Needlepoint, Ironwork, and Dead Snow Balls (Once Again, the Lichten Book)

Forgottenistas know that Frances Lichten's Decorative Art of Victoria's Era (1950) is one of the few books one may point to and claim with absolute certainty that it had a direct influence on the Haunted Mansion's Imagineers. We highlighted this book several years ago, on the occasion of our seventh anniversary, so go there first if you need to refresh your memory and want to see a lot of really neat pictures. I'll wait right here until you get back.

• Lichten is where Ken Anderson got the exterior design for the Anaheim Mansion.
• Lichten is where Claude Coats got the exterior design for the Orlando Mansion.
• Lichten is where Marc Davis got design ideas for a concept intended for the foyer.

I ended that earlier post with a promise to comb through the book again for any additional points of contact, and like Captain Hook, your humble blog administrator always keeps his promises, even if it takes five years.

I've come back with four more items to talk about.

Only one of them represents a clear and convincing case of direct influence, but I can't take credit for that one. It had already been noticed by Foxx Nolte several years before our earlier post. However, Foxxy only mentions it more or less in passing, and it's buried deep in the bowels of a long post, without pictures or page numbers, so I suspect that relatively few Mansionites have noticed it, and even fewer have followed up on it to see if it's legit.

It is.  And it's high time it received the full LF treatment.  Everyone got their magnifying glass?

(1) Stop and Snag the Roses

The TOMB SWEET TOMB cross-stitch sampler in the Corridor of Doors sports an authentically Victorian rose-and-violet border design. You have to look close, but if you do you'll see that the floral design is the same in the DL and the WDW versions, even though the specific coloration of the flowers is quite different:

Walt Disney World

Disneyland

This exact needlepoint design is found in Decorative Art (p. 122). The fact that the photo is black and white might explain

why the coloration in the two Mansion versions doesn't match. Each could be a free attempt to colorize the b&w original.

Side by side, to satisfy the skeptics among you:

It is possible that the design seen in the Lichten book was (or became) so popular that the designer of the TOMB SWEET TOMB needlepoint copied it from somewhere else, but my own online snooping around suggests that the design is not a common one. In fact, I haven't seen it anywhere but in Decorative Art and in the Mansion samplers. And since Lichten was in the WDI (then WED) library and was certainly made use of by at least three different HM Imagineers, the simplest assumption is that it was the source of the needlepoint design. So I think Foxxy is correct, and we can safely add a fourth bullet-point to our list:

• Lichten supplied the needlepoint design for the TOMB SWEET TOMB floral borders.

(2) The Coalbrookdale Benches

There is another suspected Lichten connection that didn't really pan out as hoped. It involved some outdoor benches at WDW:

The bench in Lichten's book (p. 34) is part of a grotesque furniture set from Hamburg made with stag horns,

dated 1851. Note that it and the WDW benches not only have doggy armrests, but dog's paw feet as well.

(Incidentally, I'm told that a guest put the red eyes on the dogs with some nail polish, 

and the park liked the result so much that they've kept them red ever since!)

pics by Jack Spence

pic by Joe Penniston

But hold!  This bench end is not a Disney creation. It is a fairly common variety of Victorian-era,

COALBROOKDALE cast iron bench end, and authentic antique examples are not hard to come by.

But before you walk away in disgust, you might pause and consider the fact that those ghastly and Gaston-ish staghorn furnishings we see in Lichten were popular in early Victorian England, so it's possible that the original designers of the Coalbrookdale bench ends, coming a little later in the Victorian age, were inspired in part by precisely the sort of thing we see reproduced in Decorative Art, possibly even by that very same illustration, found by them in the same source book where Lichten discovered it. In that case the WDW bench ends would still share a link with Lichten, if only in a derivative and roundabout way.

But even if there is no connection, this whole thing hasn't been a total waste: You

Floridian Mansionites now know how to correctly identify those über-cool benches.

 

"I just love the Coalbrookdale ironwork on these benches, don't you?"

( And boom, she's all impressed. Works every time. )

(3) Further Ironic Comments

Our third Lichten item is the pair of photos of the wrought ironwork on the porches of the Shipley-Leydecker house. Foxxy was sufficiently impressed with the resemblance to suggest that these photos directly inspired the ironwork of the Mansion.

I'm not so sure. We already know that the Mansion's look was directly inspired by this photo

of the Shipley house, and you can see the basic design of the ironwork in it clearly enough:

But up close the design is noticeably different from the Mansion's ironwork, so why would you suppose that in addition to the long shot, the close-up Lichten photos inspired the specific wrought iron design of the HM?  Side by side, the differences are as striking as the general similarity.

But then again, perhaps there is something to the theory after all.

  As we know, the Mansion ironwork is an off-the-shelf design known as "Bird-of-Paradise."

After looking more closely, I'm thinking it's not altogether impossible that the selection of Bird-of-Paradise over other choices may have been

inspired by one of the Lichten photos, which shows a somewhat similar zoomorphic shape at the Shipley house, unless it's just a trick of the light:

I think it's a coincidence.  But who knows?  Add it to the long list of Mansion mysteries we will never solve.

Lichten also has a photo of the veranda of another house, in Philadelphia (p. 106), and it's hard to deny that it has a similar feel to

the lovely south porch of the Anaheim Mansion. Whether that translates to "direct influence," you'll have to decide for yourselves.

Allen Huffmann

(4) Last, if Not Leashed

One more, and then I think we can let Lichten rest in peace for awhile. In this case there's no suggestion of influence, but I think it's worth pointing out that Decorative Art furnishes us with a particularly good example of Victorian fondness for pet cemeteries. Someone grieved enough over poor Snow Ball to erect an impressive little monument. 

It's tiny and tucked into the corner of page 223, and no mention is made in the text

of the obvious fact that the decedent is a dog or a cat, so this one is easy to overlook.

It's also easy to imagine Snow Ball in one of the Haunted Mansion pet cemeteries; in fact, this could almost

pass for a concept sketch for one of the animal grave markers, don't you think?  Note the leash/collar on

the ground. This is definitely the closest real-world parallel to the pet cemetery markers I've ever seen.

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More Silly, Scary Thoughts

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It's a topic we've discussed more than once: The supposed conflict among the Imagineers over the question of whether the Haunted Mansion should be funny or frightening (Silly vs. Scary, Kooky vs. Spooky, Light vs. Fright).

I've also given my own opinion more than once. I think the "conflict" has been exaggerated. Scary vs. Silly makes for a good—suspiciously good—Disneyfied version of history, and since it has long been the official line, it does not surprise or particularly impress me that the Imagineers have routinely cited Silly vs. Scary as a key (or the key) for explaining the fits and starts that dragged out the ride's development and for understanding the odd amalgam of moods in the finished ride. It's frequently the case that if you repeat something often enough you may jolly well begin to actually believe it.

There are two reasons for bringing up the topic again. First, some new materials have surfaced which really should be part of that particular conversation. They shed additional light on the thinking of X Atencio and—less directly—of Claude Coats, both of them supposedly strong advocates of the scary approach. Secondly, we're soon going to be taking a long look at Marc Davis's contributions to the Haunted Mansion, taking advantage of the wealth of new material that came to light in 2019, and as Marc is considered the chief proponent of the funny approach, inevitably the Silly vs. Scary controversy is bound to crop up in that discussion at some point, so that gives us another reason to briefly revisit the topic beforehand.


Can You Spell Kooky With an X?

As we know, Atencio occasionally made remarks to the effect that he preferred the scary approach, and as we have seen, it is easy enough to trot out spine-chilling concept art from X. I might point out, however, that the genuinely horrific artwork he produced was all part of a single series, the "one-eyed black cat" concept, always identifiable by the evil eye present somewhere in the background:

Without that series, you do have some creepy stuff from X, but nothing really frightening (with the possible exception of the Man in the Web). We have also seen that some of X's stuff is much more light-hearted. Even his take on the hanging ghost host is surprisingly cartoonish, meant to amuse rather than frighten. No evil eye in sight.

©DISNEY

Tom Morris has discovered something that may give us some further insight into X's frame of mind: the earliest draft of what would eventually become "Grim Grinning Ghosts." Remember that X's assignment from the get-go was to be the HM show writer. That might explain why we don't see concept art from him in anything like the quantity that we find in the case of Ken Anderson or Marc Davis. Anyway, the "Kook Spookin' Song" as it was called, doesn't exactly sound to me like an attempt to bend the ride toward the darker side. In fact, it's silly almost to the point of embarrassment:

The point here is that the man who wrote this piece clearly recognized that the ride needed to be silly as well as scary. To X, like everyone else, it was a matter of finding the right balance:

"We had two schools of thought—one group wanted it a little bit scary, and another wanted it a little more lighthearted. Walt wanted it to be funny—he didn't want to scare the hell out of people!  He wanted to just have a good, Halloween-type show.  He was very particular on the feeling of the audience that he wanted; he wanted to frighten them, but he didn't want to scare them to death, you know? So that's how they decided. John Hench and Dick Irvine [the Imagineers' immediate bosses], they said to us, 'Let's move in that direction' " (MDIHOW 340).

What all of that really amounted to was sticking with Ken Anderson's original formula, dating back to 1957-58. As Jason Surrell notes, one reason Ken was probably chosen by Walt for the project in the first place is that he had already demonstrated in the Fantasyland dark rides his knack for combining "fear with enjoyment" (Surrell, Haunted Mansion 2003 and 2009 p 14; 2015 p 12).


Campy Claude

It's hard to imagine Claude Coats actually quarreling with anyone. By all counts, he was as amiable and agreeable as they come. Coats too is regularly assigned to the scary camp, not because of things he said or wrote but because his acknowledged contributions to the Mansion are creepy and atmospheric. He gets much of the credit for the eerie first half of the ride, where—we are told—there is nothing silly or funny except for Marc Davis's macabre stretching portraits. Claude was a background painter, a stage designer, a creator in this case of moody and sinister environments, like the Corridor of Doors.

The problem is that settings are not enough. In many cases you cannot tell if you're in kookyland or spookyland until the characters show up, and Claude seemed happy enough to leave that part to Marc. What do I mean? Imagine, for a moment, that you are back in the '60s and know nothing at all about The Munsters TV show but have wandered onto its sets on a day when no one is around. Is there anything there to suggest that this is the stage for an ultra-campy, screwball comedy?

Nope, you could be on the set of a classic, 1930's Universal horror picture. No one would seriously argue that the Munsters' art director wanted the show to be scary but the show writers overruled him and went with silly. I suppose someone might argue that the cobwebbed, Frankenstein look is too picture perfect for serious horror, and it could be claimed that this in itself is a tipoff. It's a point, I allow it. And if we look at the Munsters' fraternal twin, The Addams Family, we find there a similarly creepy, Victorian, gothic look overall, but in this case there are some obvious sight gags thrown in to tell you it's a goof.

Right. Well. Let's take another look at what is arguably the Mansion's scariest environment,

the Corridor of Doors. Do we see anything there hinting that all of this may in fact be camp?

WDW Sampler

We can thank Doombuggies for noticing that the "Tomb Sweet Tomb" sampler may be a direct rip-off from The Vampira Show (1954-55), the first "creature feature"-type local program. Maila Nurmi came up with a cheesy formula that is now very familiar: a costumed, creepy-kooky host in a mock horror setting showing dumb old monster movies.

Before Elvira, before the Carolyn Jones Morticia, there was Vampira. As Jeff also notes in the link above, she referred to herself at least once as a "ghostess" and promised to supply "hot and cold running chills." Lotta smoke coming outta that gun. And note that it was show writer X Atencio who incorporated that exact language into his HM script already by 1968, so once again we see how someone in the scary camp nevertheless did not hesitate to draw from cheeseball source material.

And let's not overlook the fact that the COD is also home to the so-called "family portraits," which might seem to some more like something

from The Munsters or The Addams Family (or the set of The Vampira Show) than anything you'd see in a straight, no-nonsense horror setting.

Disneyland

[Edit Nov 22] As Imagineer999 has reminded me in the Comments section, the "family portraits" did not appear in the Florida Mansion until the "rehaunting" in 2007, and someone could argue from this that Claude Coats was indeed resistant to including anything so campy in the Orlando COD, where he had greater creative control. Unfortunately, that argument leaves us without any explanation for the inclusion of the Tomb Sweet Tomb sampler, which has always been in the Florida version just as it has been in the California original. Unlike the portraits, that prop is unambiguously cheesy.

(bottom pic: Hoot Gibson)

WDW pre-2007

I have to admit that I've never really liked the TST sampler. Maybe it's because it can only be explained as schlocky, camp horror, whereas the "family portraits" can be interpreted as ghostly manipulations intended to genuinely freak you out, changing portraits that are no longer bothering to change back. And of course, they are faithful reproductions of ghostly visages yet to appear, as pop-ups in the attic (pre-Constance) and in the graveyard, and those pop-ups are arguably among the scariest apparitions in the Mansion, so even if they're a bit cheesy, we might be making a mistake if we try to simply file them under "funny."

"The Kook Spookin' Song" and Vampira's "Tomb Sweet Tomb" sampler are more grist for the mill,
more evidence (in my book) that the Imagineers all wanted both fear and fun in the Haunted Mansion.
If they disagreed at times, I think it was simply a matter of balance, of fine-tuning that mixture.

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