Click through to the source for the rest of the article…it’s short, but interesting.
(via sally-slater)
Phineas gives excellent side eye.
(via the-beautiful-briny)
Source: Flickr / foolishwriter
This is an excerpt from an episode of the Wonderful World of Color in which the Haunted Mansion made it debut. A very young Kurt Russell does a walk through of the mansion. Lots of very cool imagineering behind the scenes.
IF YOU HAVE NEVER BEEN ON THIS RIDE, DO NOT WATCH BECAUSE THERE ARE PLENTY OF SPOILERS.
Instead, visit. Your ghost host will appreciate it. There’s 999 happy haunts. There’s always room for another.
I am so happy this exists.
I love behind-the-scenes peeks like this.
Source: hardyretronaut
Marc Davis Haunted Mansion concept art pin set (also known as, awesome).
The Haunted Mansion - Magic Kingdom, Walt Disney World
This is a really good edit.
Original WED Enterprises (the Disneyland design/architectural firm) construction blueprints for the Haunted Mansion’s ‘Donald Duck’ chair, likely one of the few design remnants from Rolly Crump’s Museum of the Weird concepts that made it into the final attraction.
Rolly’s sketch of a haunted chair that would ‘stand up and talk to guests’.
The final prop chair at Disneyland…..
…..and the Magic Kingdom.
I want one.
Mystic Manor, currently under construction at Hong Kong Disneyland.
This attraction will be the park’s Haunted Mansion equivalent, taking cues as well from the Adventurer’s Club formerly of Walt Disney World and Pleasure Island, and the Hotel Hightower at Tokyo Disney Sea. All focus on rare/cursed artifacts and adventurous explorers, and the backstory relates that the house was built in 1908 by a Lord Henry Mystic, a member in good standing of the Society of Explorers and Adventurers. Inside the Manor, apparently, a mishap causes all the various artifacts to come to life, much as in the Enchanted Tiki Room. It is currently unknown if any gags or characters straight out of the Haunted Mansion will appear within, in a new context. Danny Elfman is responsible for scoring the attraction.
Also in this area will be a new restaurant called, unsurprisingly, The Adventurer’s Club. If it will have live performers and how much it may resemble the extinct Florida Club remains to be seen.
This attraction will utilize the ‘trackless’ tech from Pooh’s Hunny Hunt in Tokyo Disneyland. The architecture and story also doubtless owes a tip of the hat to the famous Carson Mansion in Eureka, California, and a tiny helping of the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose.
Source photo and more information: Mystic Point Under Construction
A trackless Haunted Mansion with an apparent literal whirlwind, and a pet monkey who opens an enchanted box? Yes, please!
I wonder if they’re hiring? Because that’s probably the only way I’d ever be able to go see it.
Haunted Mansion - Grim Grinning Ghosts (graveyard monotone chorus)
This is creepy, but I love these sort of isolated tracks.
The Disney Parks blog has a new post today, pertaining to Walt Disney World.
“Who doesn’t love a good mystery – and we just happen to have one to share with you today. Our friends in Walt Disney Imagineering just sent us this portrait as a sneak peek of one of their upcoming Walt Disney World Resort projects. Any ideas which attraction this may soon be a part of?”
Now, this may be a ‘mystery’ until officially announced, but to me seems rather crystal clear. Presuming an ‘interactive queue’ is underway for Big Thunder Mountain railroad as a concept, the rest falls into place in support of this being a rather overt tribute and backstory-centric element in such.
First off, it must be stated that this is first and foremost a depiction of renowned Imagineer Tony Baxter (Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, Journey Into Imagination, Mr. Lincoln and Sleeping Beauty Castle refurbs, Disneyland Paris as a whole).
At Disneyland Paris, Frontierland’s ‘backstory’ is that one Henry Ravenswood is the owner both of Phantom Manor and the mines at Big Thunder, along with a lot of the town. His luck goes bad, he winds up penniless, mining operation abandoned and in ruins, and possibly either murdered or as the evil phantom haunting his once luxurious home. Tony was overall designer for Disneyland Paris, so he is pivotal to approving and refining this section of the park and what the concept behind it would be.
This portrait definitely has overtones of the stateside Haunted Mansion style to it, slightly sinister cast to Mr. Baxter’s (or whatever the character name will be) features and antiquated oil painting style seen within the HM in a few spots. However, Baxter was not an original HM designer, and unless a copy of this winds up in Paris in the Phantom Manor, I’d presume this is meant for Big Thunder.
In DisneySea, Imagineer Joe Rohde similarly was used as the model for several images of ‘Harrison Hightower’, owner of the Hotel Hightower and renowned adventurer and collector of bizarre artifacts. So I suspect this portrait of Baxter will function in a similar fashion, and the gold nugget headed walking stick (plus it being his concept) suggests it is somehow to be utilized at Big Thunder.In addition, the recent Haunted Mansion interactive queue included scores of tributes to Disney Imagineers who didn’t receive them at the Mansion before: Ken Anderson, Blaine Gibson, Roland ‘Rolly’ Crump, Harriet Burns, and many more, and part of the new Fantasyland was a very obvious tribute to animator Ward Kimball via a caricature of him as a circus clown and deliberate use of his drawing style for a mural in the Little Mermaid ride queue. So the element of using new WDW projects for splashy tributes to pivotal Disney employees is alive and well, and being placed more front-and-center in attractions and environments than ever before.
Will this come to Anaheim as well, where rumors are swirling that construction will remove/replace parts of the original Rainbow Ridge mining town structures? Who knows…but I can say with a fair amount of confidence this tribute to Baxter comes as a part of a ‘backstory’ and will be tied in to him being the owner/founder of BTMRR in some capacity as far as the fictional story goes.
I think the painting may be backwards…it’s his other eyebrow that usually goes up like that (I don’t have a Tony Baxter kink or anything to know this — I just noticed it while looking for a good pic of him to use as a side-by-side comparison).
(Tony Baxter photo source)
Imagineering the Haunted Mansion with Rolly Crump
The Walt Disney Family Museum has a wonderful article in which Rolly Crump talks about designing the Haunted Mansion and working with Walt.
“For example, one of the illusions that we had created had to do with an old sea captain who had evidently lived in that Mansion. He had killed his wife and bricked her up behind the fireplace before going out to see. Well, when he went out to sea, his ship sank and he died… so the story goes that he would come back to his room in that Mansion. So we did this illusion where little by little, you would see the sea captain slowly appear in the middle of the room. When he finally appeared, he was covered with seaweed, and wearing the rain slickers that captains wore, with the hat and boots and everything, but he was a skeleton. He had seaweed hanging on him and water dripping off of him, and all of this was done offstage. We had another room to the side where we lit him up very slowly, and actually had a shower, pouring over the top of him so that all the water kept dripping off of him… and little by little, he would become more solid. And just as he was starting to become a solid form, the ghost of his wife would appear behind the fireplace. She’s just a skeleton, and she has a shroud on her; and she charges out of the fireplace, screaming, flying out of there just to attack him. And just as she gets to him, the two of them disappear. It ran about two minutes long, and it was a beautiful illusion.”
