Armor Gettin'

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There is an old, unanswered question that will today be given a definitive answer, an unquiet spirit finally laid to rest after nearly half a century of restless haunting.  Don't misunderstand.  It's not what anyone would call an earthshaking discovery; frankly, it's more of an earth-yawned-rolled-over-and-went-back-to-sleep discovery.  But even though it's a minor mystery, it's a prominent mystery, so I suspect that a lot of you have wondered about it now and then, even if it isn't something that has kept you awake at night.  If it serves its purpose, this post performs the respectable if unheroic task of scratching a little itch you've always had.  Merry Christmas.

As it happens, solving this mystery only reveals another one.  In addition, the whole topic revolves around a familiar fixture found in most spooky old manor houses and haunted castles.  In fact, when it comes to haunted furnishings, that fixture is the cliché of all clichés, and yet it's rarely discussed.  So we will.  A little, anyway.


Suitable Suits

I am talking about that ubiquitous prop, your friend and mine, the suit of armor. With movies and TV shows, it seems like the cheaper the gothic horror story, the more likely it is that these guys are going to show up, since they're easily acquired from practically any prop house, probably don't cost much to rent, and they never fail to get the job done. If you're a set designer with a tight budget trying to create an old haunted house, one or two suits of armor are as indispensable as cobwebbing.

And when we go inside . . .

. . . it's just as I feared.

The 2003 Haunted Mansion movie wasn't low budget, so it went whole hog and gave us an entire armory, a suite of suits.  Set design is just about the only aspect of that film that everyone seems to agree was excellent, and the armory was no exception.  It was very menacing, very effective.

Nathan Schroeder's breathtaking concept art was the best thing about the entire movie, if you ask me.

Avoid a Void (especially if it carries a mace)

It isn't hard to explain why suits of armor are scary.  First of all, they're ancient and unfamiliar, from another time and place, and often they are holding wicked-looking weaponry.  Armor, after all, is supposed to look intimidating.  Second, they present you with a human-shaped vacuum that could easily be a hiding place for a prankster or a villain—you can't tell by looking.  Since you don't know for sure if anything is in there, when you see one your fight-or-flight instinct is automatically put on low level alert (otherwise known as the jitters).  Funny, but you can't help imagining them starting to move, however vague or backgrounded or foolish this anticipation might be. Third (and best of all in my book), despite any misgivings you may have, it is nevertheless presumed that suits of armor are likely to be empty, which is to say they contain nothing, they define a void, they create a something-that-isn't-there, and this "nothing" is in the shape of a human.  See?  You've practically molded for yourself a ghost, instantly and automatically!  With a suit of armor, it's all so easy that it's practically cheating.


Restraint

By including an armory, the Haunted Mansion movie actually made a radical departure from the attraction, which is surprisingly restrained in using this prop.  When Marc Davis did his concept artwork for the "Great Hall," he did put a pair of giant suits of armor at the entrance and another pair at the exit, but they were never used.

That didn't take long.  That's the fourth go-round for this artwork.

If you think about it, it would have been easy to put armor in both the changing portrait hall and in the limbo loading area at Disneyland or along the walls in the corridor and load area at WDW and Tokyo, and it wouldn't have looked half bad, but the Imagineers chose not to.  There are, of course, a few depictions of knights in armor—the Black Prince near the beginning and the Decapitated Knight near the end—and in the Disneyland Mansion there are a couple of suits in the background of the attic as random junk.  While we are at it, I suppose we should also mention the well-known experiment in 1985, when they put an actor in a suit of armor in the Corridor of Doors, frightening guests the easy way.

When yours truly saw him, he was like the above, unarmed, and he stayed well back from the buggies, mostly just striking poses.  That's because guests had reacted unpredictably and even violently at first, so the actor backed off and chilled out a bit.  Eventually they equipped him with a device like a garage-door opener so he could stop the ride whenever he saw guests engaged in chemical or zoological activity inappropriate to a Disney park.  For a short time at the beginning, he was armed with a huge axe, as in the concept art below.  One supposes that he could have put the kabosh on smokin' and pokin' just as efficiently with that, but legal issues and blah blah blah.

They discontinued this experiment after that one summer.

A Knight to Remember

But all of that is piddlesome trivia.  When most people speak of "the suit of armor in the Haunted Mansion," they mean the one standing to the right of the Endless Hallway.  He's really the only one that counts.  In true haunted house fashion, he's animated, just enough to cause a "what was that?" reaction.  Originally he was going to be on the left side, and one or the other of his arms was going to jiggle in conjunction with booming footsteps walking up and down the hallways, an effect never used (and discussed HERE).

(pix by Loren Javier, Old Grimm Guy, and of course Dave)

He was on display in the Disney Gallery in Disneyland during 2003, so there are lots of nice, clear photos of him in circulation.

(pic by Allen Huffmann)

How about an atmospheric 3D view, "magic eye" style as usual.

The WDW and Tokyo versions are not absolutely identical, but they are very similar.  What you've

got is a pretty standard-looking suit of armor except for that bizarre, bird-beaked helmet. Those

stars (or suns? flowers?? ) riveted to the sides are something I've seen before, but not on a helmet.

(hat tip CC)

Many Mansionites have wondered for a long time where on earth they got the
inspiration for that funny headgear.  Well, your days of wondering are over.

Armor for Albert

The Archbishop of Mainz from 1514-1545 was one Albrecht von Brandenburg (1490-1545).  He is mostly remembered today as an early foil to Martin Luther at the beginning of the Protestant Reformation.

Albrecht by Lucas Cranach the Elder

It was Albrecht who commissioned John Tetzel to sell indulgences for the Church. Famously, Tetzel went about this task in an exceptionally crass and mercantile manner ("when the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs").  This so infuriated Luther that he nailed his famous Ninety-Five Theses to a church door in Wittenberg.  Albrecht thought they looked a little heretical and forwarded them to the Pope, and bang, the Reformation had begun.  For a time Luther hoped that he might find an ally in the Archbishop, who was known for his broad education and generally liberal views, but in the end Albrecht came down firmly on the side of the Church and against Luther.

Anyway, in about 1526 Albrecht had a set of "costume armor" made (i.e. armor not for combat but for show).  Today it stands in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.  One glance at the helmet (below right) and there is no doubt that we have found the model for
the one used in the Haunted Mansion (below left).

(pix by Allen Huffmann and by Fiona Moore at flickr)

(pic by Tomasz Wladarczyk at flickr)

So there it is.
Itch scratched.

Mystery solved.

Merry Christmas.

Good bye for now.

You're still here. You say you want

to see the rest of the armor? Why? It

was the helmet we were interested in,
and now you've seen it,  so we're done.
Don't you have some Christmas shopping
to do or something?    You shouldn't be

wasting the whole day on the Internet,

you know.   Now shoo, out with you.

Scoot. See you next time. Toodles.

Oh . . . all right.


Brace yourselves.

(pic by Jason Howse at flickr)

I tried to spare you, but oh no, you just had to look.  And what you've seen you can never unsee.  There
may be stupider looking suits of armor in existence, but there can't be many.  I feel like Ralphie's mom:

There.  I've said it.

Now that we've broached the subject, can you imagine what would have happened if they had copied the whole thing, not just the helmet?  I'll tell you what would have happened.  We would all be wasting time talking about an Endless Hallway with a Donald Duck chair on the left and what is obviously Donald Duck armor on the right.  We would wonder if we should start looking for "Hidden Donalds" around the Mansion.  And undoubtedly we would start finding them.  Someone would start a blog.

In fairness, the armor may not have looked quite so odd in Albrecht's day.  The "skirt" and the

Ronald McDonald shoes can be found elsewhere in the museum, although they're less extreme.

(right pic by cphoffmann42 at flickr)

But we're not in Albrecht's day, are we?  We're in our day, and in our day Albrecht's armor
looks simply ridiculous.  Maybe it would look better in a more haunted environment?

Okay, I guess not.  I wonder if Albrecht had an armored purse to complete the ensemble?

It's understandable that someone would take notice of this armor in a catalogue of photos in an old book somewhere.  No one can resist looking at a car wreck.  But why did they linger? Seriously, why did they spend the extra time and money duplicating this helmet when a standard issue could easily have been found in Disney prop storage somewhere?  I haven't a clue.


A New Mystery

So now the mystery is why they borrowed anything at all from this . . . thing.

I don't know who was responsible either.  Ken Anderson did a very cool sketch of a haunted suit of armor when he was working on the Haunted House in the 50's, but the armor itself is normal looking enough.

And even in his most surrealistic moments, Marc Davis gave us nothing but stereotypical armor in his artwork.

I wonder if Rolly Crump is responsible?  Was this his way of rebelling against the utilization of the hoariest cliché in the book? a way of turning it into something no one had ever seen before?  As we know, that was what he thought the Haunted Mansion should be: a place full of things no one had ever seen before.  Maybe.

Or is the helmet part of the Imagineers' efforts to emphasize the gryphon imagery in this part of the ride (discussed HERE and HERE)?  Maybe.

One thing we know for certain is that the helmet was like this from the very beginning.

( pic by Jeff Cook )

I note that they made the helmet look more masculine by flaring out the bottom into more of a bell shape, giving the look of a bull neck rather

than a bird neck.  In many other ways, however, the copy is quite slavish, like the careful duplication of the little  ~ shaped hole in the beak.

(pics by Old Grimm Guy and by Callie Giles at flickr)

Whatever the reason for it, I don't want to leave a false impression.  I actually do like the helmet.  The helmet's great.  It's intriguing, and

just as scary as any other kind.  The one place where the Mansion used the armor cliché, they gave it a mysterious twist, so I say good on 'em.

That's it for this outing, but make yourself nice and comfortable in this location, Forgottenistas, because we're going to be

exploring this room and the Corridor of Doors over the next couple of posts.  Some gooood stuff is comin' up, so stay tuned.

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Post Script:  This is not the only time Albrecht's helmet has been duplicated.  As of this writing, you can get one for

yourself from Outfit4Events for about 550 euros.  There is no hint at the site that they are aware of the Mansion version.