Sentimental Paleontology: Late Lamented Haunted Mansion Effects

Well, we're into September now, and you know what that means.

“Halloween creep” is getting to be as bad as Christmas creep, but this year I actually don't mind. I, along with about 90% of the people I know, have been basically done with summer since approximately mid-July. Bring on the pumpkins, I say.* And what better way to kick off Halloween Season at the Disneyland Dilettante then with a look at the Haunted Mansion, and particularly aspects of it that are, shall we say, no longer with us?

And boy howdy, are there ever a lot of them. Plenty of attractions have been upgraded and retooled over the years, but I think I can safely say that no other attraction has undergone anywhere near as much piecemeal turnover—adding, subtracting, and/or replacing individual show elements as opposed to whole scenes—as the Mansion. There are probably several reasons why this should be. The supernatural subject matter lends itself to many different kinds of effects, which practically beg to be upgraded as technology improves. It's a modular sort of spectacle, in which swapping out one ghost for another doesn't meaningfully alter the ride's sense of narrative flow. And it has a devoted fanbase always ready to scour every inch for surprises, meaning that any tinkering is bound to be noticed.

The upshot is that sometimes a fragment of the Haunted Mansion just...goes away, usually with little to no fanfare, never to be seen again in this life. But they say that nothing is truly dead as long as its name is still spoken...**

Ghost Horse

Before I became a filthy, entitled Annual Passholder, I didn't often notice minor changes at Disneyland. When you only get to visit once or twice a year, you just don't have the luxury of scrutinizing every detail...and even if you did, you won't have seen that stuff often enough to memorize it so that the changes stand out. But in the mid-Nineties, the Haunted Mansion underwent some significant buffing...significant enough that even the least of it couldn't escape my notice.

That least of it was an old-fashioned hearse, placed out in front of the house alongside the queue, with an invisible horse in the traces. Four horseshoes on the ground, all the tack in place as it would be on a living animal, audible whinnies every several seconds...but no actual horse to be seen. A ghost horse!

In more recent years, I have come to see (or not see, since, y'know, invisible) the ghost horse as a betrayal of the Mansion's show logic, i.e. you're not supposed to “know” there's anything supernatural going on until you get inside. And maybe someone in Imagineering agrees, because at some point, the horseshoes were removed, the whinnies were turned off, and the hearse was moved to the very edge of the paved area where it rests, so that the horse tack sticks out over the planted area, easily missed if you're not looking for it:

So I guess the ghost horse isn't quite as “gone” as the other show elements highlighted in this post, but it has certainly been demoted to “nothing to see here” status.

Not that there ever was anything to see, because it was invisible. You see. Or don't. Moving on...

April-December

Most of the items on this list fall into the category of trivial details. But April-December can be considered a major feature. She was important. All of the transforming portraits are noteworthy, and during her long tenure she was arguably the most iconic of the lot. She was the only one with legible words in her paired images, which also gave her a definitive name. She was positioned at the end of the row, right around the spot where each elevator-load of guests would start to back up even on light-ish crowd days, so a lot of people got a really good look at her. And I think she had a somewhat different vibe than her companion portraits, which all changed into something threatening, whereas April's transformation was more somber and sad.

That different vibe, unfortunately, is probably the main reason she was the one to go when the transformation effect was changed from the slow fade to the lightning flash in 2005. April-December needed a slow fade; there's no jump-scare inherent in her transition. Even Master Gracey, who replaced her and otherwise illustrates a very similar concept, is more startling.

April may have exited the Haunted Mansion, but you can still see her around—rather, you can see the Marc Davis concept painting which became her (and which, in truth, is not very different). Next time you're in New Orleans Square, drop by Port Royal Curios and Curiosities*** and take a look a the upper shelves behind the registers.

Load Area Spider

This might be the most obscure item on the list, but...who remembers when there used to be a big old rubber tarantula on a cartoonishly stereotypical orb web above the spot where the Doombuggies emerge in the load area? (Or were there two spiders? Better archivists than me only cite one, but my memory has this habit of insisting there were two, at least some of the time.)

The web and its occupant(s) were removed when they started shoving Tim Burton Claymation characters in there every year. I don't know if the items were accidentally damaged during the first installation, or if it was just a stylistic choice which had been planned for a while and put into effect as long as they had big work to do in that area anyway. In any case, to this very day, the Doombuggies make their appearance from beneath much more realistic cobwebs with no arachnids to be seen. This is arguably an improvement.

But I kinda miss the spider. Or spiders. It was the first of a very few living things to reside in the Mansion. Without it, that status goes to...the Raven, which is prominent enough not to need the additional honors.

Madam Leota's Ectoplasm Ball

Okay, so this one isn't so much gone as inconsistent. Low on the maintenance priority list, you might say. But one aspect of it seems to have been chucked out entirely—at least for now—so it goes on the list.

When it's working, the ecto-ball bobs around lazily on the wall just near where the Doombuggies enter the Seance Circle, so you can't even see it until you swing around. It's a simple enough effect: a light source moves around behind a swatch of light-reactive fabric so that it leaves a slowly fading trail. For a while there, though, you could see gruesome faces in the glow: gruesome, familiar faces. There were at least two distinct images, readily identifiable from portraits in the preceding Corridor of Doors—the Hatchet Man (AKA the Ghost Host), and the one I like to call Old Squinty Screamer.****

I haven't spotted the faces for a few years now, however. There's a rumor that they represented an aborted plan to develop the Mansion's backstory and cast of characters a little more, using repeated images to explicitly tie certain scenes together, and...if that's true, I'm glad they didn't go through with it. The Haunted Mansion is perhaps the best example of the principle that theme parks are at their best when they don't tell you everything that's going on. The Attic was better before Constance. The only definitive story the Mansion needs is the one that takes place as you're riding it.

And speaking of the Attic...

Bat-Mobiles

The 2006 revamp of the Attic did more than saddle us with a suddenly unambiguously wicked bride who will. Not. Shut. Up. We lost a lot of incidental cool stuff. The pop-up spooks were all removed, leaving the Graveyard as the only remaining locale for jump-scares in the ride. Most of the existing clutter was either removed or pushed somewhere in the back where it wouldn't conflict with the loads of wedding junk. And they took out the bats.

I shouldn't miss these as much as I do. I didn't even look for them every time when they were there. They were just...cheap mechanical bats, fluttering on lazily spinning rods near the ceiling. On the scale of complexity of Haunted Mansion effects, where 1 is the shadow of the hand on the clock and 10 is the new Hatbox Ghost, they rated about a 0.2. I am sure they were included for no other reason than “It's a haunted house; gotta have bats.” Maybe it was that very simplicity and that very cheesiness that made them so charming. You had this ride, the pinnacle of Imagineering magic, with jaw-dropping illusions like Madam Leota and the stretching gallery...and then it also had rubber bats on wires. There was something very...I don't know, egalitarian?...about it. All spooks are welcome in the Haunted Mansion, even low-tech ones!

In any case, presumably some Imagineer or other also felt the loss, because the Hatbox Ghost's little nook also contains a few bats—not flying, but hanging from the ceiling as bats do:

The bats actually went into the space before Hattie did, which I must say, did an amazingly good job of building up anticipation for the full scene to be revealed. (We all knew Hattie was coming back by that point.)

Dead End! Sign

With most of the removals, you can kind of figure out why they went—they didn't work as well as the Imagineers hoped, they clashed in some way with newer effects, etc. But I'm not sure what happened to the Dead End! sign that used to be the last thing you encountered before exiting the Doombuggy. Perhaps it broke and was deemed not worth fixing. I suppose it was a little jarring and campy. But it was one of those things that perfectly encapsulated the Mansion's style, from the look of the lettering and graphics to the wordplay to the open acknowledgement that you were in an artificial situation.

In fact, it was iconic enough that typeface designer David Occhino included an image of it in his dingbat font Mansion CryptBats, right alongside far more celebrated spooks such as the wallpaper faces and Hitchhiking Ghosts.

And now, in honor of the holiday season...

Haunted Mansion Holiday Hitchhikers

I have expressed my dissatisfaction with aspects of Haunted Mansion Holiday before and don't intend to do so again just now, but even examining the overlay by itself, without comparison to the original, there are ups and downs. They're still tinkering with this thing, and probably the biggest changes came in 2003, when the original tinkly score composed by Gordy Goodwin was replaced with music from the film The Nightmare Before Christmas and the character Oogie Boogie was added to the proceedings. In particular, Oogie came in at the end of the ride, where the Hitchhiking Ghosts normally stand, spinning his roulette wheel in order to determine which of several Christmas horrors awaits you in the mirrors.

For a great many Haunted Mansion fans, this is one of the more irritating bullet points in the long list of complaints about Haunted Mansion Holiday: the immensely popular and iconic Hitchhiking Ghosts are completely pre-empted by this bombastic cartoon character who will. Not. Shut. Up. Good ol' Phineas, Ezra, and Gus were still pre-empted in 2001 and 2002, but not so...ridiculously. Instead, we got this little tableau:

Fans of the film would probably assume, reasonably enough, that the three kid characters would be the new hitchhikers, but it was actually those accordion-necked figures that filled the role, having been introduced earlier as pop-ups in the Attic. If this was an attempt to create some entirely new mascot characters just for Haunted Mansion Holiday—just for the park—then I applaud the effort even though it apparently didn't land.

But wait, what's that in the background of the image, on the crest of that hill we see through the window?

Aha! No wonder this scene, despite being a simple arrangement of painted flats, is more comforting than what followed.

Now...if you haven't yet, go check out Long-Forgotten Haunted Mansion.

* In my case, the mood is exacerbated by the fact that I basically missed all of fall last year due to the Knee Situation.

** By the by, if Haunted Mansion history is your jam, you should absolutely visit the Long-Forgotten Haunted Mansion blog and read every dang post on it. Everything is there, from the ideas that inspired the Mansion to never-used concepts to the most recent developments, all laser-focused on the original Anaheim attraction with only very occasional side-trips to Orlando or other attractions. Every. Dang. Post. Go!

*** Hang on...this shop sells almost exclusively Haunted Mansion/The Nightmare Before Christmas swag and has for at least a few years. What's it still doing with a pirate-y name? Given that “Le Bat En Rouge” has been reassigned to the dress shop, what should they call it? I can't top the sister's suggestion of “Ghoulish Delights”...anyone care to try one-upping her?

**** What? I've always called it that. I certainly didn't make up that name for this post.