After-Action Report: Haunted Mansion Holiday

We must face it: Haunted Mansion Holiday is something we, as Disneyland fans, need to reckon with.* Yet in the 21 months this blog has been active, the only thoughts I have shared on the matter are that a) I wish it didn't go up so early in the year, and b) I adore the thing it temporarily replaces. I haven't ever given my actual opinion on the thing itself, as a holiday overlay. So here it is:

Eh, it's okay.

As a rule, I am far more forgiving of temporary ride alterations than permanent ones. The latter have to constitute a definite improvement on the original for me to approve of them, while the former just have to be moderately entertaining since, after all, I'll have the original back soon enough. Even if I can't stand a temporary change, all I have to do is wait it out.

I'm happy enough to put Haunted Mansion Holiday in the “moderately entertaining” pile. I like some of the music, the visuals in the stretching room are pretty sweet, and I like seeing the new gingerbread house each year. (Though this year's is a little...uh...) I even think the often criticized mismatch between the existing Haunted Mansion imagery and the Tim Burton additions kind of works with the concept—the Halloweentown characters are imposing their style on the Mansion, are they not?

Of course, I am well aware that this is the kind of cheap post-hoc rationalization for lazy attraction design that Disney's own Marketing Department apologists like to use: “Of course it sucks. We were going for suck.” So I don't give it too much weight. And there's plenty else to criticize about the endeavor.

I just don't find myself criticizing it on the level of “This is a travesty against everything Disneyland outght to stand for” like many commenters do. It's more along the lines of “This could have and should have been done better.” So what I'll do here is, I'll go over various aspects of the ride, explain what I do and don't like about them, and then—as a bonus bit of Armchair Imagineering—sketch out an alternate way of adding The Nightmare Before Christmas to the Haunted Mansion for the holiday season that hopefully makes more sense and is more engaging.

Armchair Imagineering: Hooray For Halloween Parade

The first Mickey's Halloween Party of the year is this Friday. I got to go to that thing in 2013. It wasn't as mind-blowing as the advertising (and price tag) would have you believe, but it was fun enough. There honestly wasn't that much going on that there wouldn't be on any normal Disneyland evening, it's just that on this occasion, it was Halloween-themed. Speaking as a grown-up, the best part was getting to wander around Disneyland in a costume. (I was the “it's a small world” Clock Tower.) The “candy stations” were nothing to write home about and I don't usually go in for rave dancing.

And then there was the unique live entertainment, which I would describe as a mixed bag. The “Cadaver Dans”—i.e. The Dapper Dans with ghoulish makeup and a spooky song repertoire—were a lot of fun. The “Halloween Screams” fireworks show is fantastic, and I think it's practically criminal that they only show it at the party. The parade, though—”Mickey's Costume Party Cavalcade”—was rather disappointing. It just felt very thrown-together, with cheap floats, uninspired music and dancing, and an overall lack of imagination and effort.

Orlando's Magic Kingdom, by contrast, has a Halloween parade—Mickey's Boo-To-You Halloween Parade—that's pretty dang slick..but rather than simply wish to have theirs imported over here,* I thought I'd Armchair Imagineer a better one from scratch! Inspired by the wonderful A Christmas Fantasy Parade, I would make this parade an elaborate, tightly themed spectacle that really brings across the spirit of the holiday in all its facets (or at least all the facets that are family-friendly enough for Disneyland). Accordingly, rather than spamming the most marketable characters, I would choose characters and IPs that actually reflect aspects of Halloween...while still including plenty of crowd-pleasers so the average guest can still find a favorite!

Disneyland Dilettante readers, I give you...the Hooray For Halloween Parade!

This is Halloween – The Case Against Haunted Mansion Holiday

Let's digress from Disneyland for a bit to talk about Christmas Creep. Even if you haven't encountered the term before, you're bound to be familiar with the phenomenon: the tendency for retailers to start stocking and advertising their Christmas items earlier and earlier in the year. Is it a new phenomenon, per se? Hard to say. The Peanuts had a gag about a Christmas sale in April as far back as 1974, but when I was a kid in the Eighties, people still rolled their eyes over the fact that tree displays went up the instant Thanksgiving was over.* Now, of course, we're shocked if any store waits that long. The standard is to flip straight from Halloween to Christmas, with poor Thanksgiving relegated to an end cap display.

This is understandable, of course. Both Halloween and Christmas are much bigger moneymaking opportunities than Thanksgiving. For Halloween, people like to buy costumes, elaborate decorations, and loads of candy. For Christmas, they buy elaborate decorations,** candy, occasional costumes, and gifts gifts gifts. Unless you're a supermarket or an airline, Thanksgiving just isn't that much of a boost for you...and if you are a supermarket or an airline, Christmas might still be bigger. On the consumer side of things, Thanksgiving isn't capital-F Fun the way Halloween and Christmas are, so most people are content to let it be eclipsed by its feuding calendrical neighbors.

Halloween itself wasn't always so prominent, of course. I think my generation was the one to decisively say “Screw you, adulthood, we'll keep dressing up if we want,” turning what had previously been thought of mainly as a children's romp day into an all-ages cultural phenomenon...and honestly? In light of Christmas Creep, it's a good thing we did. The prominence of Halloween gives us a stick with which to draw our line in the sand: “No, Wal-Mart, we are not shopping for Christmas yet; we are still celebrating Halloween.” And since it's become so easy to capitalize on Halloween itself, the retailers of America aren't too inclined to fight us on the matter. Don't be fooled by the appearance of fake pine garlands on the shelves in mid-October—those are just there so the transition can be made as quickly as possible once November 1 hits.

Now we can get back to Disneyland, which turns the whole thing upside-down by installing the Haunted Mansion Holiday overlay in September.