Things You're Just Supposed to Know

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

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

________
.

Tuesday, October 1, 2013

Here in This Gallery

.
In 1964, Walt Disney spoke specifically about the hallway in the Haunted Mansion where we now see the changing portraits. He said that he...

.               "...wanted something nice for the hall, like werewolves,
.               a Medusa, marble busts that talk, and ordinary-appearing
.               pictures that will change into horrors before the visitors' eyes." *

That's a pretty accurate description of the "Great Hall" as Marc Davis envisioned it.  It's not likely that Walt came up with this detailed scheme and dictated it to his artists.  More likely he's describing—with obvious approval—the artwork that Marc had already shown him.

Marc Davis in the 60s, with artwork for the "Great Hall"

We've posted and discussed that artwork on two separate occasions, once to show how receptive Marc Davis was at one point to Rolly Crump's notions of a surreal environment for the Haunted Mansion (A Weirder Haunted Mansion) and once to show how Davis and company planned for awhile to use massive scale to intimidate guests (Does Size Matter?).  So I better have a darn good reason for pulling out that same artwork a third time and placing it at center stage.  As it happens, I have three.  (1) Recently I acquired some fresh copies of those paintings that are better quality than what I had, one of them MUCH better quality, so even though you've seen them before, you may never have seen them this clear and sharp, especially the first one.  (2) Besides the cleaner copies, I've also got a handful of trivia about them that has been sitting patiently in my files, waiting for just such a moment, and I've decided to let them come out and play. One of them might even be charitably described as "serious history," nearly, almost.  After that we'll get to the real meat of the post: (3) an entirely fresh angle on the creative genius of Marc Davis that probably justifies a third go-round with this intriguing artwork.

So you don't mind if I post them again, do you?  Oh you do?  You do mind?  Well, as the poet says, that's just T.S., Eliot, because I'm posting them.



Triviality #1 is trivial indeed, but fun.  It has to do with the date of the two paintings. They were done in either 1964 or 1965. Since Walt seems to refer to them in 1964, you would think that would fix the date. The artwork also appeared in the 1965 Disneyland souvenir guidebook, so it obviously existed before that went to press.


Nevertheless, I'm inclined to assign the two paintings to early '65.  The paintings are nowhere in sight during Walt's tour of Marc's corner at WED during the January 1965 "Tencennial" television show, even though the walls are covered with Marc's and Rolly Crump's concept art, and it's possible that what Walt saw in 1964 were concept sketches of individual paintings and sculptures, along with preliminary sketches for the hall itself, like this:


But the real reason I date them to early '65 (and the only real reason this
trivial little discussion is interesting at all) is something I just recently noticed:


As for triviality #2, I noted in passing in one of the previous examinations of these paintings that they represent the two ends of the same room and should be taken together.  I didn't explain how we know that. Davis left no room for doubt on this point by showing half of the Cat Lady portrait in one painting and the other half in the other painting.


This naturally encourages us to look across the Hall to see if we can identify the painting
chopped in half on that side.  At first glance, the project doesn't look too promising.


But dry those eyes, and please, put down the gun.  I think
this too is a real painting that can be positively identified.


On to triviality #3, wherein I note the curious circumstance that all seven of the paintings shown in the Great Hall really did make it into the finished Mansions, either at Disneyland or Orlando, but none of the sculptures made it. The paintings are Dracula (in his wolven phase), the Cat Lady, the Black Prince, and Medusa along one wall, and what we now know is Jack the Ripper, the Flying Dutchman (in its original form) and the Witch of Walpurgis along the opposite wall.

We need to take a stroll down the Hall to get to triviality #4.  Guests would
have entered through those Crumpish doors at one end, off to the side...

(Look at how beautifully that armor is rendered.)

...with the portrait of Dracula right in front of them (Walt's "werewolves")...


...and a very large bust to the right.  It's hard to make
out any details without moving in closer.  It's creepy.


At the other end of the Hall is the fireplace.  As we have seen previously, Davis did more than one concept painting of that one.  Perhaps he felt that the room had enough talking marble busts and needed something different over the hearth.  We've got a battle axe and medieval mace crossed behind a shield, and from the looks of it, perhaps the face in the shield was going to talk.  Very Crumpish.  Also very Tiki-Roomish.


And this brings us to triviality #4. It has been suggested that the fireplace was actually going to serve as the exit from the room.  Weird, unexpected, and scary.  Perfect, in other words.  If you look at the guide ropes in the sketches, it is clear that guests either exited through the fireplace or had to return and go out the same door they came in, which seems unlikely.

The hearth opening is certainly tall and wide enough to be a doorway, and there are any number of ways the effect could have been achieved. Special effects whiz Yale Gracey could have designed something like that on his lunch hour.  Most interesting to me is that this would have been yet another case of borrowing a page directly from Ken Anderson's playbook. In the original 1957-58 blueprints for his Ghost House, the "Father of the Haunted Mansion" included two rooms from which the guests would exit via secret passages revealed by moving fireplaces.  In the case of the Trophy Hall, even the layout of the room resembles Marc's Great Hall, with animated animal-head trophies along each side wall (= Marc's marble busts) and the moving fireplace in the center of the end wall.



Marc the Lowbrow

More than once I've tried to debunk the stereotype of Marc Davis as a diehard jokester who had no interest in making the Mansion a scary place. Try to find anything funny in these Great Hall paintings.

There's another somewhat related stereotype that can use a little debunking as well, and that's Marc the slightly bawdy, lowbrow entertainer. Because so much of what we receive from Marc's hand in the Mansion is humorous, and so much of this humor is pretty lowbrow, it's easy to forget that he was more complex than this.

The unused "Great White Hunter" gag is a good example of the type of thing Davis is known for.  At one point he conceived of a "Ghost Men's Club" in one room of the HM, and the GWH would have gone there.  I've posted the concept painting before, but most of you have probably not seen Marc's sketches.  The basic gag was simple:  A tiger rug comes to life and bites the ghost of the man who shot him.  Did I say "simple?"  The joke may be simple, but don't ask me to explain the metaphysics.





(David Witt takes the whole thing several steps further.)

It would seem that Marc toyed at one point with the idea of
having the tiger bite the man's boot rather than pants bottom.


Well forget that.  Biting the pants is much funnier. Marc knew and shared Walt's sense of humor, and that meant BUTT JOKES.  Lots of butt jokes. Once you notice it, they're all over the place, a favorite groove in the Disney oeuvre.  If you need proof, this will do as well as any:  Be it known that there are 14 butt jokes in Pinocchio.  That's four freakin' teen.  I haven't really done a detailed count for other films.  I've got other things to do, you know, and what do you think I am, anyway, some kind of PERVERT?  If you really doubt that this sort of humor rang the bell with Walt and Marc, I've got two words for you: Lost Safari.

Think too of the truckload of corn Davis delivers in the Country Bear Jamboree, and then there's my favorite example from the Mansion, a guy in his unnerwear on a keg o' TNT.  It's not for nothing that Marc has a reputation for lowbrow humor.

As for bawdiness and naughtiness, do we really need to go there?  Hmm?  Oh, we do?  Okay, well, there's the obvious example . . .


But in my humble opinion, Marc's wickedest double entendre is here:


You don't see it?  Oh come on, how can you not see it?  There's a rooster on his tippy-toes. You still
don't get it?  A rooster.  And he's standing erect.  NOW do you get it?  Okay, let's change the subject.


Marc the Highbrow

But don't forget that there is also Davis the serious artist, well trained, highly disciplined.  His knowledge of anatomy was excellent.  Reportedly, there was no one at Disney better at drawing realistic animals.  This Marc Davis would tell you that Mary Blair was as good a colorist as Matisse and just assume that you know enough about modern art to know what that means.  He was an expert in New Guinea primitive art.  In fact, he and wife Alice actually bought the house next door to their own so that he could display his impressive collection of New Guinean art there.  He also moonlighted as a "serious" artist, and some of his work from the 1950's, although not groundbreaking by any measure, isn't half bad.

Horses Seeing Red (1950)

Queequeg Pursuing Moby Dick (1956)

The point I wish to make is that sometimes Marc's work on the Haunted Mansion betrays the influence of this side of the man.  As a serious artist and student of the arts, Davis was certainly familiar with the great art collections of Europe, such as the Louvre, the Vatican museums, and the Hermitage in St. Petersburg (then Leningrad).  The Western European collection at the latter is among the finest in the world, and those galleries are considered the heart of the Hermitage.

So what?  Well, I strongly suspect that when Davis designed the Haunted Mansion's Great Hall in the form of a large art gallery, he had in mind not only Rolly Crump's surrealistic architectural environment, but also a real world art gallery:  the Hermitage.  Judge for yourselves.

(top photo from Viking River Cruises)

A few additional observations.  You don't see it in the photo above, but
those distinctive red galleries also housed white marble statuary:


How about some purple draperies to go with those red walls?


And those toothsome wall coverings remind me somehow of the Hermitage Throne Room.


In "Does Size Matter?," I pointed out that the Great Hall was massively oversized, part of a scare strategy (subsequently abandoned) of intimidation through sheer bigness.  If you think that this was simply another element of surrealistic fantasy, think again. It's very much an element of real world museums like the Hermitage.  By happy accident, in our earlier photo there's a man standing in the same place as a man in Davis's painting, and the scale is not much different.


Davis was aware that real world museums sometimes overawed their guests with enormous canvases and statuary in monumental settings.  It's not hard to feel like a midget walking among giants.  (One could mention here that the great cathedrals evoke a strong sense of spirituality through sheer, breathtaking scale, as anyone who has ever been in one of them can testify.  Perhaps that's one reason why "Gothic" and "spooky" so easily came to be synonyms?)

So there you have one more example of the richness and depth these talented artists brought to the table from their own experience.  And now, we'll put these pieces to bed, unless and until such time as it seems appropriate to bring them out for a fourth discussion.  Wouldn't surprise me.

*Jeff Baham, Doombuggies.com Presents the Secrets of Disney's Haunted Mansion (2006) p. 14.


14 comments:

  1. An amazing review of 'triviality' HBG2.

    Marc Davis' art always - to me anyways - evokes something much more cerebral once you get past the 'Low Brow Punnery' presented at face value. I appreciate you presenting the parallels, as well as some original Marc Davis art side by side to prove this point.

    Job well done sir.

    MFTA

    ReplyDelete
  2. I think it's true that you have to be smart to be funny. As they say "If you have to explain the joke, it isn't funny." I find the great white hunter and tiger funny because deep down we all like a good butt joke, no matter how old we are. Disney is very much about about getting both the young and the young at heart to have fun. Davis clearly also had a very fine eye for the arts and the concept art for the Portrait Hall is gorgeous! I'm glad that much of the what's in the concept art showed up in the actual attraction. One thing I've never understood is the Dracula/Wolf painting though. I'm pretty sure there was no film version of Dracula at the time that had him becoming a wolf, so I always felt that this painting didn't read at a glance. Am I alone on this one?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Actually, if I recall correctly, in the 1930 Bela Legosi Dracula, it's strongly suggested that he turns into a wolf, even though it isn't shown. He is averse to wolf-bane and crucifixes (no garlic in sight). They don't show him turning into a bat either, and I don't think it's even mentioned. My recollection is that the Bram Stoker novel is similar, with Dracula's most usual and possibly only transformation changing into a wolf. (Someone will correct me if I'm wrong, I'm sure.)

      Delete
    2. Okay, I was wrong about a number of things. It's 1931 for the film. He mostly turns into a bat in that, but it's implied he can do more than that. In the novel he's quite a shape-shifter, appearing as a wolf, a bat, and a cloud of mist, and a rat. In Nosteratu there's definitely the wolf, and I can't remember any bats. Anyway, his ability to turn into a wolf is well-attested.

      Delete
  3. Fun stuff. I always snickered at those pirates. I teach using "old master" paintings as adjuncts to my topical material, and I am always looking for the symbols and subtexts in the visual work, since I want subliminal tie-ins to my otherwise unrelated topic.

    I've also noticed that the ability of artists to dream them up and include them has declined in parallel with the viewers' abilities to recognize them and interpret them.

    Nowadays, a symbol has no semantic value unless it's a brand logo or a cartoon character. You can show people cues like the rooster, but they can't see them as a narrative, much less as a joke.

    I suspect this is why there have been no more attractions like the Pirates or the HM; today's audiences (and Imagineers too) are unable to construct an "open-ended" narrative out of a group of loosely connected vignettes like these attractions do.

    Today, we need the crutch of familiarity with the external story like Star Tours or even Peter Pan to help us enjoy the tableaux. And that's part of the brilliance of these old Disneyland attractions like Jungle Cruise, Nature's Wonderland, Tom Sawyer's Island, even the Primeval World; their narrative takes place in your mind, created only by the images you see and the "prototypes" or symbols you bring to the party yourself (well, ok, the patter of the boat pilot helps too). Everyone has a different experience, uniquely their own, due to their interpretation of an open-ended story, instead of seeing a fully scripted event.

    This is why I resent the attempts by Disney (now) and other fans to create a consistent backstory for the HM. It never had one, which is why creating a consistent one is difficult, and doesn't need one, since the open story is better than any fixed narrative could ever be.

    JG

    ReplyDelete
  4. I'm just a casual reader of the blog, but I can't help but wonder if the idea of walking through a fireplace can be linked to Ken Anderson's work on Sleeping Beauty, where walking through a fireplace is actually used to creepy, climatic effect. It would seem that the timing would fit and maybe even precede his Ghost House blueprint since story work for the film began in '51 and animation production ran from '53 through '58. Any thoughts on that? Your knowledge is broader than mine.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That's a good observation; the motif is used in Sleeping Beauty, and Anderson would have been very much aware of it, so it's possible that he thought about incorporating the idea into his Ghost House. I suspect that the idea of a hidden passageway behind a fireplace probably isn't original to SB, though.

      Delete
  5. I'll assume you covered the subject in an earlier post. Looking at the hunter gag, I noticed the seven tiger heads are the seven dwarfs. Two of them are obvious(Sneezy, Grumpy), I know that's up to some interpretation. It could go into the seven deadly sins, I like the dwarfs angle better.

    What I really like is the tiger's tail, less fur on the tip. LOL
    Marc was a very clever guy. I like how he ads more than just one joke in his work.

    The Moby Dick painting is really striking.

    ReplyDelete
  6. I knew that Dracula became a wolf in the novel and that it's mentioned briefly in the 1931 film. I just figured that most people would've forgot that he turned into a wolf, considering how often he is associated with turning into bats and/or being around bats in pop culture imagery. I have no doubt that Davis remembered the undead "werewolf" aspect of Dracula, I'm just not completely sure Joe Mansion would (kind of like the Witch of Walpurgis' pitchfork not being used due to the popular image of the witch on the broomstick). I also wish they would've kept the werwolf transformation for the arsonist. Without the transformation, he makes little sense. What about him makes him an arsonist? I guess the background looks sort-of on fire, but it could also look like a bright sunset. He's not really spooky or mysterious like the other paintings, he just looks out of place. Is there a place I could find a clearer picture of the Arsonist painting, just to confirm the background is actually ablaze?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. There's no doubt about the Arsonist. There are even people trapped inside, visible in the lower windows. Gruesome.

      http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y32/danolson/stuf/kioug_zps09045c51.jpg

      Delete
  7. OK. Yeah, that's clearly fire coming out of the roof and the roof has fire damage. I guess those little shadowy smudges in the lower window could be interpreted as people. The main focus is on the Arsonist himself, so only so much background detail could be put in once the Mansion was changed to a ride-through. Thanks for the clarifying photo!

    ReplyDelete
  8. RE 'The Hunter' artwork by Davis...I'm sure you have seen this?...;)

    https://vimeo.com/6988088

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes! That's the "David Witt" link in the post above.

      Delete