Moonlight Picnic

.
Updated Nov 2, 2019

Sometime back, I identified the royal playground scene in the graveyard as the Haunted Mansion tableau that has attracted the least interest. Scratch that.  It's only second to least.  The picnic couple next to the hearse tea party holds that dubious distinction.  It's not in any official synopsis of the ride that I have seen, it's not mentioned in the "Story and Song" narration, and you won't find it in any of the photos used for postcards, slides, souvenir guides, etc.

No love for picnicking ghosts.

For a long time I lumped them in with the tea party.  You have three couples interacting with each other over there.  Right to left: (1) the diminutive coffin occupant and his medieval conversation partner, (2) the coachman and lady, and (3) the picnic couple.  I just assumed that the picnickers were a third pair in the same group.

And why would anyone think otherwise?  There is even documentary support for the classification: a daily
checklist of animated effects used by ride operators refers to them as "T/PTY. MAN" and "T/PTY. LADY."

Notwithstanding this (semi)official document, I no longer think they belong to that group. The hearse tea party is exactly that, a tea party. They're drinking tea, with cups and saucers and a floating tea pot to make it as obvious as possible.  The picnic couple, however, are drinking wine, and I don't see anything suggesting that they arrived with the hearse.  They are a tiny tableau unto themselves. Officially, they are simply "Man at Table" and "Woman at Table."  Note that Marc Davis's concept artwork for the hearse tea party does not include them.

They are instead featured in a separate Davis sketch, first published in 2019:

MDIHOW 431

As usual, the scale model maquettes stick pretty close to the Davis sketches upon which they are based.

He's very well dressed and appears to be making fine progress through the champagne bottle. He's proposing a toast. "To us, my dear." He comes across as an extroverted, well-heeled, boozy, woozy ghost, yet another comical Davis drunk.  He's supposed to make you smile, and he does.

His female partner seems like an unassuming, cheerful type. She's got a nice spring bonnet with a gay pink bow. Appropriate clothing for an outing, nothing special. She's got her hair back, out of the way, sensibly enough for a picnic. One supposes that she's about his age, and that her hair is gray, but boost the color and we see that it still has some blonde in it.

She's of a mature age, but I get an impression of health and

vitality matching his.  Not bad for a dead person, you agree?

Overall, it looks like Marc Davis envisioned a sort of "Thurston Howell III and lady friend" tableau.  Naturally, such a man is going to dominate the scene.  He's bombastic and overbearing, but he's also jovial and harmless.  She's his happy companion, and to all appearance her contribution is not much more than that.


Heads Will Role Play

When some long forgotten maquettes of the band members came to light about a year ago, we traced the creative process that gave us the harpist, working from two sketches and two maquettes as well as what we already knew about the development of the band tableau.  You will recall that the discussion ended on a bittersweet note, since most of Marc Davis's meticulous attention to the character went for nothing.  In an economy move (time? money? manpower?), they just put an existing Pirate head onto the harpist's shoulders. Not all of the original Davis character was lost, however.  Owing to his height and positioning, the harpist still comes across as band leader, and owing to his quaint and curious, old-fashioned uniform and the whacked out music they're playing, he's still an amusing, mildly comic figure.

Ah, but when they made the same sort of economizing move with our male picnicker, alas, they gutted the scene.  Look at Marc's sketch and at the maquettes.  The man's face is 90% of the show, and I think this would still be true even if we could see her face.  But when they built the figure for the ride, he was stuck with a bland, serious countenance, lacking in individual personality. Sure, he's still dressed nicely, but not so much as to distinguish him from a lot of the other ghosts.  Why oh why did they choose this particular head? There are other Pirate heads with expressions not far from the one on the maquette.  Was the selection due to desperate hurry and current availability?  It better be a darn good excuse, whatever it was.

"To us, I guess. Whatever."

You could say that they had planned for a Dick Martin, but they settled for a Dan Rowan.

Here's a LINK for the L.I.N.K.'s among you (Laugh-in? No knowledge).

There's less to say about the woman's personality, since we can't see the maquette's face. For that matter, it isn't
easy to make out her face in the ride either, but once again Long-Forgotten rides to the rescue.  Let's take a look.

She too is sporting a standard-issue head, and she's got at least
one HM twin, back in the ballroom.  (The difference is all paint.)

Despite this, it seems to me that they were still able to preserve the
personality of the maquette pretty well, so far as it can be determined.

•       Youthful face           √ check
•      Happy mood            √ check
•      Cheerfully dressed   √ check

 

ride pic by maggotprince

In ride photos, the couple generally comes across as . . . subdued, shall we say?  Especially when
they're compared to what's going on all about them.  The picnic is not unpleasant, but it's a little dull.

(pic by K447)

What is that they're drinking, anyway?  Did they mistake the
ketchup bottle for the wine bottle?  Never picnic in the dark.
(pic by photomatt)

A Hit and a Miss

Since a pirate made off with the man's personality, the Imagineers had to find a way to inject some character into what was now a rather faceless tableau, so they apparently decided to reinvent the couple as veddy uppuh clawss Brits by means of their vocal soundtrack (which inspired an unofficial nickname, "The Duke and Dutchess").

The Picnickers


Okay, I admit that she's fun to listen to.  How can you not love the improvised "oh yes they do" at the end?  Hats off to Betty Wand. As for him, it sounds to me like Bill Lee is trying to pull off a Boris Karloff impression.  If so, it leaves something to be desired, but hey, it's certainly no worse than Dick Van Dyke's cockney.  I notice that his vocal sounds a lot less snooty than hers.  There's very little caricature in it.  You could just as easily argue that it's a mild, middle-of-the-road British accent, with no particular social pretensions projecting through it.

Overall, how successful was the reinvention?  In a word, meh.  There's a reason why no one ever talks about this tableau.  In their efforts here, I think the Imagineers scored one hit and one miss, but the hit was rather dull, and the miss was totally unnecessary and a damn shame.  As we have seen, there's a disconnect between the lively male maquette and his bland AA realization, but at least you can say that the vocal track seems to fit the ride figure.  It's humorless and lacking in personality, like him. I guess we have to call that a successful match, but big whoop.

Then there's the lady.  Like I said, despite her recycled head it seems to me that they preserved a nice continuity between the female maquette and her AA.  But then that achievement was inexplicably squandered by a poor vocal match.

By voicing her as they did, the Imagineers were apparently aiming for a comic effect along these lines:  A stuffy, self-important Grand Dame and her consort are seen enjoying a quaint old-fashioned picnic! How droll.  Even if you think the gag succeeds, it's still an awfully lame version of the same joke you see in King and Queen playing on a see-saw.  But I don't think it does succeed.  The lady looks nothing like what you would expect, based on the voice.  I don't see anything proud or snobbish or even comic about her.  Look at that unassuming smile, that perky little sunbonnet. She's got that quality the French call joie de vivre (although in this case we would more properly call it joie de mourir). Anyway, there's no irony here; she's exactly the type of gal who would really go for a picnic.  As amusing as the vocal track is by itself, I don't think it matches the figure.

(top right: Jeff Cook; bottom right: maggotprince)

So that's it.  Bummer.  But don't slash those wrists quite yet.  We've got a few

miscellaneous items to deal with, and after that Captain Negative promises to

come back to our overall evaluation and end the post on a more positive note.

A Loaf of Bread, a Jug of Wine, and Thou

I keep calling it a picnic.  It is.  In Marc's sketch, the picnic basket is conspicuously placed, as is the wine chiller.  In the actual ride, the chiller is there, and so is the basket, but it's been known to migrate over to the tea party.  I guess the teapot isn't the only thing that floats around.  

(pic by Brett Garrett)

Even without the basket, there's no doubt that it's supposed to be a picnic.  The tablecloth has that familiar checkered design
that says PICNIC as clearly as if it were written on it.  It doesn't show up in most photos, but you can see it in this picnic pic, Nick:

It's more obvious in this shot of the Tokyo tableau:

pic by Tom Bricker

Incidentally, the table is ALL there is.  Thanks to the HMH, we know that they're sitting on invisible chairs.  It's strictly a table tableau,
you might say.  (Well, some of you might.)  Anyway, they look constipated. One more reason to dislike the holiday overlay, I suppose.

Some of you may have another picnic nitpick:  the maquettes are drinking champagne, but the

ride gives them red wine, and yet it keeps the wine chiller.  Chilled red wine?  Quelle horreur!

You chill.  That looks like a champagne bottle poking out of the chiller, so the best course may be to imagine
that they're drinking pink champagne. It has a deep, unearthly glow, but that seems appropriate enough, oui?

Another problem solved.  How could you

sleep at night before this blog came along?

Armed and Loaded

Speaking of wine, at Disneyland the party is being joined (crashed?) by the possessor of the arm coming out of a crypt in front of the couple and dangling a wine glass.  It's a great gag.  Everyone notices it; everyone likes it.  As usual, Dave De Caro has put up some excellent photos:

Striking as it is, that arm is only a leftover scrap from a much more ambitious idea Davis came up with.

Curiously enough, in Orlando the arm is a righty and holds a teacup.  It's been reassigned to the hearse tea party tableau,
in other words.  Tokyo takes it the next logical step and points their similarly becuppèd arm in the tea party direction.

pix: lostonpurpose (top left), CrimsonGypsy 1313 (top right). GRD (bottom right)

At Disneyland, good Ol' Blasty the pop-up ghost comes out of that very
same crypt.  Orlando and Tokyo have a regular stick-head popup there.

(pic by SilentDante)

Between him, the arm, and the bikers swooping around in the background, the poor
picnic couple is well and truly upstaged.  No wonder they inspire so little comment.

Unique

Okay, the picnic may not be the most exciting tableau in the ride, but it's not without a certain charm.  They're a couple entirely occupied with each other, having their own quiet party within the party.  There are examples elsewhere in the Haunted Mansion of coupled ghosts involved exclusively with each other, or nearly so.  There's the tipsy couple on the chandelier in the ballroom, the duelists, the opera singers, and you could make a case for the Bride and the Hat Box Ghost in the original attic.  But the picnic couple is different in that they are not very funny and certainly not scary.  The lack of humor as well as the utter lack of threat leave you with no alternative but to take them entirely on their own terms, and this is their one strong point.  They're a unique little island of tranquility, a romantic couple quietly enjoying each other's company even in the midst of all this pandemonium.  Kinda sweet, really.

The Death Coach

.
Updated October 2019

Let's continue with our probes into the cultural background of the various ghosts and ghoulies populating the Mansion.  Some are mere visual puns and have a thin background (Great Caesar's Ghost, the Phantoms of the Opera), others can be traced back to a single famous ghost (The Brown Lady of Raynham Hall, the Phantom Drummer of Tedworth), and some take their cue from a more general historic or folkloric setting (the Victorian "mummy craze," the numerous legends about ghostly hitchhikers).  Sometimes "mere folklore" veers over into full-blown myth, carrying an almost religious portent.  That's where we're headed today, as we turn our gaze toward the Hearse Tea Party in the graveyard.  Here it is in magnificent 3D, in two sizes, and once again, it's worth it to do the "magic eye" thing, as the depth of field in this one is particularly enjoyable.

The man in charge here seems to be the coachman.

All you have to do is Google "phantom coachman" or "death coach" or the like, and you'll summon up tons of folklore. This is a major ghost. He's a fully mythological figure in Irish folklore, the Dullahan, driving the Cóiste Bodhar ("coach-a-bower"). The Dullahan is a headless coachman who works in coordination with the Banshee and takes you away when you're about to die. Interestingly, it is widely agreed that the most satisfying treatment of this figure in modern pop culture is in the 1959 Disney film, Darby O'Gill and the Little People. (Mansionites particularly enjoy the Banshee in this film because a couple of its wails were either added to or taken from the Disney sound library and emigrated from there into the Haunted Mansion's Corridor of Doors.)


Here he comes...

Get in.

Another interesting cinematic treatment of the Death Coach is in F.W. Murnau's classic, Nosferatu (1922).  En route to the castle Dracula, Jonathan Harker is whipped across Transylvanian no-man's land in a phantom coach.  This suggests that poor Jonny is in some sense leaving the land of the living and passing over into the land of the dead.

Check HERE for another 1921 treatment of the Death Coach, this time in a Swedish film.


Plenty of "real" phantom coaches have been reported.  Part of the ghostly doings at Borley Rectory ("The Most Haunted House in England") involve unseen coaches and thundering hoofbeats passing by, or glimpses of a ghostly coach with a headless driver. The Edinburgh Royal Mile has its very own phantom coach, they say.


The phantom's appearance varies. Besides the headless coachman, there's a monstrous one, a Grim Reaper-like skeletal one, and a fairly "normal" looking one. Asked to create a Phantom Coachman mask/wall sculpture, the folks at Dynamic Design International (who have done some work for Disney) came up with this as the classic look:

Likewise, the vehicle varies. Usually it's a proper black stagecoach, but often in popular depiction it's a hearse.


Was any of this in the background as Marc Davis designed his tea party ensemble? Alas, the paper trail is much thinner this time. His concept sketch looks pretty much like what we ended up getting.

This Davis sketch of a "Phantom Coachman" was not published until 2019.

MDIHOW 407

However, there are depictions of the Death Coach in pop iconography that are remarkably similar to Davis's graveyard hearse in appearance. This is from a 1954 comic book:

If you have your parents' permission, you can read the rest HERE, but be forewarned: that stuff will rot your brain.  Anyway, this is all fair game, as we have already seen that Davis was not above taking inspiration from horror comics.

Davis's driver is a lot less gruesome, but he is, literally, a phantom coachman, and he's presumably the one who brought these folks to the graveyard (i.e., the place of the dead).  The similar hearse dropping off guestly ghosts in the ballroom originally was going to have a friendly driver too, to judge from Davis's concept art.

Essentially, what we've got is a cheerful Charon.  That's definitely how Collin Campbell read Davis's graveyard drawing when he did the cover of the "Story and Song" album.  (You'll note that Collins combines elements from both of the Davis concept pieces above.) The phantom is providing a taxi service in this painting that is not essentially dissimilar to his function in the scarier treatments.

Davis obviously wanted to get away from the scary phantom coachman and make him a light, comic figure. Indeed, the Davis/Collins coachman looks like a cross between Mr. Magoo and W. C. Fields.  Other Disney artists have also treated this character and this topic.  One interesting example is on the back cover of the 1970 Magic from the Haunted Mansion souvenir book. That artist clearly interpreted the graveyard hearse as the Death Coach:

When Imagineers in the 90's kicked around ideas for improving the Load area, one of the new concepts called for a full-blown Death Coach in a large window. Notice that once again it's a hearse, not a stagecoach, but this time the Grim Reaper version of the coachman is used:

It's a thinner trail this time, but I'm willing to put down the coachman at the Hearse Tea Party as another spook with solid roots in established ghost lore.  It is most curious that we humans are consistently interested not only in the afterlife but in the means of transport from this world into that one.  When we're not talking about angelic escort by walking or flying, we're seeing visions of boats and coaches.  A carriage approaches, to take you into the boundless realm.  Part of the journey is the mode of transportation itself, it seems.  And for that last trip, there is no longer any need to pull down on the safety bar.
.