Stayed up just now watching the ‘Martin’s Ultimate’ tribute to Tower of Terror at DHS. (click the link to get the torrent for yourself at MouseBits.)
Really captivated me, all the ambiance footage and detail around the attraction, especially compared to the bare bones version at DCA, and so it got my mind to wandering….
That attraction, Florida version, really captivates me. I love many Disney attractions, but with a lot, there is a level of disconnect: hard to think of the Enchanted Tiki Room, Pirates, Great Moments With Mr. Lincoln, or MuppetVision as a place in the ‘real world’ and the fantasy concepts could be real. Tower of Terror, though…for me, it offers that opportunity, to play along, or imagine that more. Thinking along the lines of what those events actually would be like for the people involved: Halloween night and a big party, all the guests and hotel staff, cooks, entertainers, big Hollywood stars, maintenance staff being rushed out of the hotel when it is hit by lightning, and then realizing eventually…five people are missing….
Years pass, and the bodies are never found, or even evidence of them. The hotel being locked up basically and rotting from within. Newspaper stories, retrospectives, the families looking for what actually happened, and the mystery just grows of where those people went. Talk of ghosts, and curses, and doubtless organized crime conspiracy theories.
It’s a captivating and enthralling fantasy backstory if you let your mind imagine it really happened, and you’re going into this long-shuttered hotel still containing artifacts people just left close to seventy years ago, not knowing what was happening, rushed out by hotel staff and management. Rooms full of rotting food, abandoned clothes and belongings, musical instruments, things that will never see the light of day. And in this place you’ve entered, five people still might be there, dead, decayed, lost: or worse, shades of them trapped forever, roaming the hallways. You might see them.
If you let your mind run with the fantasy, and hit it at the right time when no other guests are about in a certain area, just you, the eerie, distant vintage music, the clank and groan of the boiler room, a distant, half-heard whispered voice…quite chilling indeed.
And all this makes me wish I was there, right now, in Florida: local time, 4:40 a.m. Imagining no other people about, no guests, employees magically out of sight, and wandering the dimly lit lobby, the library, the boiler room, the exterior grounds. It would be amazing. Pitch black still and the chill night air, silence, apart from the thematic attraction audio. Give me the shivers just thinking about it. I’d love it.
And there ends my ranting…but here’s a little night music, from the Hollywood Tower Hotel to your eardrums:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prCaTEc_a0c
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsWmfljeIq0
The Haunted Mansion - Magic Kingdom, Walt Disney World
This is a really good edit.
Magic Kingdom - Country Bears Vacation Hoedown - 1991
The other Country Bear show.
This version ran at the Magic Kingdom from 1986-1992, after which the original show returned (well, until late last year when about five minutes was removed from the show to present a shortened version instead).
This version also ran at Disneyland from 1986 until the attraction closed in 2001.
“In many ways, Walt Disney World is a labyrinth. People used to get lost at Animal Kingdom, did you know that? When it first opened, visitors literally couldn’t find the exit and Disney went through and added a whole bunch of signs and stuff, a few months after opening. Apparently the intentional layout — designed to invite exploration — proved too much for the average family from Iowa. You can still find skeletons of lost souls if you know where to look. People who simply curled up behind a lemonade cart and gave up the ghost. It’s tragic, really.
This must be a newer set than the one I got three cards from a couple years ago. Mine have purple borders, and say they are cards #1, 2, and 3 of 18.
Card #1 is The Gillig, one of the newer styles of buses (at the time — it was before the higher-capactiy articulated bus was being tested) in use all over the resort (I don’t have my scanner handy to show you the actual cards, so you get random internet pictures of the buses).
Card #2 is The Nova, a slightly older bus model.
And card #3 is The ATS, the oldest bus model in use.
I wonder what seven cards were added to the set?
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)
Ward Kimball (1914 - 2002) was a steam railroad enthusiast, animator, director, and jazz musician/enthusiast employed by the Walt Disney company.
His notable artistic style is seen in his character work on Jiminy Cricket, the Cheshire Cat, Mad Hatter, Lucifer the cat from Cinderella, the Three Caballeros musical number from the film of the same name, Ichabod Crane, the Pearly Band in Mary Poppins, and several segments in the ‘Man And Space’ and ‘Mars and Beyond’ episodes of the Disneyland television show.
The top selection of four images are from Ward’s work om the previously-mentioned space programs, and the bottom is a mural gracing the queue for the newly-opened Little Mermaid attraction in WDW’s Magic Kingdom. I am very pleased to see what is fairly clearly an homage to Kimball and his style of drawing, if in an rather unexpected place, included in a modern Disney park. I love the sea monster and caricature quality of the sailors, notably similar to the examples provided above.
I may not agree with all changes made to the parks or even all ‘hidden Mickey’ style tributes when they get too obvious, but I love this one for it’s placement, subtlety and masterful use of style to pay tribute to a most worthy artist and figure in Disney company history.
Little Mermaid line photo source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/insidethemagic/8080491657/
Harriet Burns, one of the founding members of Walt Disney Imagineering. When she was assigned, the department was three members big (herself, Fred Joerger, and Wathel Rogers). She worked on model work for the Matterhorn, designed and painted the underwater figures for the Submarine Voyage, and helped design and ‘finish’ figures and environments for the Enchanted Tiki Room, Pirates of the Caribbean, and the Haunted Mansion.
All three of the early Imagineers listed above, including Harriet, currently have tribute/homage tombstones outside Walt Disney World’s Haunted Mansion.
Source: vintagedisneyparks
While waiting in line for the new Little Mermaid attraction at the Magic Kingdom, keep a weather eye open for this tribute to a now-gone (and to my mind, much superior) attraction which once took guests under the sea in this same location.
“Dive! Dive!”
In addition, Whale of a Tail is among the instrumental sea shanties heard in the grotto/shipwreck area at the ride entrance.
