Medusa Joins the Club

 .Updated 8-1-26

 In the fall of 2015 (yep, it's been that long), batches of glass slides intended for use in the changing-portrait cameras in the Portrait Hall at Disneyland showed up in Van Eaton auctions. At least by Long-Forgotten standards, these slides were a sensation. See HERE and HERE. Three more posts followed those two, representing a complete rewriting of the history of that part of the ride. Not only that, but the newly discovered April-December six-slide series was incorporated into the new version when she debuted in the Limbo load area in 2021 (yep, it's been that long).

One thing I noticed and remarked about when these slides first appeared was that Medusa was missing. All of the other four originals (April, Flying Dutch, Black Knight, and Cat Lady) were represented by full (or nearly full) sets, plus slides of a lot of other unused concepts, but there was nary a slide of our favorite Gorgon in the entire horde. At the time I speculated that maybe all of those slides had escaped the collector's market and were tucked away in the archives, or maybe some collector who had them had a thing for Medusa and no-siree-Bub was he going to part with her.

Well, thanks to a tip from VicariousCorpse over at The Thread™ (at Mice Chat), we can now add Medusa to the club. A single slide from what was undoubtedly a six-slide set is currently up at Heritage auctions. Like so many of these slides, it is badly magentafied (badly magentaed? has become magentacized? has gone magenta? has faded magentaward? -wards? *reboot* "It has faded into a magenta haze.")

 

 

 A sunburned relic. But with some judicious knob-twiddling, we can approximate the original look: 

  

I thank an anonymous commenter for pointing out to me that this slide was #4 in the six-slide set.

We can compare it with the first slide, which of course was in actual use for decades.

 

 

That same commenter kindly alerted me that #5 in the series has also hit the collector's market. It's currently up at eekbay. Unfortunately, none of the photos show the slide outside of its protective wrap, which is semi-opaque! Plus it too has gone off to magenta land. I did what I could, but don't expect much. At least you can still get some idea of what #5 looked like.

 

 

We've got #1, #4, #5, and #6, but always in these six-slide sets, #2 is only a teensy-weensy bit different from #1, so really, we're not far from being able to visualize the complete set. Only #3 is still a genuine mystery at this point.

 

 

 Unraveling an Unveiling

 

With these slides, there's now enough there for us to unravel some of the intended story-telling for the first time. We see a lovely Grecian gal or goddess gradually turning sour, and something funny is happening with her hair. What I find interesting is that the only obvious difference between #4 and #5 is that the ends of her locks have turned into snake heads. That means that it is only at stage five that you're supposed to realize that—oh no—"this gal is a . . . a . . . a  GORGON!" And now that you know that, they hurry up and turn her into stone. No doubt that's why all the pitting and pock-marking is saved for #6. You're two-thirds of the way through the slide show before you know what you're looking at.

 

Those were all painted by Ed Kohn, of course. We can compare them with Davis's three-part concept sketch:

 

Rarely seen earlier stages in the concept sketches, because we care about such things:

 

 

The Del Toro Medusa Mystery

It's no secret that filmmaker Guillermo del Toro is a huge fan of Marc Davis and the Haunted Mansion, and he has in his collection what is supposedly a Davis original of the final Medusa panel in his three-part concept sketch set. What is intriguing is that it is not an exact match of (1) the sketch, nor of (2) the Ed Kohn painting used in the ride, nor of (3) the "eyes follow you" version used for many decades at WDW. Either Davis executed a full-sized, finished painting of the final panel in his set (for whatever reason), or the painting owned by Del Toro is . . . of questionable authenticity. I can't understand why Davis would have done such a thing, but on the other hand, neither can I prove he did not. You decide:

Kohn, as it appeared in the Portrait Hall at Disneyland:

Del Toro's painting (courtesy Daveland):

The WDW "eyes follow you" version:

Side-by-side, the Davis sketch (left) and the Del Toro painting (right)

Whoever painted this obviously wanted to execute a pretty slavish reproduction of Davis's artwork.

Was it Marc himself? I don't know, and neither do you, and that's all I intend to say about it.

 

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Sweet. Long-Forgotten Turns SIXTEEN (plus, the Mansion up against the wall)

If Long Forgotten were a Disney princess, she'd now be old enough to get married. To quote Maleficent: "It's incredible! Sixteen years..." Yes, it's incredible.

Ooooh . . .

Ahhhh . . .

Okay, that'll do. Time for the pivot and introduction of a topic worth talking about but which has never merited a post of its own.

In other words, we're going to do what we always do on these august occasions (even though they're always in April). This one has been sitting in the drawer for a long time, waiting patiently for its moment in the sun.

If there's one piece of traditional Disneyana loved by absolutely everybody, it's those big, souvenir park maps that debuted in 1958 and were regularly updated as time went by. But before we get into those, something you may not know is that in addition to their famous early concept sketches, Harper Goff and Marvin Davis also sketched several maps of the proposed Disney park, then just a twinkle in Walt's eye, and in some of those they included a "Haunted House." Here's Goff's 1951 map. The haunted house is at the very top.

 

And here's Davis's 1953 map. (Middle, far right.)

 

McKim's McKlassics

Our interest, however, is in those colorful wall maps the parks sold. As most of you probably know, the first of these (and the best) were done by Sam McKim, and from the beginning they have always included the Haunted Mansion (or "Haunted House"). We're not going to do a survey of all the changes in the various iterations of the map, only the ones that affected the portrait of the HM in them. McKim's original drawing of the Mansion remained unaltered in the '58, '59, '60, and '61 editions:

We've discussed this one many times, and I haven't anything new to say about it, so we'll move on to the '62, '64, '65 map (none were printed in '63; we'll find that there are numerous such gaps along the way).

  Hands down my favorite. McKim was good at rendering top-down perspective, and his mastery of line weight was amazing. This is the only rendition of the building that even comes close to being accurate, including as it does the peculiar roofline, which reflects the twin stretching rooms. He probably sketched this in 1961 or early 1962, when the building was not up yet, so he must have seen some of the blueprints.

Perhaps the most interesting feature is the color. Already by 1958, in McKim's rendition elsewhere of the building inspired by the Shipley-Leydecker house, the exterior was expected to be white.

But we also know that the eventual color scheme was not yet set in stone, and as proof, the rugged brown in the 1962 park map may be added to this well-known "color guide" from 1962 or 63.

McKim's realistic inclusion of the northeastern stretchroom in the roofline evidently confused later mapmakers, who took it as virtually a separate building attached to the Mansion (and thought to be . . . what? a spill area? restaurant? ). The famous National Geographic spread on Disneyland (1963) interpreted it that way in its Disneyland map:

We're years too early for the Museum of the Weird, by the way, in case any of you are getting all excited about that possibility. The park guidebooks for '65, '66, and '67 all included a little wing over there as well.

 

I suspect that this was inspired by a misreading of McKim's sketch, fueled by the false assumption that the house was a simple square. Did they think it was an old-fashioned farmhouse water tower?

 

I'm Callin' Campbell Mmm Mmm Good

In 1966 the map was redone in a painterly style by Collin Campbell (reproduced in '68, '72, '74, '75, '76). I don't like it as well as McKim's, but I must admit its softer, lusher look has a certain appeal.

The house design is far less accurate, but this will remain the basic look for the rest of the souvenir map's existence. There are several curious features here. One is a weird, non-existent entrance gate leading straight to the front door. I've never heard of any plans to incorporate this feature, but once it got on the souvenir map it had remarkable staying power through subsequent editions. 

More interesting is the implication that the front yard cemetery would extend all the way around to the other side, which of course never happened. But the way the front yard portion is walled-off and enclosed is reminiscent of the old Ken Anderson design for an elaborate cemetery. When the attraction was conceived as a walk-thru (which would still have been the case in 1966), we remember that the northern and southern walled areas were to be twin exit areas complete with graveyards. Were there plans to have them connected? The earliest blueprints of the building do not include the attached stairwell entrance that blocks traffic along the back of the building, so I suppose the idea may have been considered feasible at one point, even though it would always have been a bit of a squeeze.

More interesting still is the presence of the show building. Keep in mind that it was not actually built until the early spring of 1969 (yes, really, 1969), even though the basic size and shape of the building were already determined by 1961:

But why include it at all on a souvenir fun map with no pretensions to strict accuracy? Haven't we been told that 'beyond the berm" isn't supposed to exist when you're at Disneyland? Why, then, the big, ugly, gray blob? Well, the answer is not far to seek. Just south on the same map is the big gray blob of the POTC show building:

As we can see, the Pirates building served as a convenient bulletin board for posting the names of exciting scenes in the upcoming attraction, guaranteed to tease and tantalize map owners.

No doubt when Campbell was recruited to redo the map in 1965 or 66 the powers that be (i.e. Walt) were confident that by the time the map was ready for the printer the Mansion's contents would be just as settled as POTC's. Campbell obviously was not responsible for all that superimposed lettering. They knew what the show building was going to look like and they thought they would soon know what was going to be in it.

What this shows is that as long as Walt was alive and at the helm, everybody thought the decision-making process would keep moving along at a sufficient pace to put a Mansion bulletin board on the park map, in confident anticipation that all the major issues about its contents would be settled by 1966. Didn't happen, of course. The '66 and '68 Campbell maps are solid evidence that things really did lapse into a state of uncertainty and flux when Walt died, just like everyone says it did.

An edition of the map with the interior items tacked on the show building eventually did appear in 1972 (no new maps appeared in '69, '70, or '71). Notice that "the graveyard" is not included. The outside graveyard (still labeled there) is supposed to be understood as being in continuity with the one we see on the ride, and you wouldn't label the same graveyard twice, right? This is evidence that what would eventually be the berm graveyard was conceived as merely the extreme edge of the large public cemetery you see in the ride, spilling over the hilltop into view from the front. The crypt complex that makes up the exit area was to be understood the same way. You enter it riding in your doombuggy and eventually make your way out of it on foot. This is also confirmed in the script for the "Story and Song" album.

For 1978, they decided to redo the map entirely once again and go back to the look of the original Sam McKim maps, more sketchy-graphic and linear, but preserving the Campbell design overall, except for deleting the no longer necessary show building (qua bulletin board). Putting a couple of the hitchhikers on the map seemed sufficient.

This edition was reprinted in '79, '82, '83, '84, and '87. I have to admit that I don't know who the artist was. No one else seems to know either. If I ever find out who it was, I'll put it here (hooray for the blog format). According to Tom Morris, the art library at WDI has the artist listed as "unknown." It's not bad, but I think it suffers by comparison with McKim. When it comes to pseudo-Sam, Chris Merritt does it better.

In 1989 some alterations were made to accommodate the inclusion of Splash Mountain. The hitchers were moved into the front yard, but little else was changed. Same artist, it seems.

In 1995 they redid the whole thing again. The artist was Nina Rae Vaughn. It seems like the goal was to bring in a some of the lushness of the Campbell version. The wraparound graveyard is finally gone (or obscured), and the south porch has finally been given its pediment, but the non-existent front entrance still persists. A few more interior characters appear (Mdm L and the Caretaker). It was reprinted in 2000.

For the 2001 edition (reprinted in '05 and '08), FastPass Gardens was included, and the front entrance was finally put where it belongs.

I have not thought it worthwhile to chart all the little depictions of the Mansion in the park guides, other than the mid-sixties items above, but I find it curious that since at least 2013 (and probably earlier), a strange sort of "Winchester Mystery House" architectural sprawl has served as the HM icon.

 

 

I can only imagine that the artist wanted you to think that the parts of the building you can't see are in fact able to accommodate all the stuff you encounter inside. Be that as it may, map artists have let their imaginations run wild.

McKim Returns!

Getting back to the big wall maps, there is a wonderful tale to be told about Paris Disneyland. It seems that they convinced Sam McKim himself to come out of retirement and do their souvenir map, and the depiction of Phantom Manor is a sheer delight, full of Sam's distinctive humor and with his graphic skills undiminished and on full display, as if 1958 was yesterday. What a treat.

 A always, thanks to all you Forgottenistas for making this blog worthwhile! Long Forgotten continues to pick up new readers, so . . . there ya go.

 

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FOUND: One of the Original 1969 Stretching Portraits (UPDATE: new photos)

 UPDATED: new photos added 7-4-25

This may be the most amazing and unexpected discovery of an original Mansion prop since the Phineas Pock tombstone resurfaced in 2020. This is even better, really. Back in January of this year (2025), a guy who goes by the moniker "BlueCollardBastard" (BCB) put up a post at Reddit about successful restoration work on an old stretching gallery portrait of the Wicked Widow (aka Constance, and before that Abigail Patecleaver). As he tells it, his grandfather was an elevator mechanic with Amtech and did some servicing on the Haunted Mansion stretchrooms back in the day. He somehow got hold of an old Widow portrait, apparently from a Disney engineer who fished it out of the trash when they were swapping out the portraits for fresh ones. They wear out and have to be replaced regularly.

(You regular Forgottenistas will have to forgive the inclusion of a lot of stuff that you already know and has been discussed before. I'm expecting this post to attract the attention of a number of outside readers. Disney history buffs they perhaps may be, but sadly, many are still shockingly underMansionized. We must be patient with them.)

BCB chronicled the restoration with a nice series of photos. (They also did an Ally Gal portrait of more recent vintage.)

 

 

Photos: https://www.reddit.com/r/thehauntedmansion/comments/1il2owt/2_stretching_portraits/#lightbox

A sharp-eyed threadster brought the Reddit post to our attention (VicariousCorpse), and another

one noticed that this particular painting looks like a match to one of the originals (yensidtlaw1969).

 

Long story short: it is.

 

What we have here is one of the original 1969 stretching portraits,

a rare and valuable historical relic, risen from the dead.

 

 

From a historian's point of view, doing restoration work on an old relic beyond what is necessary for preservation is definitely a no-no, but from an aesthetic and possibly a collector's point of view, it's hard to argue with the results.

How do we know it's one of THE original portraits? First of all, it's the right style. As I've pointed out elsewhere, the Imagineers' first impulse was to preserve the design of Marc Davis's concepts but alter the coloration to something more realistic so they would look like typical 19th century oil portraits rather than watercolors using somewhat nonrealistic colors. You've seen it many times before, but these Daveland shots are among the most recent and most accurate photographs of Marc's concept art:

 

The portraits seen in the Mansion when it opened were not painted by Davis but by Ed Kohn, the same guy who translated Marc's changing portrait concept artwork into the finished designs still seen today. Ed did a pretty good job preserving Marc's designs while naturalizing the colors, but this approach did not last for many generations, perhaps not even two. It was apparently felt (correctly, I think) that the spirit of Marc's creations did not fit this approach, and if they were going to go with natural coloration they needed a more naturalistic design overall. That remains to this day the governing philosophy. Clem Hall is often credited for the new look, which is still in use, but Elmer Plummer may actually be the man to thank. Whoever is responsible, the difference between the newer style and Marc's is pretty obvious.

pic by Bassbone

My best information is that the paintings were done by hand until about 2005, although there were some unsuccessful attempts before that to come up with an effective printing technique. An "assembly line" approach can be seen in this photo of paintings being produced for the Tokyo Mansion in the 1980s. Of course, as long as paintings were still being produced by hand, the artists had some leeway. Notice that the foliage in the three Ally Gals is not leaf-for-leaf exactly the same from painting to painting. And why should it be?

Which brings us to the point first raised by yen69. There are photos from 1969 and 1970 showing the original paintings in situ, and it should therefore be possible to check whether or not the BCB relic is in fact the one in those photos. The painting can be seen in the Osmonds TV special from March 1970, but that one is a bit too distant to supply the sort of detail we want.

Better are these two from 1969/70, one acquired by Daveland a number of years ago, the other a shot by Gregg Ziak taken by himself back then.

With a little effort, it's possible to line these up with the BCB painting. Looks to me like an exact match. It's almost certainly the same painting.

Hey, what about the Widow portrait in the second stretching gallery? As it happens, Gregg has a photo of that one too (well, sort of):

This time the foliage is NOT an exact match, so this must be from the other stretching gallery.

A second photo exists (owned by Master Gracey and posted at Facebook).

Oh my.  Not the best quality, and not a very helpful angle for making comparisons, either. Nevertheless, with a few adjustments it's good enough to create an overlay with the Ziak photo. There's no doubt in my mind that we have another match. (You have to look not only at the outlines of the foliage but at things like the patterns of "sunlight holes" through the leaves.)

Worth the effort, because this gives us a DATE. The photo is stamped February, 1972. Assuming the paintings in both galleries were changed out at about the same time, this proves that the original paintings were in use for at least two and a half years, and BCB's grandfather couldn't have gotten his lucky hands on this relic until sometime in the spring of 1972 at the earliest. I've seen wildly different accounts of how long those hand-painted portraits lasted before needing to be replaced, from a couple of months to a couple of years. We now have solid evidence that they could indeed remain in use for at least two and a half years.

 

Orlando

What about WDW? Less mystery there. When they removed the original paintings from the WDW galleries, they cut one down, framed it, and put it in the chicken exit corridor:

 

 

Full-length photos also exist. It's fun to put one alongside the newly

recovered Disneyland example and see how similar they were:

Anyway, BlueCollardBastard, if you're reading this, know that you have an extremely rare piece of historic Disneyana on your hands. That's the very same painting people like me saw in the Mansion when it opened in August of 1969. I hope that whoever ends up owning it appreciates what they have.

 UPDATE: two more pre-restoration photos have been posted online HERE:

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