to see if they were fooled (they were). Rolly has also made it clear that as far as he's concerned, Yale's tricks are the heart and soul of the HM: "[I]f it hadn't had been for Yale Gracey, well, his illusions made the Mansion what it is. [...] I think he should have gotten more credit, because if you take out those illusions, it's dumb."

Point Two. There would have been a lot more influence from La belle et la bête than the one unmistakable item that made it into the final attraction (viz, the arm-sconce).

You can spot other things in Rolly's concept artwork that betray the influence of the Cocteau film.

As a matter of fact, the two well-known sketches of the Museum of the Weird are both inspired

by a striking set shot that appears late in La belle. I don't think anyone has noticed this before.

Compare those two sketches with this:

You can't see it in this long shot, but the candelabrum on the round table is the one that is held by a human hand. There is
a similar gag in the Crump sketches. Here's a montage, with the color element taken out for easier comparison all around.

Point Three. If we're trying to imagine a Crump-Gracey Haunted Mansion, then obviously we shouldn't overlook the few items that actually did make it into the final product. Besides the Cocteau arm-sconces in the exit crypt, there are at least three other places where you can see Rolly's influence clearly enough.

There is of course the "demon-eye" wallpaper in the Corridor of Doors, featuring a Rolly Crump design reminiscent of his MotW artwork:

Then there's the "Donald Duck" chair, widely thought to be inspired by a MotW chair that was going to stand up and talk to you. The Donald chair has picked up that dumb nickname because a lot of people evidently detect an abstract image of Donald Duck in it. Uh huh. Right. Whatever.

Actually, if we are going to speak of a Donald chair, then we need to recognize a Huey chair, a Dewey chair, and a Louie chair as

well, inasmuch as there are at least four different designs in use. Or didn't you know? As long as we're here, let's look. Have a seat.

The one at Disneyland (upper left) is closest to the blueprint, but it's not absolutely identical, if you look closely. Still, it's got the charmingly sinister quality of the blueprint drawing. Very nice. The WDW version (lower left) is brighter and friendlier. Boo, hiss. And the one in the WDW library (lower right) is friendlier still. Double boo, double hiss. It almost looks like something you'd see in Alice in Wonderland. Ah, but the granny chair in the ballroom (upper right; identical in DL and WDW) puts a stop to this alarming drift toward princess-meet-n'-greet harmlessness. That sucker's got teeth. Nasssty. (In case you were wondering, Tokyo doesn't use these chairs so far as I know.) Enough with the chairs.

And then finally, I think we can safely add to this short list the design for the ballroom organ pipes (as pointed out previously).

These adaptations from the Museum of the Weird were usable because they represent designs, not entities. You couldn't have Torsohead walking around swinging his censer in the real-world simulation of the Haunted Mansion, but you could have a wallpaper design of something almost that weird. You wouldn't find a chair that stood up and talked in the real world, but you might encounter a chair with eerie and eccentric embroidery. The ghosts of the HM do demonstrate that they have the ability to manipulate (or appear to manipulate) the physical fabric of the building and its furnishings, but there are limits to what they can do. Creating weird, impossible creatures would be a bit much.

It's pitifully piddly, this list, but at least some of Rolly's interior design met with the approval of the other guys and is there today. Yale Gracey fared better. The Davis-Coats-Atencio team loved Yale's stuff almost as much as Rolly did, and they continued to make good use of his talents, so Yale's special effects would be another point of continuity between the middle and final imagineering teams. Whatever else a Crump-Gracey house would have looked like, it would have had follow-you busts, the Leota effect, ghostly projections, changing portraits, and Pepper's Ghost.

Ah yes, Yale Gracey's masterful illusions. (Oh, this is Point Four if any of you are still bothering with the outline.) Everyone always thinks of the Grand Ballroom and its mammoth Pepper's Ghost effect in this regard, and rightly so. But the second most amazing of the big displays in the Mansion is also 100% Yale and Rolly, yet for some reason this fact has not penetrated the consciousness of many Mansion fans. It's really a more original effect than the Ballroom. I am speaking of the Stretching Galleries. Maybe the problem is that there seems to be some confusion as to when these were built. Jason Surrell speaks of the Haunted Mansion façade that went up in 1962 as "just the shell of a building with nothing inside" (Surrell, p. 22). You hear that "empty shell" stuff a lot. Surrell also seems to give credit for the elongating room to Davis, who refers to it in a 1964 show script (Surrell, p. 25). This is all rubbish. The stretching rooms were built into the façade when it went up. They are plainly visible in 1962 blueprints. Not only that, but even the specific illusion of stretching portraits was part of the package. They too are visible in the '62 blueprints:

While we're on the topic, are there any other unrecognized triumphs by the Gracey-Crump team in the Mansion? There is possibly another small one, a very small one. More than likely, it's a coincidence. It depends on whether Rolly had anything to do with choosing the wrought iron pattern for the Mansion exterior. It's a standard, off-the-shelf style known as "Bird of Paradise." It has a little bird's head woven into the pattern, easily missed. A bird's head, that is, on a reptilian neck snaking out of a plant. Like I said, probably coincidental, but that thing reminds me of the Museum of the Weird. He even has the Look. He's got attitude, his thoughts are elsewhere, he's in his own world, and he's a little sinister.

(middle pic by RegionsBeyond)

If it's a coincidence, it's a very happy one.

Point Five. One of our best glimpses into the Mansion as Rolly might have designed it comes not from Rolly's artwork, nor from little things that are actually in there today, nor from Yale's bag of tricks, but from what might seem an unlikely source: Marc Davis.

It seems to me that when Davis came on board, he was for a time quite agreeable to Rolly's approach, whether he would have admitted it or not (and from what I've heard about Marc, "not" is the better bet). Maybe this was because Walt was enthusiastic about Rolly's stuff and Davis wasn't stupid, but I suspect that Marc genuinely knew Rolly was on to something. Whatever the reason, it looks to me like Marc took some of Rolly's concepts as a given, a starting point for his own ideas. Consider these Davis sketches of the "Great Hall" (as it was called then), the forerunner of the changing portrait hall. The two sketches are intended to be taken together, as they represent the two ends of the same room:

Marc Davis has here mounted his changing portraits (all of which are identifiable in the sketches)
within a suspiciously Crumpish interior. It's not just the bizarre details: look at the use of color.
Compare one of these sketches with Rolly's full-color concept sketch of the Museum.

There is a jarring, almost disturbing quality in the way impossibly vivid colors are violently juxtaposed in both paintings. And there are other Crumpian elements in Marc's Great Hall sketches. Things like, well... body parts merged into the very architecture. The walls have teeth. Or something. There are things in there that look like veins. Or something. And hair. Or something. The rough sketch for the first painting showed life-sized (yes they are) skeletal figures emerging from (or visible in) the woodwork. Weird.

A specific idea that Rolly has mentioned more than once is having faces over the fireplace that watch you and have smoke coming out of their noses and mouths (another idea lifted directly from Cocteau). It's interesting that Davis sketched an alternate version of the fireplace as seen in the first sketch. You have to wonder if Rolly's ideas were a stimulus here. Maybe, maybe not.

The doorway into Marc's Great Hall had an odd gate in it. More human body parts in the architecture. Marc did a separate drawing of it as well:

First time I ever saw that I just assumed it was done by Rolly. Incidentally, Davis liked these gates so well that he had a set
made, and to this day they may be found doing service in the Davis home. That may be as good an indication as any that
Davis truly liked this approach. Whether or not he would have been willing to credit Rolly for any of it is a different question.

It shouldn't really be a surprise that Marc and Rolly could sometimes be found on the same wavelength. They had successfully worked together on the Enchanted Tiki Room, which has a lot in common with Rolly's notions about the Haunted Mansion if you think about it. Flowers that act like people. Faces that come to life sculpted right into the architecture. The whole room comes to life, really. Davis knew that Rolly's essential idea of a strange, living, enchanted house could work because it did work, not just in the Cocteau film but right over there in Adventureland. Just substitute "ghosts" for "tiki god magic" and you're there. You can even find details in Marc's artwork for the Tiki Room once in awhile that look awfully Crumpish. Check out this Davis sketch of a surprisingly angry birdmobile. That's Rolly's poison plant for the MotW on the left. Of course, Davis's Tiki Room sketch is older, and the point is not to suggest direct, conscious influence in either direction. The point is that these guys sometimes explored the same alleyways of the imagination, and surprisingly similar results can be glimpsed from time to time. We'll probably never nail it down any more precisely than that.

Once we recognize that Davis at some early stage was evidently sympathetic to Rolly's offbeat interior design, we may be able to go back and visualize, at least a little bit, what the Stretching Gallery masterpiece might have looked like. Yale built a half-inch scale model of the elongating room and suggested to Rolly that he design the stretching portraits. Rolly did produce some sketches, but later on Marc wasn't satisfied with them and replaced them with his own. Despite that loss, I think that Davis's beautiful concept artwork may give us a hint of what might have been. It's certainly weirder than what we ended up with. In fact, if you ask me, the one item in the sketch that looks slightly out of place is the Davis portrait! Is that because the essentials of this design came from elsewhere?

You can find faces all over the place in the woodwork. Some of them remind me of the Tiki Room chanters
("In the freaky freaky freaky freaky freaky room, oh the bats fling turds in the foulest gloom..."). Shut up. My blog.
Those faces across the bottom would have looked right at home in the Museum. They remind me of the demon-eye wallpaper:

A Less Weird Haunted Mansion

One thing we learn from all this is that the "normalization" of the HM interior was probably not Davis's idea but should be attributed more to the influence of Claude Coats. It is he, after all, who always gets credit for the spooky atmosphere of the first part of the attraction. And much as I'd like to have seen some of these weirder interiors, in the end, what Coats had in mind worked very well indeed. With the Coats approach, the place looks normal enough, if a bit dark and ominous:

(pic by RegionsBeyond)

The notion that you are entering a supernatural vortex, a portal into another realm, is something that dawns on you slowly, as you are led to doubt whether what you see is real or a hallucination. That creepy progression only works because things look real and normal enough. It gives the show a flow. In contrast, if the original Crump concepts had prevailed, you would have known you weren't in Kansas any more the moment you stepped through the door. That would have been a very different experience.

So I'm glad it went the way it did. We can today enjoy the Stretching Gallery as a fine amalgam of creative minds. It's a piece of hallucinatory strangeness courtesy of Rolly Crump, made possible by the mechanical genius of Yale Gracey, dressed up in the elegant but slow and sombre woodwork of Claude Coats. Then there's a display of wicked Marc Davis humor just as X. Atencio's script sets before you THE classic dilemma of this haunted house—real or imagined? Plus, you get the finest scare of the ride in the form of a gag that would NEVER be approved today. How nice. Forbidden fruit for dessert.

Beware of These Hitchhiking Ghosts

2011-06-11T22:07:00.000-07:00

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Let's look at the other major addition to the WDW Mansion: The new Hitchhiking Ghosts. Carsillo's team spruced up the classic threesome we encounter as we enter the crypt, and they changed the mirror effect. No longer is there a solitary hitchhiker sitting beside us. Now, thanks to some fancy high-tech equipment, we have computer generated hitchhikers frolicking about and pulling pranks on us, like switching faces around, blowing our heads up like a balloon, falling off the top of our doombuggy, etc.

As with Pepe Le Queue, there are some good things here, along with a whole lotta bad. Let's start off with the good things.

Lonesome Ghosts

This time, the concept actually makes sense. After the ghosts have materialized, and you have discovered to your relief that they are not hostile, you start to wonder if they take notice of you at all. None of them seem to pay any attention to your presence, with the exception of the pop-ups, who seem to get a kick out of scaring you. Eventually, near the end, the Ghost Host informs you that they have indeed taken particular notice of you; in fact, they have selected you and will follow you home, haunting you until you return. The new mirror gag cements that message by showing the ghosts teasing you and pulling good-natured pranks. Well what do you know, they like us, they actually like us.

One of the cinematic influences on the HM, mentioned briefly at the end of an earlier post, was the 1937 short, Lonesome Ghosts, a Mickey Mouse vehicle (with Donald and Goofy) featuring a haunted house full of silly spooks who like nothing better than scaring visitors. They pretend to terrorize. It's all in good fun. Ken Anderson, you will recall, was actually going to use a ghost host with the name, "Lonesome Ghost" in his early walk-thru designs for the Disneyland Haunted House. But pranky spirits who could actually play tricks on you were beyond the reach of 1960's technology. You just couldn't do something like this:

Trying to bring a little of this into the Haunted Mansion was a bold step and not necessarily a bad idea. A kind of Lonesome Ghosts atmosphere is clearly what the Carsillo team is going for with these new mirror HHG's, and I'll grant to them that it's done at the right place in the ride for it.

The Three

Another good thing is the spruce-up job on the audio-animatronic hitchhikers in the classic tableau. The figures themselves have been redone tastefully and look very good, although I wish they had gone back to the original, bald Ezra, and I think Gus's bindle is ridiculous. He's not a hobo; he's an escaped con with a ball-and-chain. But everyone tells me I'm being too picky about that, so I'll let it go.

(pic by Joe Penniston)

You can compare those with the originals:

One reason the new figures look good is that the Carsillo team meticulously reproduced the original Blaine Gibson heads

and simply added more detail. They talk about this in their promotional video. First class craftsmanship on display here.

How about Ezra in 3D?

I wish I could end it here, but alas, there is much that is wrong with these new additions.

Is that supposed to be Ezra?

The first problem is that the CG Ezra doesn't look like Ezra. This is absolutely baffling. How could they so carefully and lovingly reproduce the original figure in the AA, and then get the CG character so horribly wrong? I'm mystified.

While they were working on the new figures, they covered the tableau with a black screen and projected CG figures onto it, a stop-gap until the new ones were ready. When they first appeared, folks were a little alarmed, since everyone seemed to agree that these cartoons looked pretty dorky. Especially Ezra. But word quickly got out that these were just temporary substitutes until the real thing was ready. So chill.

(pic by Jeff Fillmore)

Fans should have stayed alarmed. Unbelievably, the new CG hitchhikers in the mirrors seem to be cut from the same cloth as these ugly things.

I say unbelievably, because they did such a careful job of maintaining the authentic look of the

originals when they re-did the AA figures. What were they thinking? Do these look the same to you?

Never mind the head; look at the hands. Great Caesar's Ghost, how simple is this? Blaine Gibson gave the hitchhikers BIG hands, with BIG thumbs, in order to immediately slam their hitchhikerliness in your face, as I've said elsewhere. Okay, now ask any animator whether hands are important in conveying character. What, are you stupid? They're extremely important. I mean, Duh.

Ezra is a tall, gangly, loping figure with big hands. At Disneyland, the hitchhikers on the ghosty-go-round behind the mirrors have no hands, but at WDW and at Tokyo they do. The guys who made those figures took a number of liberties of their own in reproducing the trio, it is true, but one thing they got right is the hands. I think they just used the same molds.

(pic by PhotoMatt)

In contrast, the CG Ezra has delicate, small, skeletal hands. Check out the first photo at the top of the page. And besides that, he flutters around like a nimble ballerina. Huh? Guys, he's a giraffe, not a butterfly. This is sheer incompetence. Whatever else they do, the Carsillo team needs to call their computer animators back to their terminals post haste and thoroughly re-do the Ezra figure. This is just embarrassing.

High Tech and Low Tech

Reports about the appearance of the HHG's in the mirror vary wildly. Many say that they look convincingly three-dimensional and the effects work well. Others have experienced poor performances from these high tech wonders and complain that the ghosts look flat. I'll leave that issue aside, since I have no solid basis for forming an opinion. I will comment on one complaint I've read several times, however: When you look sideways in the mirrors at the ghosts in the buggies on either side of yours, and even further down the line (and who doesn't do that?), they do indeed look flat. You can see it in photos.

If you're expecting another furious blast, or at least some snark, sorry to disappoint you. I can't get worked up about this defect, for two reasons. First, I can think of a way to fix this problem for about $100. Seriously. I won't say anything about it, because if I do, and the same idea occurs to someone at WDI (which is entirely possible), they won't be able to use it for fear I'll sue them for stealing my idea. That's how it is these days. It's sad, but such is our litigious society, ladies and gentlemen. Second, yeah, it's true, they don't look too good at an angle like that, but guess what? They never have. Oh, certainly, the old types look fully three-dimensional (being as they are three-dimensional), but they look bad in another way that we have all gotten so used to that we don't even notice it any more.

Pardon, your slip is showing.

There is something else about the new mirror HHG's that worries me, though. They represent eye-popping, cutting edge high tech—today. So tell me, how many years do you suppose it will take before you can download a set of programs, buy a couple of pieces at Fry's, and achieve the same sort of effects at home? Four years? Six, maybe? The Imagineers have committed themselves now. When the razzle loses its dazzle, what kind of antics will the mirror ghosts have to display in order to stay ahead of the curve? And does anyone believe that thematic consistency and good taste will survive this process? Hah. Those will be the first things thrown under the bus.

"Well, that may be true, but let's face it: the old effect needed to be upgraded. Sure, it

wowed people when it was new, but that was in 1969. Today it looks old-fashioned."

I've heard that one more than once. What absolute rubbish. The original mirror effect wasn't anything close to high tech in 1969. It was low tech. It was like Pepper's Ghost and changing portraits and all those other 19th century (and older) magic tricks. There is nothing about it and its mechanics that would have puzzled a stage magician from the 1890's. Criminy, this thing could have been built in the 1890's. The hitchhikers on the ghosty-go-round are nothing more than rod puppets. They aren't even electric. Two-way mirrors are nothing but regular mirrors that have been partially silvered instead of fully silvered. Old as the hills. Tracks. Wheels. Connecting rods. A couple of simple electric motors and some basic lighting and you're there.

Despite the whole Lonesome Ghost thing, which I kinda like, I get a bad feeling from all of this.

Every time they trade in a classic, low tech magical illusion for a gee-whiz high tech wonder, I fear that something of the character

of the ride is being diminished. It's that old-timey magic show feeling that suits so well the Victorian look of the Haunted Mansion.

The Hitchhiking Ghost Tableau

Back around the corner again for another look at the tableau featuring the famous trio. Surely this is the icon of icons for the Haunted Mansion, a slice of elegant perfection, a stroke of simple genius. Who would deny it? So ... what can be said about a mentality that looks at that classic scene and thinks, "Gee, look at all the wasted space! You know, this would be a perfect spot to place a portrait of one of our new characters. There's plenty of room. Great opportunity for blending in one of our new narratives."

Thumbs Down
(pic from Orlando Attractions Magazine)

Like I say, what can be said about such a mentality? Stupid, you say? Evil? Insane? Did I hear someone say incompetent? Well, look, we can all be friends about this. Let's just say that we all agree that anyone, anyone, who thinks that that right there is a good idea should never have been allowed anywhere near the table where decisions about the future of this attraction were made. Shouldn't have been allowed in the same building. Can we all agree to that? All right then.

By the way, why would someone living in the house store their artwork in a crypt in a public cemetery adjacent to the house? Oh, that's right. How quickly I forget the lessons of Pepe Le Queue. The Haunted Mansion doesn't have to make any sense. The Haunted Mansion is wacky land. Woo hoo.

I keep forgetting.

Decadence

2011-05-24T19:53:00.000-07:00

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In March and April of this year (2011), major additions came to the WDW Mansion. Since this is the first time a big change has occurred on our watch (i.e. since this blog debuted), I thought it would be appropriate to do a full review. Um...it's not as if my opinions are a secret or anything. I've been stapling them to every telephone pole I can find over the past few months. I've also been engaged in some pretty lengthy discussions of the additions in various Disney fora, and it's all been good, because it's clarified my thinking, I think. So some of what follows I've said elsewhere, but here is my first real attempt to pull it all together and try to get at the core of the issue.

About the New Queue

So far, there are two places the additions have appeared: (1) the queue area formerly occupied by the "family plot" graveyard and (2) the hitchhiking ghost portion inside the ride. I'll deal with the hitchhikers in a separate post—probably the next one—and stick to the queue today, but I should say in advance that I find more to praise in the new HHGs than I do with the queue, so expect a slightly happier post about them.

The new queue is "interactive," which essentially means that guests are encouraged to play with the new stuff and not simply look at it. To that end, some clever electronic gizmos that respond to touch and sound are embedded in the three new crypts. They talk and play music and spray water and move books in and out. I'm not going to speak to the performance of these devices, since reports about how well they work are mixed, and I think you have to give the Imagineers some slack to work out the inevitable bugs in new technology. I will say that I don't see anything ghostly about a predictable mechanical response to a particular type of stimulus. Does anyone really get the feeling that someone is in there? Are there really people who think vending machines are kinda creepy?

The queue is optional at present. You can bypass it and go straight into the HM proper.

For some, this is its one saving grace, since they can pretend it doesn't exist. I haven't been to Orlando, so I can't comment on how well this strategy works, but in general I'm leery about whether you can or should simply ignore major additions to the ride from the almighty hands of WDI. It is an imaginary world, and the only "reality" in there is the reality created by WDI, for good or ill. Besides, at least one item from the queue has been incorporated into the ride: A portrait of a new character from the queue now sits beside the three hitchhikers, strong evidence that the Imagineers consider the new material compatible with the old. If fans of the Orlando HM who hate the queue have come up with successful work-around strategies for coping with the new material, more power to them. I am going to treat it as something that is really there.

The enclosed queue itself mainly consists of (1) a set of busts depicting one of the families that once inhabited the house, (2) three large crypts, and (3) several grave markers, including three old ones from the "family plot" that used to be there. In addition to all this, the lawn area beyond the enclosed queue now features a much larger graveyard, with the remainder of the old headstones relocated and a slew of new ones, plus anonymous markers and details like shovels stuck in the ground.

What's Good About It

What is good here? Well, the new queue is tribute city, dude. As every Mansionite knows, the epitaphs on the old headstones were sly tributes to various Imagineers who helped create the original ride, and the new team clearly wanted to fill in some gaps in this area. I myself have commented on how unjust it is that "the Father of the Haunted Mansion," Ken Anderson, had no tribute of any kind in the finished attraction, while there were others who had more than one. Weep no more, my friends. The new queue has tributes not only to Anderson, but to Blaine Gibson, Paul Frees, Rolly Crump, Collin Campbell, Harriet Burns, Thurl Ravenscroft, and Dorothea Redmond, all of whom are worthy candidates for a little kiss-blowing. Most of these tributes are epitaphs, and all of these are genuinely witty and macabre in the best boot-hill tradition of HM epitaphs.

Also worthy of praise is the dolling up of the graveyard with handsome and appropriately old-fashioned funerary artwork. It looks more like a rich family's graveyard now, although it may be a little overblown, slopping all the way out and into the trees and making you wonder if this is still supposed to be a private family plot. I'm assuming it is. Oh, I also like the shovels, now that it seems likely that they're going to be overgrown with vines so as to look like they've been there a long time.

(pix by MouseSteps [left] and Life by the Drop [right])

Pepe Le Queue

And that's it. The rest of this thing is terrible; in fact, it is in my opinion the worst thing that has ever happened to any of the HMs in their entire 42-year history. If, like me, you feel obliged to swallow the bitter medicine and include WDI-generated material into the imaginative experience of the HM, then I will go so far as to say that the responsible parties, Peter Carsillo (art director and show designer), Eric Goodman (show producer), and Eric Jacobson (Senior VP of Creative Development), have ruined the WDW Haunted Mansion. I have no doubt that the motives of these Imagineers were good, but the Orlando Mansion is no longer the same kind of attraction as its twin in Tokyo or the original in Anaheim. Because the simple truth is, Pepe Le Queue tampers with the fundamental concept of the ride, changing it to something radically different from what it was originally and what it has always been, through all the changes and additions over the years.

There are three kinds of criticism that have been leveled at PLQ: aesthetic, narrative, and conceptual.

Aesthetically, many think some of the artwork is too cartoony. The basic design of the organist's crypt does have real-world antecedents...

...but the WDW counterpart simply looks goofy and garish, many say. More like Toontown than the Haunted Mansion.

(pic from Inside-the-Magic)

What are we supposed to think that raven is made out of, anyway? Concrete? Metal? Wood? Same with those candles. They look like real wax candles. What would they be doing on the candleholders carved on an outdoor funeral monument? Turning to the next crypt, the Captain's "Tubsoleum" is impossibly silly, like nothing anyone would ever build in the real world. The third crypt is pink. A pink crypt.

(pic by MouseSteps)

They didn't even try to make these look like real crypts. They look more like children's play stations, or like I said, something that would look at home in Mickey's Toontown.

The narrative problem is far more serious. It should be obvious to anyone that the HM has a deliberate show flow, a sort of plot. It starts out low-key, sombre, and sinister. In fact, the entire first half of the ride is creepy and scary, relieved only by the humor of the stretchroom portraits; and yet even these are so macabre that they can be taken as veiled threats. It is only after Madame Leota enables the frustrated ghosts to materialize that you discover that they are really not such a bad lot; for the most part they are just a bunch of fun-loving ghosts. By the time you get into the graveyard for the show climax, you are laughing at "silly spooks" come out to socialize.

Pepe Le Queue throws this presentation into the trash can. Now you learn immediately, even before you go through the doors, that the ghosts are silly and good-natured, nothing to be scared of, no more intimidating than Casper the Friendly Ghost. PLQ also provides at least one specific show spoiler, showing you banshees floating out of the organ pipes, just as you will see later in the ballroom. This queue is like the rude guy in the movie theater who has seen the film already and is loudly talking to friends about how the story is going to end.

It's the conceptual problems, however, that are the most serious of all. Pepe is a nest of logical absurdities and contradictions.

How is it that ghosts that have never been seen before (the banshees) are commemorated in stone on an old crypt? The organist is dressed in Victorian garb, so presumably he's been dead and buried here for a century or so.

Why are ghosts depicted on a funeral monument at all? Graves for ghosts?

Similarly, the banner in Prudence Pock's crypt makes reference to her activities as a ghost:

(pic by Inside-the-Magic)

Huh? A funerary monument that talks about the occupant's post-mortem antics? And why is

she blathering poems about off-road vehicles and gasoline tanks? When did she die, anyway?

On one side of the organist's crypt are depictions of musical instruments from the Séance circle and the graveyard band. But the graveyard band consists of ghosts from different historical periods who have gathered together here at the HM and are going to be making their debut as a band later in the ride (the old Caretaker has never seen these graveyard spooks before). Some are wearing 18th c. (?) bandsmen uniforms and others are in medieval attire. How did the musical instruments used by this ad hoc combo from scattered times and places come to be depicted on an old crypt, as if they played together in life?

"Captain Culpepper Clyne" is evidently the same character depicted in one of the "Sinister 11" portraits, the ghostly mariner. But that painting plainly tells us that he drowned at sea in a shipwreck. The crashing ship is depicted behind him and his ghost is covered with seaweed, barnacles, and a starfish. But the new crypt's epitaph says that he did not drown at sea but in his bathtub on dry land, and just to make sure that the proverbial "average guest" does indeed identify the occupant of the crypt with the figure in the painting, the Imagineers have painstakingly decorated the Tubsoleum with his barnacles and his starfish! In other words, they have cemented the identification of the two mariners with precisely the things that make the epitaph impossible.

Two of the old gravestones, "Francis Xavier" and "Grandpa Marc," are now the first things you see in the new queue area after the busts, and they are installed in a planter that leaves no room for a body to be buried in front of either one.

(pic from Inside-the-Magic)

The Haunted Mansion is a retirement home for ghosts "from creepy old crypts all over the world." While not a contradiction per se, the new queue has turned a number of these ghosts into family members who once resided in the house. Besides the organist, one glance at the new headstones out in the family plot and we learn to our surprise that the three hitchhikers (Gus, Ezra, Phineas) are now apparently relatives and former residents. So are the men depicted as singing busts. It's possible, I guess....

Ravens typically live 10 or 12 years, but what is evidently the same raven character we will meet inside the house (never presented as anything but a real bird) is depicted on the roughly 100-year old organist's crypt. And why is he there, anyway? Is there anything associating the two characters?

(pic by MouseSteps)

You get the idea. The correct response to all of these questions is: "Look, don't ask such questions. If you do, you are thinking about all of this too much and demanding far more logical continuity from these gags than necessary. Lighten up, they're all in the spooky, kooky spirit of the attraction, and that's what's important. It's not supposed to mimic the real world; it's a funsy, imaginary world."

Real World or Fantasy World?

In the previous post I argued that the Haunted Mansion does indeed simulate the real world, your world, except that it has ghosts in it. I noted that many people dispute this, arguing (or rather assuming) that the HM is a fantasy world from start to finish. The ghosts are wacky, so it stands to reason that they were wacky when they were alive as well. So yes, as a matter of fact, it is like Toontown, just less extreme.

Barring some sort of dead giveaway like talking animals, the easiest way to spot the difference between the two concepts (realistic world vs. fantasy world) is by looking at the humans depicted in each. Does this guy look like he could be your next door neighbor, or not?

(pic by GRD via Inside-the-Magic)

The new portrait busts in PLQ (known as the Dread family during the testing phase) are heavily caricatured humans, bordering on cartoony. According to Carsillo and team, the people who built the house and lived in it evidently were people who had intelligent pet sea serpents, built impossibly silly crypts, and lived in a universe where strict logical consistency is always subject to the needs of the current gag, much as Elmer Fudd may either fall when he steps off of a cliff or remain magically suspended until he notices where he is, depending on which seems funnier to the cartoonists.

Not all HM Imagineers would agree. Even though I have some serious problems with the Constance additions, I note with appreciation that those Imagineers were at least fully aware that "real" humans built and lived in this house. For Connie's wedding portraits, photos of real humans were used, and the ghost itself is a filmed human. It makes sense, doesn't it? Madame Leota, "Little Leota," and the Singing Busts are all films of real human faces. But Carsillo has rejected the sensibilities governing the previous Imagineering teams (and at WDW, that's only four years ago!). The result is that we now have one set of former Mansion residents (the Dreads) who must never be seen juxtaposed to another set (Connie and husbands), because the stylistic clash would be intolerable. How stupid.

(left pic by MouseSteps)

The Carsillo team has decided to place a stronger accent on the silly, comic side, and move the HM away from the darker, scarier side. To that end, they have consciously and deliberately taken their inspiration (1) from the looser, more cartoonish feel of Marc Davis's concept artwork, (2) from Blaine Gibson's whimsical sculpture, and (3) from Collin Campbell's classic illustrations for the "Story and Song" souvenir record album. (I know all of this to be true; don't ask me how.) Regardless of how you feel about the eternal tension in the HM between silly and scary, the Carsillo team has betrayed a gruesome misunderstanding of the very artwork they have turned to for inspiration.

Point by point.

No doubt about it, Marc Davis did indeed have a lot of cartoony ghosts in his concept sketches.

And not a one of them made it into the final attraction. The ones that weren't dropped outright Blaine Gibson and his team consistently and invariably turned into more realistic-looking figures, presumably with Davis's blessing. What impulse drove them in that direction, one wonders? You don't suppose it was because they all decided at some point that we're never supposed to leave the "real" world, do you? "But wait a sec; Gibson's ghosts still look pretty loopy to me, not like 'real' ghosts." That argument might carry more weight if we had some idea of what "real" ghosts are supposed to look like. Behold, a gallery of "real" ghosts.

The real fantasy feature of the Haunted Mansion ghosts is not their appearance but their behavior. They're fun-loving ghosts. Ain't no such thing.

Gibson was a genius at knowing where the line is between caricature and cartoon. Your mileage may vary, but here's my working definition of the difference: caricature exaggerates within the possible, while the cartoony ignores this limitation. People do exist with noses the size of golf balls, but not tennis balls. In his classic POTC and HM faces, Gibson never goes past the golf ball.

Furthermore, Gibson's caricature has a sober, pragmatic purpose: it enables the viewer to read the character instantly, even in less-than-ideal lighting conditions, and even from 30 feet away. From the boat, all of his pirates look like real men. But from two feet away, with the work lights on, a lot of them look pretty goofy, almost cartoony.

I freely concede that Carsillo's "Bertie" is within the Blaine Gibson tradition of caricature. And if Bertie were dressed up as a pirate and firing a cannon from the Wicked Wench, he'd be fine. But he's not. He's right there in broad daylight, inches away, and you can examine him all over with a magnifying glass, and for as long as you wish.

(pic by GRD, who doesn't agree with my analysis, btw)

Sorry, but from this vantage point I cannot imagine that guy as my neighbor. He and his sea serpent are from cartoonland after all. And if you cannot imagine yourself in the same world as Bertie and his sea serpent, you can only be an audience to it. I call that a radical change in the fundamental concept of the attraction. How much more boring that is than the original premise: you in a "real" haunted house!

As for Collin Campbell, another influence, these guys seem to forget that his delightful artworks for the "Story and Song" album were illustrations for a children's record, as he was fully aware.

If we're going to borrow something of the style of his humanoid ghosts, hell's bells, why not use his smiley-face ghosts as well?

Exactly what age group is Pepe Le Queue aiming for? Is it in fact just for kids? If so, it sends the message that the ride is not going to be scary, when in fact the first part of the ride is scary. Kind of a rotten thing to do, if you think about it.

Oh, interestingly enough, Campbell also did an "adult" rendering of the HM exterior. No cartoony ghosts, no smiley faces. More booze.

Incidentally, Carsillo's preference for the kooky over the spooky has led to something like grand larceny. He has taken ghosts from the scary column and reassigned them to the silly side. The organ banshees are not funny, but he's turned them into buck-toothed squirt guns.

(right pic by MouseSteps)

The Mariner in the painting is pretty frightening, but now he's sneezing and singing and merrily blowing bubbles in his Tubsoleum.

X. Atencio's one-eyed black cat was horrifying (more on that shortly). Carsillo's "tribute"? Meh, not so much.

The Point of Reference

If you've decided the HM is not a simulation of the real world and have thrown logical consistency to the breeze in the process, what is the guiding principle holding the new material together? You must have something. What replaces "make it realistic"? Sadly, the ultimate point of reference in PLQ, at any rate, is nothing more than "the wonderful world of Haunted Mansion icons." It is relentlessly self-referential. Pepe practically shouts, "Is this Haunted Mansion ride GREAT, or WHAT?" It makes the ride celebrate itself. Thus the gravestones that used to look like real gravestones over real graves, and which incidentally also happened to have quiet tributes on them to X. Atencio and Marc Davis, are now no longer gravestones at all but tributes only. They're pushed right into your face so you won't miss them. They're signs now; they're placards. They're tributes to tributes.

(pic by MouseSteps)

The Collin Campbell tribute grave marker is even worse. Currently, it's just sitting in

a corner, with nothing like a grave anywhere in sight. Doesn't matter. It's a "tribute."

(pic by bigfloridacountry)

Nearby it, Carsillo has embedded a ring in the pavement.

The Fellowship of the Ring

Here's the story for those of you who don't know it. Once upon a time, a turnstile was removed near the exit of the WDW HM. An anchoring pipe inside of it was sawn off at pavement level. One day, someone looked at it and thought it looked an awful lot like a ring.

And that was it. Magic. Lightning had struck. Fans began thinking it was the bride's wedding ring, flung down from the attic and embedded in the ground. Everyone would make a point to go look at it as they exited the ride. Doombuggies.com put up a sticky post telling people how to find it. Cast members either went along with the gag or scolded guests and told them it was NOTHING. There's nothing there. Will you forget about it please? It's just a pipe. Of course, this only added to the mystique. This was a bit of Mansion magic definitely off the menu. An accidental piece of hardware that, due to its freak location, was able to tease and coax the most stubborn imagination into thinking it was a ring, even when you knew it was not a ring. It became a sort of tribute to the Mansion from its fans, a gift back.

Not many years ago, the idiots at WDW removed the "ring"—in a fit of pique, one supposes. You can't buy magic like that, but it wasn't an official WDI product, so death to it. Now Carsillo, in sympathy with the fans (which is to his credit), has put a real ring in the pavement of his queue.

This is just sad. Isn't it obvious that you can't put that kind of lightning in a bottle? It was precisely the accidental, illicit quality of the "ring" that made it mysterious and special. What the boring new ring really amounts to is another tribute to a tribute.

Tributes, tributes, tributes. This place crawls with tributes. The new epitaphs honoring Imagineers who were passed over the first time are welcome, as we said earlier, but PLQ doesn't stop there. The organist's crypt is really a tribute to that beloved character and his banshee ghosts.

(pic by Inside-the-Magic)

The raven is a tribute to that character. What other reason is there for him to be on the organ pipes like that? The organ is labeled "Ravenscroft," a tribute to Thurl. The instruments depicted on the left side are tributes to the Séance circle and the graveyard band, as mentioned earlier. The whack-a-mole books popping in and out on the sides of Prudence's crypt are a tribute to the library scene inside the ride. Wow, did you notice how the decoration around the crypt's "bookcase" lovingly mimics the woodwork of that scene? An elbow is nudging your ribs: "Is this ride cool, or what?"

But it doesn't stop with tributes to things that are there. Carsillo has loaded up PLQ with tributes to things that never were: ideas and artwork that never made it into the Mansion, the kind of stuff we talk about around this blog, the stuff only the geeks know about. There are headstones now for Bartholomew Gore, Beauregard, and Priscilla, names taken from Ken Anderson's old scripts. There are also headstones for Uncle Theodore, Cousin Algernon, Phineas Pock, and Ned Nub. These are the names of four of the singing busts, something that only geeks know about. The one-eyed black cat, a disused idea for a horrific ghost guide that we did a post about awhile back, appears on the side of the organist's crypt. Why is he there? What reason is there for associating that cat with the organist? Isn't it obvious that this was just a convenient spot to stick another "tribute"? Context? What context? We don't need no steeeeenking context. Finally, there are the "Museum of the Weird" tributes, which call for special comment.

A "Tribute" to the Museum of the Weird

The sea serpent around Bertie's neck is a nod to the MoW (even though this creature doesn't look anything like Rolly's MoW artwork, stylistically). The surrealistic musical instruments on the right side of the organ crypt are also "tributes" to the Museum. This is a slap in the face of Walt Disney himself.

Rolly has told this story many times. Everyone at WED thought his strange creations were just too, too weird to use. Everyone but Walt, who looked at them one day as the HM Imagineers were all "displaying their wares" for Walt's inspection. He left without saying anything, and everyone (including Rolly) thought his weird little artifacts were indeed too extreme and had failed the test. Next day, Rolly found Walt himself sitting in his chair, wearing the same clothes. "You SOB," Walt greeted him. He loved Rolly's stuff and had literally stayed up all night trying to figure out a way to use it. It obviously didn't fit in with Marc Davis's material or any of the other work that showed the direction that the HM project was headed, but there had to be a way to use it. Finally, Walt had hit on the idea of a museum, a museum of the weird, a completely separate venue featuring Rolly's work. Sort of a Professor Marvel's show of wonders, filled with objects that mocked the boundary between the natural and the supernatural. And so when the 1965 "tencenniel" television special was filmed, there was Marc with all of his HM stuff over here in this corner, and Rolly's stuff on a table over there in that corner.

It was obvious to Walt that Rolly's and Marc's work belonged in two different environments, that they operated in two different imaginative spheres. It was a serious problem that took him all night to solve.

Silly Walt. If only Carsillo, Goodman, and Ericson had been there to straighten him out. Of course all of that stuff goes together. See? You just put musical instruments out of Davis's playbook on the left side of the crypt, and slap some surreal instruments out of Rolly's playbook on the other. Ta da.

If anyone scratches his head over these weird instruments, or the cat, or the odd names on the tombstones, you say, "They're tributes!" and that's supposed to be enough logic to hold them all together. Of course, only the cognizati will get those esoteric ones, so what that material really amounts to is Carsillo repeatedly sending signals to the hardcore Mansionites: "Hey guys, look, I'm one of you!" It makes no other sense and serves no other purpose. For me, what John Livingston Lowes said about poetry applies to other creative offerings as well: "I dislike poems that black your eyes, or put up their mouths to be kissed."

Tributes, tributes, tributes. Let's have tributes to as many of the original Imagineers as we can think of. And tributes to the wonderful things they made. And tributes to the wonderful things they almost made but didn't. And tributes to the wonderful ideas that they thought were bad and didn't use. And tributes to tributes. Let's stop every four feet and remind ourselves how MUCH we LOVE this ride. In fact, let's spend an enormous sum of money and make that the first act of the ride itself! People...

When you see this kind of self-referentiality, it is a sure sign of decadence.

Sorry to shout like that. But compare this misbegotten Mansionite masturbatory to the original queue cemetery, there at Anaheim when it opened in 1969. Eight simple stones with wry and dry epitaphs, laid out according to a picky blueprint so as to make sure, dead sure, that there were eight believable graves in front of them.

Let's Get Real

2011-05-07T22:39:00.000-07:00

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Whoops, Long-Forgotten's first anniversary slipped past while I wasn't looking, but it's not too late to say thanks to all the readers, and especially the commenters, for making this blog such an enjoyable project throughout this last year. Many have put kind words of praise and generous thank you's in the Comments sections, often without a direct reply from your Host. I assure you that I have seen and appreciated them all, even if I haven't personally responded in every case. Thank you all.

This seems like a good occasion to ask the question, What makes the Haunted Mansion so different? Why does it generate and how does it sustain this level of interest, the kind that can fuel blogs and sustain entire websites for years, to say nothing of books and movies? Pirates of the Caribbean is arguably a more perfect ride, but nothing else in the Disney parks produces anything close to Mansion mania.

I think the Haunted Mansion may be more psychologically seductive and intriguing than other attractions because, unlike most of them, it never asks you to stop being yourself in your own world. In your imagination, you do not have to go either backward or forward in time (Main Street, Frontierland, New Orleans Square, Tomorrowland). You do not move into a fairy tale or cartoon world (Fantasyland, Toontown), nor do you picture yourself in a remote, exotic part of the real world (Adventureland, the Matterhorn). You do not imagine what it would be like to be a cowboy, a pirate, an astronaut, a bobsledder, a fairy tale hero or heroine, or an animated mouse. At Disneyland's Haunted Mansion, you imagine only that you are in New Orleans, today, visiting a very normal-looking old house that is reputedly haunted. The only big imaginative leap you are asked to take is to accept the premise that ghosts are real.

(pic by Laurie O)

If you want to understand the unique and enduring fascination that the Haunted Mansion holds for so many people, it is essential to recognize that this attraction is an artistic representation of a real house in the real world as it exists today, and it's in a familiar locale, not off in some remote corner of Zanzibar. The only fantasy element in the presentation is the assumption that ghosts and ghostly activities are real.

What kind of ghosts? Friends, this is what the scary-vs-silly, Claude-vs-Marc controversy really comes down to: On the one side were Imagineers (Coats being the best-known) who wanted to restrict the HM to non-fictive ghosts. On the other side, Marc Davis wanted both non-fictive and fictive ghosts. By "non-fictive," I mean the types of ghosts that some people believe really do exist, the poltergeists and the Brown Lady of Raynham Hall types. This would also include literary and cinematic ghosts that are meant to scare you, as if they were—or could be—real. By "fictive" ghosts I mean the kind that are obviously invented purely for entertainment purposes. Casper the Friendly Ghost and that sort of thing. One place you find an abundance of those spooks is in comic songs, the kind that had their heyday in the 30's and 40's and of which Grim Grinning Ghosts is a good latter-day example. Including these patently imaginary spirits would help keep things light-spirited. Marc won that debate, and we got both kinds.

One result of this mixture is a quiet but important division in the audience:

If you believe ghosts may possibly exist, then about half of the denizens of the HM are sheer fantasy.

If you absolutely do not believe in ghosts, then all of them are sheer fantasy.

It's as simple as that. It will make a difference later, you'll see. First, let me give you my take on the ride.

(pic by monstersgoboo)

You enter what looks like a real house. Immediately you are met by a ghostly voice. Nothing coy about it: ghosts are real from the get-go and no apology. In short order you discover that the ghosts are able to manipulate the very fabric of the building, including its furnishings and artworks, so that you don't know whether you're hallucinating ("is it your imagination?") or these things are "actually" happening.

The ghosts are evidently bent on disorienting you and unnerving you. The top part of those portraits seemed real enough when you came in, but that lower, elongated portion, so ridiculous, so unrealistic—is that actually there too or just a ghostly trick? Those paintings are funny, but they're pretty macabre. Maybe they're an implied threat? The Host's mocking question goes unanswered. You don't know.

Egads, not only can they manipulate space, but also time. Look out the window. What, is it night already? When did that happen?

Dude, it's like Rip Van Winkle in here. Or is that all a trick too? You don't know. That Ghost Host sure is chatty. Can you trust what he tells you? You don't know. He explains that this house is a retirement home for ghosts, and it's jam packed with them. Sure, why not?

Before you know it you're being moved involuntarily along your way (What are these things we're sitting in? Oh well, it doesn't seem to matter much). It's getting scarier. The ghosts seem threatening, hostile. At one point they even seem to be attacking you. It happens in front of a clock that only confirms that your senses of space and time are putty in their hands. Thirteen freakin' o'clock? Where am I? If this were really happening, you would have bolted the house by now.

And yet, and yet...you're still curious, aren't you? You'd still like to see one of these ghosts, despite everything, wouldn't you? Come on, show yourselves already.

Well, as it turns out the ghosts are having some sort of problem, but whatever it is, that creepy Leota chick fixes it, so the ghosts can at last cross over. And the Host tells you that "they have received your sympathetic vibrations and are beginning to materialize." So, what does that mean? Was all of this a test? To see if your curiosity was greater than your fear? By resisting the temptation to panic and run—maybe the first living visitor ever so to do—were you, then, the key to finally setting them loose? You and those "sympathetic vibrations" of yours? You don't know.

Whatever it was, they're out and about now, all over the place, and it turns out they aren't angry with you after all. Hunh. Maybe you're okay in their book, what with those "sympathetic vibrations" and all. There's still some dark business going on in the attic. Based on what you see, it looks like some crazy bride took out a series of husbands. Maybe that has something to do with why this is a haunted house? After that you go outside and down to ground level. You pass the first flesh-and-blood human you've seen since you got here. As it turns out, he will be the only one. He's obviously the old caretaker, and he's not only frightened, he's astonished. Dumbstruck. He's never seen anything like this before.

Now, THERE'S a man whose flabber has been gasted (pic by Don Sullivan)

Well, I guess that answers the question, Does this happen all the time, or is this a big, one-time event? It's a party out here, and they're having a good time, and you're having a good time too. The spooks are playing for laughs now, and you see silly things like ghosts on bicycles.

It all winds down, and before you leave the grounds, they reset your clock to the real, daylight time you were in before they began playing their little head games with you. Or was it real? You know, one of those parallel universe things? You don't know. But one of them will "follow you home," which I suppose is believable in a weird sort of way, since really, it is THEY who have visited YOUR world, the world where both this home and your home happen to be.

Was that fun, or what?

But that reading has not been without controversy. Many people think that what you're seeing is the party these ghosts throw every night, or at least periodically. That interpretation fails to do justice to the utter astonishment evidenced by the caretaker. It fails to account for the frustration and anger of the ghosts before Leota works her magic and they are free to materialize. Some of the items put forward in order to show that the ghosts do this sort of thing all the time are the present tense verbs all through Grim Grinning Ghost and the Ghost Host's safety spiel, telling you that the spirits will materialize only if you remain quietly seated, with your hands, arms, feet, legs, butts, ears, naughty bits, prehensile tails, and lawyers inside. Of course, in English the present tense is used to describe things happening right now, as we speak, as well as habitual occurrences, and maybe the Host senses that Leota's really got her mojo on today and doesn't want you to potentially screw things up.

Besides, the notion that they have these ghost parties routinely is not Disney enough. On these rides, it's always your lucky day. You're always coming upon unique events just as they are happening. You come around the corner just as the rhino has treed the safari, you escape from the burning town just as it's about to collapse, your train makes it out of the tunnel just as it's caving in. And what do you know, you happen to be there precisely when Leota finally unplugs the clogged portal between this world and that one. Why, it may even have been your "sympathetic vibrations" that did the trick! I'm telling you, this is YOUR LUCKY DAY!

"Raven, it's time. Let's do this thing."

I have a hunch that people unthinkingly pick up the idea that this happens all the time because they've been on the ride so often. It's easy to forget that it's like watching a movie or seeing a play over and over again. You don't know what's coming, you're supposed to mentally rewind to the beginning each time.

Another point of controversy is whether this is a realistic world with ghosts in it, or a fantasy world with ghosts in it. This is far more subtle, but it's important. Perhaps it's easier to assume it's a fantasy world if you're an adamant disbeliever in ghosts. To such a one, saying that something is a realistic world, except that it's jam-packed with ghosts, is virtually the same as saying it's a type of fantasy world. If you have a more open mind about ghostly phenomena, allowing at least the bare possibility that such things could be real, then the distinction is clearer. Granted, the fact that brazenly unrealistic, silly spooks start showing up halfway through the ride complicates things slightly, but it's still reasonably clear that you're only being asked to accept one impossibility here, one fantastic element.

I'm convinced that apart from the ghosts and the ghostly phenomena, it's a realistic world that is put before you. Why? For one thing, it follows the rules.

If you are writing a realistic novel, or the script for a realistic movie or play, there are unwritten rules. First, you are allowed one big, amazing coincidence or one, bizarre, major occurrence. One. If you go over the limit, you risk having your audience bail on you. "Phony." "Unbelievable." That's just how it is. Second, you are allowed to cheat a little to avoid tedium. When the detective needs to jump out of his car and run into the building, there's always a parking spot available, even if we're in downtown San Francisco at midday. If we're at the beach, nobody objects if all the women and men in the background look mahvelous. When a band starts to play, their hands don't need to always go where they're supposed to and you may hear extra instruments in the mix if you know your stuff. (Before the Beatles era, when even kids started learning what an electric bass is, they were able to cheat a lot more in this area.) Third, audiences will forgive tiny logic holes and anachronisms, but if they start piling up, or if there's a whopper in there, they can and will hold it against you.

Filmmakers and writers know this stuff. When a realistic movie is being made, nobody needs to be reminded of these things. You don't have to "decide" to put horses in that pasture but no unicorns. Most of your decisions are made virtually by instinct. You know what the real world is like, since you live in it—duh, and you automatically aim at logical consistency as much as possible.

With a comical fantasy world, it's not nearly so tight. The gag comes first, logic comes second.

I love how exterior shots show the Flintstones' house as essentially a giant egg, but when Fred and Barney are having a conversation as they are running out of that house, that sucker is a quarter mile long (and amazingly repetitious). But who cares? They're cartoon characters in a cartoon world, where logic is a lot more flexible. Great Caesar's Ghost, they've got talking animals, so put away your measuring tape already.

Like I say, the Haunted Mansion is the realistic variety (ghosts excepted) and not the comic fantasy variety. To me, the logical consistency throughout this project never fails to amaze.

Q: Why are the tombstones in the graveyard scene all in the style of 16th-18th century New England gravestones, while the gravestones in the front yard family plot (alas, gone at DL) are of more recent vintage?
A: Because the house was built next to a much older, public cemetery, sometime around the beginning of the 19th century.

Q: Why are the ghosts invisible and scary before Leota, and visible and happy after (except for Connie et al., with their apparently separate melodrama going on)?
A: Because they're unhappy when they're dematerialized and frustrated because they can't seem to do anything about it. Leota is the one who enables the materialization.

Q: Yes, but why are we given the distinct impression that we're in danger before they materialize but not afterwards?
A: Because lacking their own materialized, aerial bodies, they would be more than happy to possess yours. This is garden variety demonology, and the HM apparently makes no ontological distinction between ghosts and demons.

Q: Oh no, now you're getting all theological. How about this: Why is the music done the way it is?
A: Because reality has no soundtrack. At the HM, you only hear "source" or "diegetic" music; that is, music coming from instruments and vocalists that are there onstage (within the cheating rules described above). With realistic films, this is not mandatory, but the HM takes the hard realism route. You hear an unseen pipe organ when you're in the foyer? Well, pipe organs are loud and the sound carries. There must be a pipe organ in the house somewhere. And so there is.

1969 pre-opening shot of the Organist

The instruments floating around at Leota's séance? They match up tolerably well with the music you hear there. There's a lot of drawn-out cymbal work (albeit distorted), and the "bung bung" muffled organ chords can be interpreted by the ear as the plucking of a harp. The music "from regions beyond" is drums and horn.

Sometimes the music is "only the wind" and no instruments need be present. The graveyard is jumpin' to a lively tune because there's a band right there. A distorted wedding march fills the attic. Sure enough, the piano and pianist are right there (lacking at WDW). Using the diegetic approach makes the task of adding music to the background a lot trickier. You'd be stupid to do it that way unless you were deliberately shooting for realism (and by the way, this restriction to source music is extreeeemely rare at Disneyland). Personally, I find this one to be a particularly compelling argument.

You can play this Q/A game . All. Day. Long. As in real life, answers are not plopped into your lap, but if you ask questions and look around, you find that plausible explanations come back to you time after time. Of course the Imagineers didn't consciously connect all these dots. They didn't need to. You go about creating a "realistic" environment, using gut-level, common sense choices all along, and ta da, a high degree of logical consistency shapes up almost automatically, at least if you're good at doing "realistic." The genuine logical holes I've found in the HM are few and piddly. For example, the cupola on top of the DL Mansion is a sloppy, inexact architectural match to what you see above you in the stretching gallery. The tubular bells you hear as part of the mix in the portrait hall and loading area lack an explanation. Forgivable stuff like that.

I have had people challenge this analysis, insisting to me that the HM invites you into a different world than your own, a fantasy world. In response, I have thrown down the gauntlet: Show me a significant logical lapse anywhere in the HM world, something that doesn't make any sense (excluding things done by ghosts, of course). Or failing that, show me repeated examples of things that require special pleading to explain them, things that take us beyond the quota of allowable eccentricities in a realist presentation.

So far I have had no serious takers. Believe it or not, the best that has been offered so far, even by Imagineers who disagree with me, is the "Haunted Mansion" plaque out front! I've actually had this cited more than once as good evidence that you're entering a fantasy world.

(pic by Dave O)

Weak. Every ride in the park has a sign out front, telling what it is. And these signs are themed so as to clash as little as possible with the surroundings. Ah, but they could have named it "Williamson Manor" or something if they wanted it to be a realistic presentation, right? Wrong. You have to have something telling guests this is a spooky ride, in case they don't want to go on a spooky ride. After all, once upon a time the attraction was not famous, and it does not look like a stereotypical haunted house. Yes, the plaques are beautiful, but they are like green EXIT signs, safety bars, stroller parking, and seating instructions. They are part of the price you pay in order to enjoy a presentation like this in the real real world.

You mentally screen all that stuff out as a necessary evil. It doesn't count.

The premise of the ride is exceedingly simple. It answers the question, "What if ghosts were real?" Real to whom? To you, fool. To keep things light and cheerful, Disney threw fun-loving, party ghosts into the mix, ghosts that nobody thinks are real. That prevents you from taking the question too seriously, see?

The main purpose of this exercise it to provide the basis for my upcoming in-depth review of the major changes and additions to the Orlando Haunted Mansion, which began to be implemented in April of this year. That post will be up soon. It is not going to be pretty.

Famous Ghosts, and Ghosts Trying to Make a Name for Themselves

2011-03-22T12:22:00.000-07:00

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Ghosts.

That word covers a lot of territory, from Casper the Friendly to Hamlet's father, from trick-or-treat bag white-sheeters to the really scary ones in literature, cinema, and legend, to say nothing of reports of reputedly real hauntings. One of the fundamental decisions that confronted the Imagineers who put together the Haunted Mansion was choosing which ghosts and ghoulies to put before the public. It was like writing a recipe. How much should the Mansion rely—if at all—on cinematic ghosts? or Halloween decoration ghosts? or established dark ride traditions? The long gestation period of the Haunted Mansion and the conflicting concepts proposed by the many Imagineers who worked on it ensured that the recipe for the attraction would go through many permutations before it was finalized. But Marc Davis's famous verdict to the effect that this particular broth was spoiled by too many cooks is refuted by the ride's growing and often passionate fan base. Mmm-mmm good. Mighty tasty, that recipe.

This post takes a look at some of the approaches they seriously considered but eventually rejected, and why. Curiously enough, for anyone who is interested in this topic, there is a set of paintings that serves almost as an index of the Mansion's disused and discarded concepts: The "Sinister 11" portraits. These are found at WDW and Tokyo, but they were never used at Disneyland.

I'm sure that many of you are already aware that most of the Sinister 11 represent unused ideas for changing portraits. Two of them did indeed become changing portraits at DL (Medusa and "December" from the April-December set); the rest became static paintings with "follow-you" eyes. Until 2007 at WDW they were all in a nice neat corridor. At Tokyo, that's still so. Since 2007, most of the Orlando set can be seen in the load area, with a few placed elsewhere in the ride. However, they no longer stare at you as you go by. It's interesting enough to discover that many of these are really truncated changing portraits; it's even more interesting (to me, anyway) when you realize that they are, in several cases, signposts pointing to paths not taken.

Take Jack the Ripper. He has the distinction of being—possibly—the ONLY fully historical figure in any of the Mansions.

Good old Jack, always prepared to put his best foot forward. He was a little more grisly in Marc
Davis's concept sketch (upper left). In the upper right is Jack as he's seen today. The bottom two
are from the eyes-follow-you days, an effect made possible through the magic of half a ping pong ball.

I say "possibly" because it has been pointed out to me by one of our readers that the Knight changing portrait was labeled "the Black Prince" on Marc Davis's original sketch, as GRD noted years ago. If that refers to Edward, the Black Prince, then we have one other historical character. What about "Great Caesar's Ghost"? Sorry, he doesn't count, because it's uncertain which Caesar he is. No doubt he's either Julius or Augustus, but since it isn't specified, he's technically a generic figure rather than a historical figure. Same with the Mummy. He's frequently referred to as King Tut, but without a scrap of evidence.

Jack is all that remains of Ken Anderson's and then Marc Davis's ambitious plans to use a variety of colorful historical villains in the Mansion. Ken's 1957 show scripts included Anne Boleyn, Lucrezia Borgia, Anne Bonny, Jack the Ripper, and King Tut (not really a villain, of course, but fully historical and . . . sorta creepy). From that list, Marc kept Anne Boleyn . . .

. . . and Mr. Ripper. He also added a number of historical villains of his own, including Guy Fawkes and Ivan the Terrible. (By the way, these were not going to be changing portraits but talking portraits, I am told.) As an aside, it's always fun to speculate about the models Marc may have used in drawing his sketches—in these cases caricatures of historical figures.

Davis's rendering of Guy Fawkes (upper left) seems to owe something to more than one historical
portrait of the famous Gunpowder Plot conspirator. The lower left sketch is by George Cruikshank,
a famous caricaturist previously mentioned in our discussion of the Phantom Drummer of Tedworth.
It's very likely that Davis knew his work. In the present case, note the feather in the hat.

Renderings of Ivan are so few that this 19th c. painting (above) can probably be identified as
a model, almost by default. It's harder to say whether this other thing (below) was laid under
contribution. I kinda doubt it, but then again, there's that helmet-like crown, so maybe . . . .
Well, it's pretty enough to justify putting it up on the board in any event:

Marc also planned to use Rasputin. Believe it or not, Walt nixed this one himself, not because it was so weird but because he feared that relatives of Rasputin might still be alive (which was true) and might want to sue them! Marc recycled some of his unused Rasputin portrait into one of the Sinister 11, the one sometimes referred to as "the ogre."

As for Marc's inspiration, who knows? I mean, when doesn't Rasputin look like that?

Marc was still open to this approach at the time they were planning Tokyo Disneyland, and he did a concept sketch showing an animated crypt full of "famous villians" [sic], including Nero, the subject of a Davis sketch GRD got hold of. Maybe the concept was for him to be a talking, moving statue. Nero, that is, not GRD. Whatever it was, this too came to nothing.

In the end, only one or two historical characters survived the sifting process. And at Disneyland, there is no Jack the Ripper portrait, so Edward, the Black Prince is all you get in the Anaheim original.

When we turn to ghosts and creeps from literature and cinema, the story is much the same: This was going to be a major source, but there is little evidence of it in the actual attraction. Anderson scripted in cameos by Marley and Scrooge, Little Eva and Simon Legree (from Uncle Tom's Cabin), the Canterville Ghost (from an Oscar Wilde play by that name), Captain Hook (at that time, probably inspired more directly by the Barrie play than by the relatively recent Disney treatment of the character), Dracula, the Frankenstein monster, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, and the Phantom of the Opera. Of these, Davis kept only Dracula, an obvious and easy choice for a changing portrait:

He survived as one of the Sinister 11, of course:

Upper left is the ride version, complete with ping pong balls.
Upper right is some impressive concept artwork.
Lower left, another example from the Sinister 11.
Lower right is a painter prepared Drac for Tokyo
Disneyland, from Eyes and Ears magazine (Mar
27, 1981), a very nice find by Master Gracey.

But as usual, Davis proposed a few such characters of his own. A couple were from classical mythology. There's Medusa, an original changing portrait at DL (as she is also now at WDW) and an original Sinister 11 member at Tokyo and WDW.

I've seen no artwork, but Marc also did work on a portrait based on the Apollo and Daphne myth.

Just as the Sinister 11 "ogre" is actually a recycled design based on an unused Rasputin changing portrait, so also the S 11 "arsonist" is based on an unused changing portrait, this one depicting a wolfman. It's not clear whether Marc's wolfman owes anything to cinematic or literary archetypes. The same is true of Dracula, actually. In fact, you cannot find any indisputable case of borrowing directly from the movies to provide a specific character for the Mansion. The only example of this I can find anywhere in Mansion concept art is Ken Anderson's Frankenstein, which is obviously molded in the moldy mold of Boris Karloff.

We need to mention again the following, even though it's a Poe example of the phenomenon. Once upon a midnight dreary, characters and images from Edgar Allan Poe were going to enjoy a conspicuous presence in the HM, as we've seen in a previous post. The Raven's dialogue was replete with "nevermore's," and a demonic, one-eyed black cat was going to pester you all through the ride. But the Poe allusions were eventually taken out of the mix.

So are Dracula and Medusa really the only direct borrowings from literature and/or cinema that made it into the Mansion? Almost. You've also got the Bluebeard crypt. But yeah, that's about it.

We find the same story yet again when we turn to the campy, hokey, orange-and-black world of Halloween iconography, another obvious source of ghost and haunted house lore.

Sheet ghosts, witches, skeletons, black cats, bats, spiders, jack-o-lanterns—all that stuff. So little of this approach is in evidence at the Mansion that you may be surprised to learn how seriously some of the Imagineers contemplated using it. You must admit that Herb Ryman's 1951 rendering of a haunted house, the sketch that started it all, really does look like something you'd see on a Halloween poster...

Ken Anderson also dipped his pen into this inkwell a few times. One of his scripts called for a marriage between "Monsieur Bogeyman" and "Mlle. Vampire," and his sketch of the mansion exterior had an unmistakably Halloweenish black cat weather vane on it, faithfully preserved by Sam McKim and Marvin Davis in subsequent artwork and only traded in for the familiar schooner shortly before the final blueprints were drawn up.

But it was Marc Davis who showed the most inclination to exploit Halloween iconography. It's not known whether he just changed his mind about this approach, or if other Imagineers helped him see the error of his ways. In a previous post, we saw that Davis apparently had a difficult time with the seemingly simple notion of putting a witch into the Haunted Mansion. He veered back and forth between a "real" Black Sabbat type of witch and a Halloween decoration witch. The "Witch of Walpurgis" (among the Sinister 11) remains the only witch in the HM, a compromise between the two approaches. Marc also persisted for a long time with the idea of using stereotypical white sheet ghosts. Like the witches, they're something right off of a trick-or-treat bag.

Marc carried this approach toward realization surprisingly far. One of his hitchhikers ("Ezra") still had that icky "Casper the Friendly Ghost" look when he was done up as a maquette. Of course, it's easy to dump on it because we all know that what took its place is so amazingly good.

Marc was big on the black cat thing, too. (Lower right: dude, Ken's weather vane lives!) But the only Davis black
cats that survived into the finished Mansion are to be found—surprise!—in a couple of the Sinister 11 portraits.

Is anything left of this? Not much. The fact that the seasonal Haunted Mansion Holiday feels like a complete transformation shows how little iconography from Halloween is in the original. The only things in the finished Mansion that ever struck me as stemming from a campy Halloween milieu were those cheesy, orange, giant spiders. [Edit: in the Comments, the Bat weather vane at WDW was mentioned, and I agree that it probably qualifies as another example of Halloween decor at the HM]

A few notes on the spiders: They originally had one of these orange guys in the big web of the DL "Limbo" load area through which the doombuggies descended (which web has been gone since about 2001) . . .

. . . . but they quickly changed it to a more realistic color scheme. I think it's a natural law: all giant spiders gravitate toward the Mexican Orange-Kneed Tarantula look (you know, the one you always see in the movies).

The original orange giants persisted at WDW until 2007 in the area now occupied by the "Escher" staircases.

Tokyo still has spiders in that location, but they feature the more realistic, DL coloration. They also move

their legs, which is cool. If you really must do the giant spider thing, that's the way to do it.

Though the Disneyland spider has been gone for many years, he lives again here at Long-Forgotten, in glorious 3D:

After this post was already written and in the can, lo and behold FoxxFur decided to take up the topic of Disney's giant spiders. That's karma for you. Anyway, if you want to explore Disney's arachnophilia further, check it out.

To sum up our study so far: All that is left of specific historical characters in the HM are the Jack the Ripper and (probably) Edward, the Black Prince portraits. All that is left of specific literary, mythological, and cinematic characters are the Dracula and Medusa portraits and Bluebeard's crypt. In the style and manner of Halloween decor, all that is left are some giant spiders at Tokyo—assuming that is a valid categorization for them in the first place—and probably the bat weather vane at WDW.

Hey, how about traditional dark ride phantasmagoria? Didn't they consider that approach? Well, there are the popup ghosts, of course, widely understood as a hat tip to the HM's dark ride roots.

(left image from Laff in the Dark)

Some would argue that the coffin guy is an adaptation of the coffin popper, or "Dead Dan" gag, a spookhouse perennial. That's probably valid. Maybe the hanging corpse. Beyond that, I don't see much reliance on the haunted house dark ride tradition.

(Images from Laff in the Dark)

However, in contrast to the approaches discussed above, I don't know that the Imagineers ever planned to use the spookhouse template further than they did, so it probably doesn't belong in a discussion of approaches that have left a smaller footprint than originally contemplated.

Time for the big "so what?" moment. Goodness knows, you've been patient long enough.

What is the common thread running through all of these ultimately rejected approaches?

All of them betray a basic insecurity, an attempt to borrow scare credentials from pre-existing, pre-packaged sources. In rejecting these approaches, the Imagineers voted for originality. The Haunted Mansion would stand on its own two feet, or it wouldn't stand at all. No shortcuts, no quick and easy goosebumps by putting a Frankenstein monster in there or having a Pit and the Pendulum scene. We have done a lot of posts ferreting out ghostly inspirations in myth, literature, and history for such things as the attic bride, the graveyard band, the hearse and coachman, the decapitated knight, and the mummy scene, just to name some of the more interesting ones. In every case the inspirations are inspirations only. The Mansion characters themselves are originals. After 40 years, they've made their way into the popular cultural consciousness, and you can speak of Madame Leota or the Hitchhiking Ghosts in the same breath as Frankenstein or Dracula, so familiar are they. But at one time, they represented a creative risk. In other words . . .

In spite of Marty Sklar's famous placard, the Imagineers ultimately excluded

"famous ghosts" in favor of "ghosts trying to make a name for themselves."

The Many Faces of...the Other Stretching Portraits

2011-03-10T21:58:00.000-08:00

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Following up on the Tightrope Walker post, it seems only fair to give the other portraits the same treatment. The differences in artistic interpretations of these characters are at least as noticeable as was the case with Ally Gal, and in some cases they are even more dramatic.

Here's Connie (née "Abigale Patecleaver," her name in that same old X. Atencio script cited earlier). Left to right we've got (1) Marc Davis's original sketch, (2) a Davis-style canvas actually used in the attraction during the first year or two, (3) Clem Hall's version ca 1982, and (4) the current DL version. We'll use that formula with the other characters as well, displaying the same four representations in the same order.

The first thing I always notice about Marc's original is that this widow is not very old. She's put on a few, but she's still cooking on all burners. Secondly, there's a huge contrast between the fried-egg madness in the eyes of Marc's Tightrope Walker and the nimble intelligence of this widow. If this is madness, it's an utterly different form of madness. This is truly a classic Marc Davis sketch, in my opinion. The self-confidence is there, the cold-bloodedness, the wicked edge. She seems quite pleased with herself. She keeps her secret without a trace of guilt feelings. And check out the colors in that face! Yellow skin, grayish-green shadows, pink ears—and yet, mirabile dictu, she doesn't look sickly but very much alive and well. Unless someone had called your attention to it (like I just did), would you ever have noticed how daring and original Marc's palette is in this sketch?

As I pointed out in the Ally Gal post, the first stretching portraits tried to retain the Davis drawings, but they "naturalized" the colors. As was the case with Ally Gal, the widow done this way isn't nearly as good. And don't think Marc didn't notice the way they trashed his color scheme. During an interview with Alice Davis during one of the 40th Anniversary events in 2009, she lamented that many of Marc's gags were either not used or were "overloaded."

Interviewer: "But a lot of Marc's stuff is still in the Mansion, with—like the stretching portraits, and things like that."
Alice: "Yes, but they're not his. They're somebody else's, and the color is not as, uh, nice as what Marc's or Mary Blair's would be to the eye."

When we get to Clem Hall's widow, we have a real revolution. She's quite a bit older. She's drunk. She's got a droopy, somewhat vacant look as a result. But she's still got a few essential qualities remaining from the Davis original. She's smug and self-satisfied. She knows something that you don't know, but that woozy look keeps her from looking pompous about it. You suspect that there's definitely something going on in there when she's sober.

And then there's the current version. Another disappointment. That woman has been drinking iced tea, not wine. Too friendly, too sincere, and like the current Ally Gal, seriously lacking in personality. Does she look to you like she's keeping a secret? Pthh. On to the next...

Marc's original Dynamite Guy looks like a leftover pirate from POTC, and I mean one of the mean ones. Look at those beady eyes. This is a look of undisguised cruelty and barely-suppressed rage. The colors are much more natural this time, so the canvas version is not such a radical departure. Very little difference, except that the eyes have been softened. With those pretty blue peepers, you're tempted to think that maybe, just maybe, this guy started out in life as a nice little boy and turned bad at some point. Davis's original, on the other hand, was born bad.

Clem Hall, once again, reinvents the character. This guy isn't evil or angry (let alone crazy or drunk); he's just plain stupid. It's a study in pride and vacuity. The more you look at him, the more convinced you are that he hasn't had an interesting or intelligent thought in his life, but that apparently hasn't kept him from becoming a Somebody. Are those eyes gazing unfocused at something in the distance, or are they gazing inward at the void where his soul should have been? Seriously, if you were told that this is a painting of a blind man, you might well believe it.

In this case, the current version has aped Hall's version so closely that there isn't a lot to say. So that's it. On to the next...

What we have here is a smug toad. He's self-satisfied and superior, but he's not threatening, not particularly vicious. Alas, I have no color photo of the Davis-like canvas, so we are at a disadvantage there, but it looks like they botched the shape of his face a little. The smile is not as broad, the cheeks don't bulge out as they should. Something is definitely lost in that part of the face.

Once again Clem Hall, it seems to me, has given us a drunk. Nose and cheeks are red, eyes are pale and watery. He's feeling no pain. It's another study in vacuity. Those eyes are staring out at the world unseeing. Remember the overall message of the stretching portraits? The things most highly prized in this life are mere vanities that only serve to distract us from the reality of death. That is what many would call a "sobering thought." With Hall's characters, the state of mind untroubled by that sobering thought is represented, quite naturally, by what looks like an alcoholic haze.

As usual, the current version has sobered up the subject considerably, and as usual it has failed to fill the void with anything particularly interesting.

The remaining Quicksand Men are of less interest, since by the time you see them the joke is beginning to unfold. As the ironic distance between the smug upper portrait and the macabre reality beneath diminishes, so also opportunities for artistic reinterpretation of the joke diminish. Not surprisingly, then, the post-Davis versions don't reinvent the two lower Quicksand Men very radically.

The middle guy has only just now spotted the quicksand sign and has only begun to realize his dire situation. You see pure shock in his face. Even in this moment, he still has his sense of self-importance with him. It's not, "This can't be happening!" so much as "This can't be happening to me!" The bottom guy is past that. He's been aware of the situation for several seconds by now. Initial panic has turned into a full comprehension of the inevitable. Hall et al have added sweat droplets to Davis's original. Hmm. Is that the hot sweat of exertion or the cold sweat of terror?

On a lighter note, we discussed in an earlier post the evidence that Davis looked through old EC horror comics for inspiration from time to time. Seems to me there are enough elements in common between this Al Feldstein cover art and Davis's Quicksand Men to raise suspicions.

On the other hand, there is no need to go rummaging through old comics in search of inspiration for the basic gag in the Dynamite Guy portrait. A plausible source can be found right under our noses, mere yards from the Mansion.

The Many Faces of the Tightrope Walker

2011-02-20T15:15:00.000-08:00

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In our last post, we got all philosophical and theological and stuff with the stretching gallery portraits. This time out we'll be looking at the artistic interpretations of the most popular of these Marc Davis masterpieces (for such they are widely regarded). I'm speaking of the Tightrope Walker (aka Alligator Girl). Recently we were given fresh proof of how much interest there is in this piece. On December 17, 2010, a collector paid $47,500 at auction for an Ally Gal portrait actually used in the attraction. The canvasses get worn out with continual rolling and unrolling and are replaced at regular intervals (every few years is what I've heard). This hand-painted copy was dated in the auction catalogue to 1969-1972, based on the testimony of a Disney employee that they no longer hand-painted the portraits after 1972.

I hope the early date was not a major factor for the buyer, since the information supplied by the employee (and hence the catalogue) was wrong. According to Brandon "Ghost Relations Department" Champlin, all of the stretchroom canvasses were hand-painted until around 2005, when they went to a large format printer. The printed portraits can be done in about 12 minutes, and they last longer too, so it's hard to blame Disney for going to the mechanical reproduction. It's not impossible that the auctioned painting goes back to 1972, but unless there is evidence other than the fact that it's hand-painted, the odds are not good. Even without GRD's testimony, it is obvious that the portraits were hand-painted long past 1972, as there are variations in the style, depending on the individual artists involved. Yes, they used a paint-by-numbers approach and cranked them out in a more-or-less assembly line fashion, but at the same time a certain leeway was allowed to the painters.

In our last post, we dissected the joke represented by this stretching portrait (and the others). By looking at the surprising differences among the various Tightrope Walkers produced by different artists down through the years, you can see some interesting readings of that joke, much as different performers produce different interpretations of the same material. Hey, if somebody was willing to shell out $47,500 for one of these, you can't claim that nobody cares about the topic enough to justify a measly blog post.

The place to begin, obviously, is with Davis's concept artwork. It isn't hard to figure out his take on the character he created...

She's just plain bats. Utterly gone. Look hard into those eyes, if you dare. Dude, those circuit boards are fried. There is no longer a connection between this chick and the world, any world. As it stretches open, the portrait's joke is as simple as it can be: she's oblivious to the reality of death because she's oblivious to any reality at all.

The first few generations of HM stretching portraits stayed conservatively with Davis's design, but they abandoned his bold colors (pink sky? yellow skin?) for a more "natural" look. The result was an unsatisfactory hybrid. Since they only followed this formula for the first few sets, these "Davis-style" canvasses are certainly the rarest in existence. That doesn't necessarily make them good.

Wisely, they abandoned their efforts to rigidly preserve the look of the Davis characters and allowed artists to re-imagine their appearance. Almost all of the stretching portrait artists are anonymous, but the more realistic style that replaced the Davis type is commonly attributed to Clem Hall. One set Hall produced around 1982 has been widely reproduced in books and posters. Here's a set of three non-Davis Ally Gal heads, with the recently auctioned "1972" model on the left, Hall 1982 in the middle, and the current DL version on the right. (In the remarks that follow, bear in mind that it's possible Hall did both left and middle.) [Edit: the "1972" canvas is now being attributed to Elmer Plummer.]

It is obvious at a glance that we are justified in speaking of a variety of interpretations of the character. If you look closely, these three faces read quite differently, don't they? Our '72 girl has a dreamy, far-away look in her eye, but her mind is clearly occupied. She looks like she's remembering something. The look is wistful but intelligent. You might conclude that she's oblivious to the presence of death because she's not really present, she's daydreaming of some past event or person.

There are some nice details in this one. For one thing, her mouth is open, and you can even see her teeth (very well done too). That's unusual, maybe even unique. Those eyes seem almost impossibly far apart, but that contributes to her look, doesn't it? I see a certain sweetness in this one not found in most of the others. It may not go back to '72, and I don't think I'd pay forty-seven and a half K for it, but there's no denying the collector picked up a nice piece by a talented painter.

As for Hall '82, his Ally Gal has an equally distant look in her eye, but unlike the '72 girl, she looks...stoned. Seriously, it reminds me of the look a lot of models cop when they're trying to look blank and decadent and ready to be taken advantage of, if you know what I mean, and I think you do. Now that I've said that, I won't exactly be covering myself with glory if I suggest that she may be the sexiest of all the Alligator Girls, so I won't suggest that. I'll let someone else suggest that. I won't suggest that. Oh, and do you see the unique facial feature? She's almost frowning. In fact, she's on her way to a full-on pout, but I don't think she will ever get there. Pouting takes too much energy, and she's pretty wasted.

Whereas other Ally Gals have a look of innocence about them, Hall's girl is anything but innocent. Not with that drug problem. With this version of the joke we have someone who isn't so much unaware of her fragile mortality as she is uncaring about it.

Then there's the current version. No doubt about it, this girl is a lot more chipper than Hall's. Look at the shape of the eyes. I think the idea was to get back some of the wide-eyed innocence that Hall threw out the window.

She looks a little older to me than the others, and I guess a little more sensible, but frankly it's hard for me to tell, because for some reason this face is seriously lacking in personality. To me, she's easily the most boring of the lot.

There are photos of other post-Davis Alligator Girls out there too, but I don't have anything high-rez enough to facilitate the kind of scrutiny we've given to the three above. Here are two others:

If I had to render a judgment based on those inadequate photos, I'd say the one on the left looks a little p.o.'d, but again, that may be the photograph's fault. The one on the right is very Hall-esque, but with a slightly more perplexed and disturbed look. It's very subtle, but the Clem Hall frown almost means something here. In some ways, she seems to me the most poignant of the Tightrope Walkers we've looked at, since you could interpret her expression as a sort of dawning realization that beauty doesn't mean much in the long run. No, she isn't there yet, not by any means, but she may be the closest of the lot to realizing, vaguely, that she too has a hungry alligator beneath her pretty little feet, like all the rest of us.

Next up: The other stretchroom denizens get the same treatment.
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Whistling Past the Graveyard: The Stretching Portraits

2011-02-02T05:48:00.000-08:00

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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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The Duelists

2011-01-14T21:37:00.000-08:00

In a blog post last year I discussed Marc Davis's talent for telling a funny story in less than a second. Under most circumstances artists try to avoid clichés, but for this task stock characters and stereotypical situations are your best friends (although I have to say that even here it is remarkable how few truly stereotypical situations Davis uses). Another friend of the quick-joke artist is ritual. If you show characters involved in a well-known ritual, you have already incorporated a good deal of story before you've even begun. The best example of this in the Haunted Mansion is the pair of duelists depicted in the grand ballroom's portraits:

Think how much you "know" within half-a-second. A gentleman of some social standing believes his honor has been slighted by another gentleman of about equal social station, and he has challenged him to a duel. The other fellow makes no apologies and so accepts the challenge. The time period is not modern, but 19th century or earlier. The two men are somewhat stuffy, humorless characters. In particular, they seem almost melodramatically sensitive when it comes to their personal honor. You know all of this at a glance, because you know the rules for this particular ceremony, and you probably share the current perception about the kind of people thought to be attracted to it. A dueling scene is a brilliant choice for a drive-by joke.

And what is that joke? Obviously, the duel settled nothing and continues ad infinitum in the afterlife. What was supposed to be the ultimate way of settling a dispute in fact ensured that the dispute would never be settled. It has always been my opinion that the two shot each other dead, leaving no winner, and so the duel continues, stuck in an endlessly repeating loop. I know that GRD thinks there is a real winner, based on a slight sideways head movement by one of the duelists at the end of the cycle, and others who have worked on the figures confirm that the little movement is there, but it's virtually undetectable to guests, and I'm not yet fully convinced it represents a bullet hit rather than drawing a bead. What would truly settle the issue is if one of the two guns went off before the other. The pistols have a special bulb for a barrel flash as well as a bang, so it should not be an irresolvable question. Perhaps one of you Forgottenistas has an insider's familiarity with the shot sequence.

Yer goin' DOWN, dude

While we're snooping around backstage looking at light bulbs and head nods, here are a few fuzzy pix that some of you might find interesting. Top left is the actual set up at DL. Directly underneath them the doombuggies are scooting along the balcony. Top right shows them in the shop, not long before installation in 1969. The bottom row gives you some close-ups. Center and right are the same character, one recent (center) and one old (right). As you can see, they've done up his eyes a little differently over the years. That's the Auctioneer's head from POTC, by the way.

There are more unsolved mysteries with the duelists than whether or not one of them won the duel. There is also reason to suspect that they are not located where they were originally planned to be. Much of what follows may be filed under "speculation," but hey, nothing wrong with that so long as you admit it.

It all begins with Collin Campbell's artwork for the "Story and Song" souvenir record album.

These lush, colorful illustrations are beloved by Mansion fans. But despite their breezy, painterly quality, if you compare them to the corresponding Marc Davis concept art you find that they are extremely conservative. Campbell stayed very close to his sources. This is typical:

Now let's take a look at the Grand Ballroom illustration, which spreads across two pages. The left side would be the place

you might expect to find the duelists, but they aren't there. Balcony railing gingerbread obscures that portion of the wall.

But that doesn't mean that Campbell ignored the duelists. Over on the right side of the painting is a

little surprise, something unknown until this artwork was re-issued with the CD version of "Story and Song"

in 2009. The painting as it was known from the booklet in the 1969 record album looks like this:

But the same painting in the CD booklet looks like this:

Note the portrait on the wall, fully visible for the first time in 2009. Is that . . ? Is that . . ?

It is. It's one of the duelist portraits. What's it doing over here on this side of the room?

It wouldn't be so odd except that Collins is so consistently literal in his reproductions of Davis artwork. Putting a duelist on the wrong side of the room is a little bold for him. Unless Davis also had the duelists on that wall in his sketches. Is that possible? Alas, we don't have Campbell's source art. Well, okay, what's on that right-hand wall in the actual attraction? The fireplace. And above the fireplace is the Mantelpiece Ghost.

Funny thing about Mantelpiece Ghost. He's missing entirely from the two Effects blueprints produced in the first quarter of 1969. If that's just an oversight, it's odd that it happened not once but twice and was never corrected on the blueprints, which were repeatedly updated as they were used. This would also be the only such erroneous omission on these blueprints. Mantelpiece Ghost should be in the red circle on the left.

You can see him in the WDW blueprint of the same area:

Hmm. Is it possible that the duelist portraits were originally going to be on the wall above the fireplace but were subsequently relocated, while a new ghost was put in that area, the Mantelpiece Ghost? Complicating this theory is the fact that the duelists are right where they should be on these same blueprints (see the red circles on the right). What may have happened is that they realized the duelists would work a lot better on the back wall, above the balcony, and they decided they would definitely move them there, even before they came up with something to replace them on the right. That would explain the blueprints. By this scenario, Marc Davis came up with Mantelpiece guy fairly late in the game, no earlier than mid-to-late spring, in fact. If so, this ghost would then have the distinction of being, in all likelihood, the very last AA character developed for the Mansion.

Postscript

Joe "Datameister" Cardello has come up with a good idea for a way to "plus" the duelists: Turn the figures in the paintings into rear projections so that they can disappear when the "real" figure is lit up. Here are a couple of rough GIFs Joe came up with to illustrate the idea. On the top is what you have now, and below it is what you would get with his idea (yeah, yeah, we know it's the wrong duelist).

View Masters From Outer Space (in 3D!)

2010-12-30T13:38:00.000-08:00

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I think that my favorite old photos of Disneyland are the ones you find on View-Master reels. Through the magic of stereoscopic photography, you get a perspective that you can't get any other way. And the older they get, the more fun it is to (re)capture that "you are there" feeling.

Stereoscopic photography uses special double-lensed cameras, thereby replicating the two images received by your two eyes and producing a pair of photos that provide a 3D image when seen through a special viewer, or even "free viewed" without any device at all if you're adept at the skill you use in order to see "magic eye" images.

This kind of photography is nothing new. It's been around since the middle of the 19th century.

As an interesting historical note, many Abraham Lincoln photos were taken as stereographs. There are less than 135 known photos of Lincoln, and only nine of them were marketed originally as stereographs, but many "regular" photos of him are simply the left or right side of photos shot with a stereoscopic camera. Stereoscopes were still a bit of a novelty in the 1860's, and photographers sometimes found it more profitable to print up one side of the stereoscope and sell it as a conventional portrait. Sometimes the stereoscopic secret was not discovered until much later, when a sharp-eyed observer noticed minute differences between photos thought to be identical, and it was discovered that they were actually right and left sides of a stereoscopic image. The two could then be recombined and the stereo effect recovered. Some of those lately-recovered 3D images are among Lincoln's best-known portraits!

This would obviously be appropriate content for a Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln blog, but what does it have to do with the Haunted Mansion? Well, the same thing happened to the Mansion that happened to Lincoln. When the HM opened in 1969, they took the extant New Orleans View-Master set (three discs, 21 pictures) and trimmed seven shots out of it so that they could devote the third reel to the HM. Those seven pictures are the only officially released 3D images of the Disneyland Mansion. For the WDW View-Master set, they kept six of the seven the same and simply swapped out the exterior shot for a shot of the WDW exterior.

Very nice set. But these six interior shots were simply the ones they selected to use in the View-Master reel. The photogs took a lot more than six! What happened to the rejects? Well, a lot of them were perfectly good photos, and so Disney kept them in their files and continued to use the left or the right sides for post cards, souvenir guides, magazine ads, etc. Looking at these, I have detected small differences between identical-looking photos and recovered at least three "lost" View-Master 3D shots of the Mansion interior, all taken in 1969.

This first one I have posted before. In this case the stereoscope is the same as one of the View-Master shots, but I think it's much better quality than the VM version (see above). One side is from a post card, the other side from a Panavue souvenir slide.

In this next case, one side is from Gordon and O'Day, Disneyland: Then, Now, and Forever (2005: Disney Enterprises), p 124 . . .

...and the other is from a 1970 ad in Vacationland magazine.

I had to colorize one of them. Behold, the graveyard band in 3D:

This Death Coach shot is probably my favorite 3D shot of all. The depth of field is amazing. Actually, I have found three similar but slightly different photos of this scene, so I suspect there's a fourth picture floating around out there somewhere, and that there were at least two stereoscopic photos taken in succession during the same shoot.

You can also cheat and create your own 3D stereoscopic photos by clever juxtaposition of consecutive (or near-consecutive) stills from video footage when the camera is slowly sweeping horizontally and the subject matter is not moving too much. Here are a few favorites I've created in that manner. If you are able to do the "magic eye" thing, these should be no problem, but everyone's different, and you may need to drag them to your desktop and play around with the size. Also, some people have better luck by reversing the photos and using a "cross-eyed" method. Me, I can't do it that way.