UPDATED March 15, 2025
When "classic Mansion" finally returned in 2025 after an unprecedented absence of approximately a year and a half, we found a lot more than a reimagined attic bride. Now that we've dealt with her (see previous post), it's time to review the rest. Some of the new stuff is very good, and some of it is . . . not.
But before all that we need to point out one more thing about the New Connie:
She's Still a Baddie, Not a Saddie
It seems that when they redid the hubby portraits in order to eliminate their insufficiently sensitive decapitations, no one on the team had enough presence of mind to realize that they also needed to redo Connie herself in the "Constance & George" portrait, because as things stand she is still indisputably identified with the Widow portrait in the stretching gallery. I've put up this montage before, more than once:
MasterGracey
The 2005 team clearly went to great lengths to make the identification as explicit as possible. The 2024 team did nothing to undo it.
LA Times
So there's no way around it: Connie is still the Widow, and if so, it's still the case that she offed George with a hatchet. And if she rubbed out husband #5, it's a cinch she offed the previous four as well, especially since the team also failed to remove the little ceramic figurines of a female beside a male with his head snapped off. These are still to be found in the Ambrose and Frank tableaux.
Sorry, Kim Irvine. Until the last portrait is altered or simply removed and the figurines eliminated, all that talk about a sad, bewildered bride ghost searching for her lost love(s) is contradicted by the ride itself. Like it or not, as things stand the New Connie is still a cold-blooded killer.
Now let us turn to other things.
Graveyard Wraiths and Blue Mist
The
ghosts projected on the scrims in the graveyard are greatly improved.
No more spinning wheels. They now vary in speed and direction and you
find here and there a subtle waving motion. This is a 100% positive
improvement. Well done. (vid and stills: WDW News)
By
the same token, we have nothing but praise for the improvements in the
floating blue mist effect, both in the Limbo load area and in the
graveyard. Besides the improved projection effect itself, in the load
area it looks like they noticeably expanded the blue mist to cover a larger area of
the screen.
Look also behind the Royals in the video clip above. With regard to Limbo,
there's also a new exit/entrance in it for wheelchairs and scooters. At
great expense, Disneyland added a more ADA compliant elevator entry and
exit system. (This was the main reason for the prolonged shut-down.) The
huge new mausoleum in the expanded queue area, as most of you know,
houses the new elevator. There are plenty of
videos
out there giving tours of this new feature. The Mansionification of the
halls and elevators is superficial and not very atmospheric. Despite a
random set of Marc Davis concept sketches hanging on the walls of the
passages, it doesn't quite feel like part of the Haunted Mansion, but I
view it as purely utilitarian. It does what it's supposed to do with
enough decoration added to at least take the raw edges off the break in
illusioneering.
VicariousCorpse
The Bat Cage Returns
This item appeared in 2023 for a couple of days near the Endless Hallway and then vanished.
Jeff Baham
It
appeared again during the last Haunted Mansion Holiday in the Corridor
of Doors. Now it has stayed behind for classic Mansion.
My
sources say it's still on trial. If it doesn't go over well, they may
reserve it for HMH alone. Some people don't like it, but I have no
problem with it. (Someone somewhere is making a note: "Long-Forgotten says it's cool.")
Why? Well, it fits in well enough with my read of the ride's narrative.
To recap, I think that when we were downstairs the spooks were toying
with us, trying to scare us off. There were paintings that appeared to
stretch and change, not to mention the walls themselves. Other paintings
flickered foreboding images with the lightning flashes. Busts appeared
to follow our moves, but stopped moving when we stopped. A whole room
seemed to open into an "eerily lit limbo of boundless mist and decay."
The Ghost Host had taunted us with a dilemma: are these hallucinations
or actual metamorphoses? They're messing with our heads, leaving us
wondering if these haunted happenings are actually taking place or "just
our imagination." It's a false dilemma, since it's also possible the
ghosts can manipulate the very fabric of the building and its
furnishings in some sort of real/unreal way.
When we get to the
second floor, where even the staff fears to tread, the gloves are off.
No more hide and seek. Now when they manipulate the fabric of the
building, they leave it that way, and they make a lot of noise
too. In the COD, the wallpaper and the "family portraits," which
presumably would have been normal-looking before we got there (like the
downstairs furnishings), have become grotesque and distorted, with no
return to "normal" to leave us wondering if we're seeing things. They're
done with that flickering-back-and-forth rubbish. They want you to know
they're real, and that perhaps you shouldn't have come this far.
The
bat cage fits this environment fine. What was probably a bird in a cage
before we got there (or more likely just an empty cage) now seems to
have a gruesome little bat in it. If it had been downstairs, it would
have been out of place, but in the COD it fits the environment
satisfactorily.
The "Rolly" Chair is Back (But Still No Rotting Fruit)
No big thing, but the "Rolly" chair is back, the one they added in 2021
to the Séance Circle's airborne flotilla and later removed. At
the time I suspected that since they had used a commercial design, maybe they had failed to get proper permission. Well, either they got the necessary permission or that
was never an issue.
I wish they would restore the Purply Shroud
over there, especially now that they've removed his twin brother in the
graveyard crypt. I also wish that in the Ballroom they'd turn the rotting fruit effect back
on. I can't help thinking it's basically just a light switch somewhere
that people have forgotten about. It's one of those cool minor effects
you only notice on your fiftieth ride or so.
Digital Hitchhikers
We all heaved a sigh of relief when the cartoon antics of the Orlando hitchhikers
did not reappear in the Anaheim mirrors when they went to digital
imagery. Instead we got a slavish reproduction of the original rod-puppets. I
understand that they created these images from photos of the original
figures rather then de novo using CGI. Good. Clearly they wanted
everything to look the same as it always has. For this, THANK YOU, team.
There has been criticism about the sharp cut-off line at the bottom of
the figures, but that was an irritating feature of the old system too.
My main worry was that the figures would look flat, since the old
figures were genuinely three-dimensional, but the feedback I'm getting has been entirely positive, that they don't look flat. Also, they fade in and out at the beginning and
the end of the line, "materializing and dematerializing," in ghost language.
It
leaves you wondering why they bothered changing it at all. I presume
it's a maintenance issue. The ghosty-go-round was a big, clanky,
mechanical contraption requiring diligent upkeep. Barring electronic
glitchery, there's now a lot less to go wrong. I regret the disappearance of the Victorian-era magic trick technology that went with the original, but I appreciate the effort to make the change not look like a change.
The Caretaker's Shed
This
thing is not really part of the "new queue" but a way of camouflaging
something utilitarian that apparently needs to be there. It's not bad
looking.
But
what's this? A human femur in the dog's dish? Here is an example of how
shallow and obtuse the thinking of these guys can be. The Caretaker is
presumably also a grave digger (note his shovel), and his dog has
evidently been munching on human bones. It's a macabre joke, see? Well,
what this "joke" utterly ignores is the character of these characters.
Both he and his dog are utterly without guile, completely sincere and
innocent, and a bit cowardly to boot. There is NOTHING
sinister about the man or his dog. Does anyone need to be told that?
Both of them would be absolutely horrified at the gruesome suggestion
here. This is like seeing Winnie the Pooh tell a dirty joke. It's something that would never happen.
This
little tableau also ignores the fact that the Caretaker is the
caretaker of the public cemetery next to the Mansion, not the caretaker
of the Mansion. That can be seen most clearly in the Collin Campbell
artwork for the "Story and Song" album, which follows the Imagineers' intentions scrupulously.
The New Queue
Again,
we breathe a sigh of relief that we didn't get anything like the
Orlando "interactive" queue, known around these parts as PLQ
(Pepe le Queue). What this labyrinth of creamy walls and mostly
off-the-shelf artwork most resembles is the Fastpass garden it
displaced. In fact, most of the statuary from the latter has been
retained here. A lot of this mundane "artwork" came from commercial
catalogues of outdoor decor, and it shows. There is no uniformity of style, and with few exceptions, it lacks any spark of life. Some of the pieces are borderline kitsch. For example, more than one commentator has been put off by those
garish bowling balls. I haven't seen anything down at "pink flamingo" level, but too much of this stuff is only a
notch above "garden gnome" level.
Something that really
puzzles me is the color palette. The warm, creamy surfaces—almost
yellow—are anything but chill and foreboding, and with that red brick
trim it almost has a "California Mission" feel to it, which is totally
wrong here.
Why
didn't they go with the sombre gray hues of the old queue? Disney
used to have the best colorists in the business (Mary Blair, John
Hench). What has happened?
I'm
withholding judgment to some degree, because the place will no doubt
look better once the plants have a chance to fill in. We shall see.
There are traces of wit here and there. Did you notice the skull face?
There are also doors left open for future development. No one knows yet what this safe is for:
But with that lighthouse on it, it's possible we're going to be seeing a tie-in with the S.E.A. master theme, although Kim Irvine associates this area with "Gracey." Huh? Make of that what you will.
The
book on the table was published in 1917, which is pretty awkward, but I
doubt we're supposed to know that. John Paul Jones hails from the
Revolutionary War period. Plausibly, he would have been of interest to
the Mansion's original builder around the time of the War of 1812, if
they're trying here to keep the old "Sea Captain" business alive in some way. I
can't see this prop lasting very long as it doesn't look waterproofed
and it's outside. What's with that? This has to be a temporary
situation.
I suppose you could read a seascape into this glasswork as
well. Note that the ironwork has eyes (albeit a bit too obviously), which is something we find frequently around the Mansion. There's plenty of this sort of thing in the new queue if you're looking for it.
Music is playing throughout the queue, very reminiscent of Phantom Manor, but for some reason it's more upbeat. I'd rather not have it, but it doesn't bother me much. Music is playing outside at DL just about everywhere, and in this case you could justify it as helping to mask all the other noise around you, stuff that you must screen out in order to maintain the illusion that you are at a haunted house in New Orleans. I suppose that for many people, the new music helps them get into that mindset. If I want, I can just screen it out like all the other noise.
Graveyard Lite?
Maybe
there are plans to add more to it later (fingers crossed), but as
things stand, the berm graveyard has been considerably abbreviated. The "great eight"
set, paying tribute to the original Imagineers (plus Phineas Pock) is currently incomplete, and one of the four stones paying tribute to the 2016
team that brought back the graveyard is also missing. What's there looks
pretty bad at present, but when the plants have had a chance to grow up
it will no doubt look better. At least the stones all look like they
could actually have a grave in front of them, which was a major beef I
had with the 2016 incarnation. Maybe someone actually listened? If so,
thanks.
So
much for the queue. Architecturally, I don't get any New Orleans,
ante-bellum vibes from it. It's not criminally bad, but it's not ominous or spooky,
and your Long-Forgotten administrator finds it uninspired and
uninteresting. It's Fastpass Gardens spread over what seems like half an
acre. I will definitely miss the spacious and far more beautiful area
it has replaced.
It's Time to Despond
Lastly, we have this Turdasaurus Rex. If you want to know what I think of Madame Leota's Somewhere Beyond, check out the video by this guy. Brickey's not my favorite Disney historian and I don't recommend all his
stuff, but he's dead right about MLSB, and he pulls no punches. In fact,
he says it's the worst structure ever erected at Disneyland. Is he
right?
Yes. Yes, he is. See also this. (Chris is very good.) Nobody likes this building. You hear
"Home Depot" and "Tuff Shed" among the more family-friendly mutterings,
and in fact it didn't take long for sharp-eyed Disneylanders to recognize it as a brazen knock-off of a pre-fab barn: Armstrong's Legacy Post-and-Beam model 4236.
It's supposed to be the Mansion's old "carriage house," but as Brickey says, it looks nothing like
the sort of carriage house you'd expect to see alongside a New Orleans
ante-bellum plantation house. It looks like what it is: a barn, and it's dull as dishwater.
UPDATE: They've now painted the thing in order to age it. For a thorough review, see HERE. Brickey can be long-winded and repetitive, but here once again he is on the mark. Yes, the building does look older now, but that was not the worst problem.
No, the
biggest problem is that it's TOO DAMN BIG. There
is no forced perspective to bring it down to scale within its
surroundings, and it makes both the Mansion itself and what was formerly
called "Splash Mountain" look small. That is criminal.
Compare the
concept artwork with the actual thing. The painting gives you the
impression that the shop will be a modest structure tucked away beneath
the shadow of the magisterial Mansion. Instead we got this clumsy
behemoth shoehorned into the available space and big-footing the view on
that entire side.
Ironically, the shop within is rather small, while the building
exterior does everything it can to look bigger than it is, exactly the opposite
of what they should have done, if they had to do this. Consider: (1) It has oversized eaves; (2) it has a pointed peak in the middle with a narrow, Gothic window to emphasize verticality, (3) with a filigree on the rooftop to make it look even taller; (4) it has big barn doors; and (5) it has broad shoulders to emphasize horizontality. The colonnade is visually subsumed into one of those shoulders so as to make it feel like part of the main structure. All of this says: "I am a large building."
According to Brickey, this thing was entirely planned and built by Disney's Merchandising division (who have their own budget and creative team), and in their minds, making their small shop look as BIG as possible was apparently a goal. Idiots. Ignoramuses.
The
worst thing about it is what has been lost. One of the most beautiful
vistas in the entire park has been destroyed, just so that they can sell a
few more Jack Skellington mugs and tee-shirts.
THIS is unforgivable:
Gone. It's gone.
Look at it. Look what they destroyed. Shame on them.
Putting that building up was an act of vandalism. The only way to atone for this crime is to tear it down.
One could just weep. Some
people have said, "Well yeah, it's true, the exterior is disappointing,
but at least the interior is good." I disagree. Again, was there nobody
on this team with any instinct at all for color? The concept art
featured a palette built around the familiar green-and-magenta
combination that spells spookiness like no other:
But
the actual interior is what one thoroughly disgusted senior Imagineer
called a "dog's breakfast." The green-magenta interplay has been
swallowed up in browns, yellows, blues. In fact there is no dominant color scheme at all.
Some smiley-faced bright-siders say the place looks magical. I say it looks like
some kid decided to use all 64 crayons.
No,
I'm not done yet. For decor in the upper shelf areas, someone thought
it would be cool to feature some of the instruments that float around
in the Séance Circle, like the tambourine . . .
. . . and the trumpet . . .
. . . and the snare drum . . . .
When I saw that, my jaw dropped. It's a MODERN snare drum. To be precise, it's a PDP Concept Series 7x13 maple shell.
Call it "good-enough-ism." This is sloppy, cheap, and unworthy of a Disney production.
Some say, "So what. Who will notice?" I respond, "How many guests does
Disneyland have in a typical week? How many among those tens of
thousands are probably drummers? How many are at least in bands and know
what a modern drum kit looks like?" HUNDREDS of people are going to
notice. How hard would it have been to have someone at the model shop
whip up an antique-looking drum, or score one from a prop supply house?
Here's what should have been there:
Disneyland
and the other parks used to be known for their attention to detail,
including historically accurate detail. This stupid snare drum may be a small thing
in itself, but it's a symptom of a bigger problem as well as just one more log
on this particular fire.
I'm going to say it. Yes, I'm going to go there. If Walt saw this thing, people would be FIRED, and the bulldozers would be in there tomorrow. Somewhere Beyond can go . . . somewhere beyond. It needs to be torn down.
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