Beyond the Bride: The Other Changes in 2025

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.

********************

The Caretaker

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Updated November 2, 2019

And make no mistake, "Caretaker" is his official name. It's on the schematics and the blueprints, not "gravedigger" or "gardener" or any other equivalent. The reason that matters will become clearer as we go along.

I've been slow to blog on this character, for several reasons. First, the significance of the Caretaker has already been discussed here at LF, but the most thorough treatment is buried in the Comments on a previous post, and I can't realistically expect readers to go through all the Comments in addition to the 120+ posts at LF (although I highly recommend it; sometimes some pretty neat stuff appears there!). Anyway, the main points of the argument belong out where all the world can see them. Secondly, there is very little history to report with this figure. He's hardly changed since the Mansion opened. However, he has changed in one small way, and no one has noticed it, so here too there may be something interesting to say. And finally, if I'm going to discuss this guy, I have to make one more trip to The Haunting, and you know how weary I am of that movie. But that's no excuse.


Caretaker of What?

History first. Like practically every other character in the Haunted Mansion, The Caretaker began life as a Marc Davis sketch—actually, part of a Marc Davis sketch. This is one of those Davis ideas that went straight into the ride. There is very little difference between the original concept and the finished figure.

This sketch is pretty direct evidence that he is supposed to be the caretaker for the graveyard he is standing next to, not a caretaker for the house who has apparently come out here into the back yard to see what all the commotion is about. This can be inferred anyway by the fact that he is heading into the graveyard with a shovel. And this graveyard is not a private cemetery belonging to the house but a public cemetery close beside it. There is a big iron fence around it, with a big iron gate through which we pass en route to the jamboree, leaving our hero standing there at the entrance, afraid to enter. As we have seen before, Collin Campbell's illustration of the scene clearly shows the sign for the graveyard on the gate post: "[ ? ] Glade Cemetery." No doubt this fellow lives somewhere nearby, perhaps on the cemetery grounds themselves.

Hair of the Dog

Virtually the only thing about the Disneyland HM Caretaker that has changed over the years is his hair. He started out with reddish hair, a little shaggy but not extremely long, and he had a thin, scraggily, almost Lincolnesque beard. Back we go to 1969:

The red probably wouldn't or didn't show as red under
show lighting. Here are more photos of similar vintage:

They may have altered this even before the ride opened, if we may trust the date assigned to this photo: August 21, 1969.

He now has substantial shocks of gray hair coming down in front of his ears. And friends, he stayed like that for a long,

long time. In 2003 we had a chance to examine him as closely as anyone would ever want to, in the Disney Gallery.

In 2010 his hair became even longer, and also less bushy:

But they shortened it again in 2011 or 2012...

...and still more in 2013 (Daveland rocks):

Let us hope this does not betray an unholy desire to conform

the look of Anaheim's Caretaker to the guy down in Orlando:

Barf, just barf. I've said it before and I'll say it again: He

looks like he should be toting a skateboard, not a shovel.

What impulse led them to lengthen his hair, anyway? Of course we can't be sure, but when

his hair is long on the sides, one thing it does is make him look a little more like his dog:

And that may not be accidental. You know how they say that people tend

to look like their dogs? Well guess what? It turns out that it really is true.

Yes, people really do tend to pick a pet that has a comfortably familiar look to its face, and as often as not, the familiar

look is the same one they see in the mirror every day. So it's not your imagination if your best friend looks like his pit bull.

This perception has long been exploited for its comic potential,
including at Disney. Remember the opening scene in 101 Dalmatians?

And no one exploited this gimmick better than Marc Davis. He used animals as a
way of reflecting the personalities of their human companions (or is it vice versa?).

Okay, maybe you're not convinced that the vicissitudes of the Caretaker's coiffure have anything to do with the dog's ears. It doesn't really matter; the important thing is that the dog's personality is an accurate reflection of the man's. It provides an instant clue to his character. (This is the sort of thing Marc Davis specialized in.) Besides being frightened, we can infer from the meek and harmless dog that the man too is meek and harmless, a rather timid old soul. Contrast the Caretaker and dog at Phantom Manor, where the caretaker turns out to be the Phantom himself:

"The Old Caretaker"

We're dealing with a stereotype here, a trope familiar from literature, film, and television, a stock character sometimes called "The Crusty Caretaker." He's always male. He's a loner, a quiet guy, elderly (or at least mature), often a gardener, sometimes a grave digger. With the Mansion's version, it is important that we see immediately that he's a nice man, because there are a couple of important subtypes within this stereotype. There are good caretakers and bad caretakers. (Harry Potter has both: Hagrid is the good 'un; Filch is the bad 'un.) The bad ones are generally in cahoots with the villain, part of the problem. The good ones further divide between grumpy and gentle. (For that reason I think "crusty caretaker" may be a little too specific.) All of the good guy caretakers are serious and simple. They always know the secrets of the old place and they always tell the truth. These guys show up everywhere, from The Simpsons (Willie the groundskeeper) to The Secret Garden (Ben Weatherstaff), from Wuthering Heights (Joseph) to Marvel Comics, where "The Caretaker" is the relatively mild-mannered identity of a super hero, at least super enough to warrant an action figure.

For some reason these guys always seem to be carrying shovels. In modern, urban settings, this character is often a janitor, and
in such cases it seems like he's always got a mop. (Question: What exactly do you do with an action figure with a shovel, anyway?)

What all this means is that the Haunted Mansion character is instantly recognizable, and you know quite a lot about him within less than a second of laying eyes on him. You know that he's a quiet, simple, guileless man who's been around the place a long time and knows it well. Marc Davis knew that in order to communicate character instantly, you had to deal in stereotypes, and this is a classic example of just that.


Once Again . . .

Is our Caretaker inspired by any particular Crusty Caretaker in literature or film? Yeah, I think so, and here we go again with The Haunting. Mr. Dudley only shows up in one scene, but he reminds me of the guy in the Mansion more than any other CC.

Hey Smiley, where's your shovel?

Why Do We Need Him, Anyway?

Unless you count the Butlers/Maids, the Caretaker is the only living human being we encounter in the course of the Haunted Mansion ride, and he stands like a sentinel at the literal entrance to the show's grand finale.

He feels important. Is he?

Yes he is, and I've said this before too, more than once. Because the stock character he represents is so familiar and so established, you know that he's been around for many years and that his testimony about what's going on is utterly reliable. And testify he does. His countenance tells us as plainly as any words that he's not just frightened; he's astonished. That right there is all the proof we need that nothing like this has happened before within living memory. Some people resist this conclusion, but I think that any attempt to avoid it requires us to violate the stereotype, and the Imagineers have given us no warrant for doing that.

It follows that you are witness to a unique event. If the ghosts had ever come out like this previously, the old caretaker would probably have known about it, because he is after all the old caretaker, but more than this, it is dead certain he would have known about it, because he's not just the old caretaker; he's "The Old Caretaker."

If you believe the world of the Mansion is logically consistent (and it
is), this character determines how you must interpret the entire ride. 

And now, hopefully, in 2019, we can finally end the debate which shouldn't even be a debate: We are now told point blank that the Caretaker's face shows his "wide-eyed shock at seeing that spooks of every size have risen out of their graves for their midnight spree." He's shocked because he's never seen this happen before.

Post Script: The Movie

The 2003 Haunted Mansion movie was originally going to include the Caretaker character, and rumor had it they wanted to cast Don Knotts in the role. Anyway, in an early script for the movie, the Evers family sees the Caretaker and his dog as they drive up to the house, and Jim tries to ask him if they've got the right place. He doesn't answer any of Jim's questions. All he does is stare at them, and eventually he says, "Do not go into the house. Only death awaits you." That was his entire part. They eventually scrapped this scene and decided to present the Caretaker and his dog later in the film as just two more ghosts at the graveyard party, which is pretty dumb, but then, so is the rest of the movie.