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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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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Ken Anderson and the "Prince Valiant" Spooks

What's this? Another post on Ken Anderson's artwork?  Sure. Why not?

According to the Life of Saint Anthony, written by Athanasius in the fourth century, the desert monk was assailed by demons trying to trip him up. They had the annoying habit of appearing to him in various strange forms. It's one of those stories that lends itself to wild visualizations, and sure enough, if you do a search for "Temptation of St. Anthony" you'll soon be up to your neck in nightmarish and surrealistic artwork. As you might expect, Hieronymus Bosch did a Temps of Tony. A couple of them, actually. But the most famous Saint Anthony may be Martin Shongauer's:

The word "iconic" is nauseatingly overused nowadays, but in Shongauer's case it is exactly correct.

Incidentally, you might recall that Marc Davis borrowed some critters from an old Temps of Tony for a Séance Circle concept sketch.

Anyway, the basic artistic motif eventually escaped from its hagiographical context and gave birth to various and sundry depictions of protagonists from different walks of life being assaulted by clouds of demonic apparitions.

 "Alright, alright, ALL RIGHT, I should have used a semicolon . . . Sheesh."

The temptation element remains, however. Sometimes the hero is a noble knight trying to keep his nerve.

And that trail leads us, finally, to a 1938 Prince Valiant comic strip:

Well, now. Isn't this interesting. Apparently Ken Anderson was flipping through some PV comics one day, saw this, and decided it could serve as a sort of model sheet for spooks he might possibly need in order to populate his Haunted House. He must have had an eye out for this sort of thing. There aren't quite 999 here, but it's a good start.

Yep. Busted.

 But we mustn't be too quick to criticize Anderson. God himself borrowed from this same Hal Foster artwork when he designed John Fetterman.

It's kind of fun to know that neither of the men most responsible for Disney's Haunted Mansion (Ken Anderson and Marc Davis) had any compunction about stealing ideas from comic strips and comic books. Why not? It's not as if some jackanapes is going to discover their petty larcenies some day and magically broadcast them to the Whole Wide World.

(Hat tip to two Threadsters for discovering the Prince Valiant artwork and bringing it to my attention: MasterGracey and Vicarious Corpse).

 

 

 

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Long-Forgotten Turns 14, and We Ask: "Has the Inspiration for the Tightrope Walker Been Found?"

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Hard to believe, but it's been 14 years, and we're still rolling along. Again, thanks to all you Forgottenistas out there for coming along for the ride! And on this one, go ahead and stick your hands, feet, legs, and arms any damn place you please, and your kids are on their own.

As you know, we ALWAYS have a treat included in these Anny posts, and today it's a doozy. Full credit for this discovery goes to Eddie Sotto, who posted the pertinent information on X.

Rope Walk

According to Eddie, Walt Disney had a personal collection of the artwork of German illustrator Heinrich Kley (1863—1945). In fact, when Club 33 first opened in 1967 some of this collection was put on display, including this one:

As it happens, this particular piece was iconic enough to grace the cover of a modern book on Kley:

It's from 1907, and it's called Seiltanz, or "Rope Walk." It's rather amazing that no one seems to have noticed this one before. Marc Davis must have seen this artwork earlier, either independently or perhaps shown to him by Walt from his private collection. In any event, there is little doubt in my mind that this served as an inspiration when Davis came up with the Tightrope Gal stretching portrait in 1964. The combination of elements is just too coincidental.

Club 33

People often ask how Club 33 got its name. Well, club 34 is too heavy, and with club 32 you sometimes have to hit them three or four times in order to finish the job. Club 33 seems to be just about right.

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Crump and Davis: Lost Artwork and Long-Forgotten Collaborations

There's a dandy piece of unpublished Marc Davis HM artwork that I've had locked in my files forever because I have not been at liberty to show it. However, I got a second copy of it recently with permission from the owner to post it, so AT LAST y'all will see a wonderful changing portrait concept from the master himself.

It's been around since the end of 1964 at least. You can see it in the background of the "Tencenniel" program aired in January of 1965 in anticipation of DL's tenth anniversary.

It's the "Great White Hunter" character. Apparently, Marc wanted to do a lot with this guy. He would have been a prominent denizen of the "Ghost Club Room," where a retired sportsman like the GWH could relax and enjoy his afterlife. We've all seen this artwork a gazillion times...

For the gags that Marc had in mind involving the tiger rug, see the sketches HERE. Anyway, what I want to draw your attention to today is the picture over the mantelpiece.

Before it was going to be a tiger, it was a rhino. Here's another unpublished sketch:

This might have been a concept sketch for a TALKING portrait rather than a changing portrait. Who knows where Marc wanted to take this gag. It's fun, knowing he created a character and had a number of different ideas about how to use him and how much. It turns out that the one well-known concept sketch of the tiger rug chomping on his butt was only the tip of the iceberg.

Notice the picture frame in both of the above sketches. It's composed of slain animals in a sort of Gaston-ish decoration. It reminds me of this concept sketch from the dearly departed Rolly Crump.

This is Museum of the Weird stuff, of course, but I have to wonder if Marc was inspired by Rolly or Rolly was inspired by Marc here, or if the resemblance is purely coincidental. (Note too Marc's water buffalo horns and Rolly's giant wings.) The "living doorframe" concept became a maquette at one point, by the way. See it behind the Coffin Clock maquette?

Rolly and Marc worked together on the Tiki Room, as we all know (scroll down to Point 5), and we've talked before about the strange chemistry between two very dissimilar artists who nevertheless seemed to borrow ideas from each other. I like to think that it was Marc who got ideas for his macabre, pitiless (or PETA-less) picture frame in part from Rolly's surrealistic doorframe.

I like to think so, because it means we can turn around and find an example of Rolly borrowing from Marc, in ANOTHER unpublished artwork. Well, technically not "unpublished," but unnoticed and unexplored. It's a full-sized, grayish-blue tombstone maquette over in Rolly's corner of the workshop and so probably a design of his. You can see it in at least three photos:

Walt and Julie Reihm

Walt, Julie, and Harriet Burns

Walt, Julie, and John Hench

Two of the photos are not too horrible, and they are at slightly different angles, which means you can create a "magic eye" 3-D version if you twiddle and fiddle with the photos until they line up, plus some other adjustments. It's not exactly View-Master quality, folks, but it works.

Is the skull wearing a conical hat? Or no, and is that a handle on the right? (The 3-D helps here. It looks to me like the lighter-colored bar is out a bit from the background.) In other words, perhaps it's not a hat but rather a hatchet. More of a tomahawk design, actually. Is Rolly borrowing an idea from a Marc Davis concept artwork directly across the room? It's fun to think so, even if the evidence is not clear enough to be sure.

In One Year and Out the Other

Brandon Hardy has solved a minor mystery. The so-called "Rolly Chair" that was added to the Séance Circle during the "Enhauntsments" of 2021 turns out to be an off-the-shelf item: A Deangelis Rattan wicker chair. See HERE. But around here if you oust one mystery, another moves in. Why has the chair been removed? At least as of now, it isn't there. Didn't come back after the HMH overlay this last winter. No one knows why. Maybe the owner of the chair's design went harrumph and the Disney lawyers up and panicked?

No such speculations can help us with the Bat Cage mystery, however. It showed up next to the Endless Hallway after the most recent HMH overlay, but just as mysteriously it disappeared after only a brief tenure. You might say it was removed in just the bat of an eye.

Jeff Baham

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