Podcast: The Ride - The Haunted Mansion Part 1

Episode Date: October 26, 2018

In the first part of a new, annual tradition, we examine the origins of The Haunted Mansion. Listen as a simple walkthrough haunted house evolved into one of the most beloved attractions of all time. And learn how the World's Fair, the death of Walt Disney, and a battle between goofy ghosts and spooky ghosts made the Mansion into what it is today. The Patreon is live! Welcome to The Second Gate! Listen to Podcast: The Ride Ad-Free on Forever Dog Plus: https://foreverdogpodcasts.com/podcasts/ FOLLOW PODCAST: THE RIDE: https://twitter.com/PodcastTheRide https://www.instagram.com/podcasttheride BUY PODCAST: THE RIDE MERCH: https://www.teepublic.com/stores/podcast-the-ride PODCAST THE RIDE IS A FOREVER DOG PODCAST https://foreverdogpodcasts.com/podcasts/podcast-the-ride Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

FOREVER! DOG! how long this podcast is. Is the episode actually the length of a feature film? Or is it your imagination? And consider this dismaying observation. The information contained in this podcast has no practical application in the real world. But who are we kidding? That's nothing unusual for us.

It's Hauntcast, the Fright, ghost-hosted by three headless men in their ghoulies. I'm Rot Skardner, joined by Mike Snarl scum and jason skeleton uh that's the best i could do i i think i got the best one jason skeleton i thought about working a little harder and then i'm like you know what that's just the plain jason skeleton i feel fine about i think i've seen this how this halloween season i've seen like Filters for Instagram or Snapchat I don't know with like dancing skeletons And it always makes me laugh Like a skeleton going all out Having the time of his life I think it's so

Delightful really isn't it Is it because you use scare already because Jason Scare-ed in Well I like scare in mine So as being that I Yeah yeah yeah I carded it over being that there was a whole uh word i could turn uh i should have done like skeleton and what i did with a t with a d scale okay that's good too yeah skeleton or figure out a way to put scare in

mine and then we all have scare in it and then it's uniform yeah yeah okay because scarred in is the closest thing i could think of off the top of my head snarl scum a stretch also but you know feel free to replace these as we go i just thought i'd throw those out and we can change them every year yeah we'll change them every year yeah sure because we are doing the haunted mansion every year on halloween it's official yes this if you were if you were looking at this episode title and think, first of all, hopefully you're excited that we are covering The Haunted Mansion and we're excited to be doing it.

But if you're wondering how people who took 19 episodes to cover City Walk are going to possibly contain The Haunted Mansion in a single episode, we are not. This will be a tradition not this the this will be a tradition every halloween week will be the haunted mansion because there's so much culture to cover within the haunted mansion i don't know how many it's going to take it seems like a lot potentially yeah i mean we are gonna obviously we've all agreed to do this podcast for at least 10 to 20 years so we know that's what i that's that's

the handshake deal i assume we we made long ago so i would say yes there's 10 episodes honestly seems we maybe we'll see if we can be tidy and and keep it in there and we'll we'll talk a little later about what we're what we're taking off the table but uh but basically you know this we're kind of calling this like the origins of the attraction we'll kind of talk about uh how it got started all the earlier versions and how it became one of the best theme park attractions of all time uh uh but before we get into that a big exciting announcement today this moment right now is the rope drop of Podcast the Ride, the second gate, which if you if you don't know, if you didn't hear our announcement of this earlier, this is our Patreon bonus content. World of Wonder that we are opening up over at Patreon dot com slash podcast the ride. So it's open the second game oh wait you know

you know what i should do is uh open the patreon content in the name of the weirdo podcast fans of the world yeah all right well we've already Started off on the right foot Calling our Donors weirdos Oh I consider No weirdos is a A term of affection For me

I started My buddy Tommy Blot Just started calling me And a lot of other people Weirdos And I realized Oh that means he That means he likes you

That's what I started doing too That's true Yeah It's the line in that Spider-Man turn off the dark song Oh yeah All the weirdos In the world tonight These are just the Avant-garde people That's true. Yeah. It's the line in that Spider-Man turn off the dark song. Oh, yeah. All the weirdos in the world tonight.

These are just the avant-garde people. That's true. The interesting people, you know? That's what Bono meant. The people you want to be taking over New York City. Which, by the way, this isn't anything we've talked about, but I did want to propose to you guys, and I'll just do it on the air, perhaps within the Patreon, an entire episode just about the Letterman performance of Spider-Man.

We should do that annually as well. I watch that every couple months. Now in year three, we will cover the man made entirely out of mutant bees. Swarm? You're talking Swarm. I'm talking Swarm.

I'm talking Swarm. As Green Goblin would say. Yeah, Swiss Miss episode, yeah, for sure. So that's an example of the kind of wonder that awaits you. But let me give a very specific example of what you can find if you go to patreon.com slash podcast. The Ride Right Now, available to you, is our first Patreon patreon episode which is about disney quest it is a full-length episode that's only for uh you the potential patron uh disney quest which if you don't know offhand was the five-story windowless vr experience enigma yeah that lasted for a long

time one of the most confusing things ever on on dis, and we know it's kind of an internet favorite, Disney Quest. And we thought that'd be a really fun way to kick it off. But there's going to be all kinds of stuff. Do we want to say the basic terms, the kind of stuff we'll be doing? Well, let's say, too, yeah, pledge $5 a month. You will get access to the Disney Quest episode right now. It's available right. You could stop listening to this and go to Disney Quest and then come back to Haunted Mansion.

You can park hop. It's a Patreon. It's a park hopper. Yeah. And then starting in November, you will get three bonus episodes a month. Yes. And we can, well,

there are different types of episodes we have coming, you know, and among others, this is not going to just be it, but right now we have three different or not three different. So we were talking about, we have full length episodes. We have character meet and greets.

So we've been hearing a lot about like, people want to hear about sunny eclipse, you know, the lounge singer alien from Cosmic Rays in Disney World. And we're going to do that. Yeah. Maybe I'm not going to commit to this one officially. But when we we kind of stopped doing that animatronic a month of the month a while ago. And I had a little thing written up about the lady who works in the Spaceship Earth computer center.

Like with the with the cool afro and the bright yellow maybe that's a character meet and greet we talk about uh kind of anybody with a what's the name of that toy you have a bunch of them the vinylmation yes um park stars yeah yeah i think if if it's a park star it's a good candidate to be a character meet and greet i agree i mean i do think we can talk about the goat on Big Thunder for 45 minutes to an hour. If we haven't proven our worth in the rambling arena at this point, if you don't believe we can do that, we'll prove it over on the Patreon. And if you're one of the wonderful weirdos that wants to hear us do that, please come over to the Patreon.

Come to us. The three biggest weirdos of them all. Us and Swarm. Yeah. We also have, they're called Sea Tickets. Oh, yeah. See, we haven't talked about Sea Tickets yet. This has been our idea for a while, kind of taking attractions that don't really, that

are kind of riffraffs, that don't really fit into a broader discussion of a land, that are kind of their own odd thing that don't necessarily sustain the full two hours although you never know we don't know where these will go but they're potentially uh more of many episodes and what have we talked about for the sea ticket i mean the one we haven't done one of these yet we've we always talk about the mike fink keel boats right as it is as an example of that what are those that's always been one of those weird i'm not sure i ever did it and then one of them would sink and then it became not an option to do it but we're going to talk about that i'm i'm pushing for uh lucy a tribute i want the lucy

there was a lucille ball museum at you know at both universal studios hollywood and florida uh that was among the more mundane things at Universal. Although maybe I'm mistaken. I think a lot of it. Actually, Aaron, my wife, very fond of Lucy tribute. I'm very fond of it, too. I think when you said that for a C ticket, like a shorter episode, I said, no way. Full length.

Oh, we're bumping that over. We can put it on C. I'm just saying you may not be able to contain me talking about I Love Lucy and Gail Gordon. Yeah, Lucille Ball was probably my first favorite comedian as a weird little kid. So that could be a C ticket, but that might grow and become... Well, these might all evolve and shift. We got to see if we're even able to do shorter ones. And really what I think potentially in episodes could consist just of our internal discussions of what goes into what

category yes that's i guess we do this via text a lot but maybe we we need to cart it over and make it listenable we should really just say we should probably have at least a document because searching through text messages can often be a nightmare yeah true uh um yeah i mean we should well let's just let's open up our tech let's make our texts and our emails available let's release the archives look it's all it's all evolving what is what is the the actual contents of podcast the ride the second gate but that's that's some of the stuff we've talked about do we miss anything we'll do the podcast the right post office there uh we've had this idea of a lost and found episodes where we go back and cover parks we've already done before. We're actually speaking of which we started this show about a year ago.

And the first episode was the E.T. adventure. And this very day, we're going to record a little character meet and greet with an old friend named Botanicus. Yes. So, yeah, november we're announcing we're not always going to announce everything ahead of time what the next month is coming but for the for the month of november the first month of the second gate we're going to do disney quest and we're going to do botanicus an episode all about et's wise teacher from the green planet finally not weighed down by the other elements of the et adventure we had to cover

before we don't have to waste time with the flop glopple we can focus right on uh on et's teacher i will say we were we will talk a little bit about the flop glopple we have no choice because that book that botanicus is in is entirely about the flop glopple right he has more uh page time than botanicus does so he will be mentioned. But Botanicus, we got a lot of fun stuff. I found something that was shocking to me on the internet. And I will just tease you with that. Having to do with me and Botanicus that I did not know existed on YouTube.

Oh. That someone made. Interesting. And I was like, I found this an hour ago. And I went, whoa. Like, it blew me away. So that's a tease. made interesting and i was like i found this an hour ago and i went whoa like i like it was blew me away so so that's a tease this is a real flat like for your hat your brand for hashtag datonicus yes which is a real flex 2014 yeah yeah my brand we're finally really taking advantage of

uh fine right you're in uh and then i guess we'll say the last episode of the third episode of november will be about Club 33 You may have seen on Twitter that we got Lucky enough to go invited to Club 33 And we Ate and drank And why not With this new exclusive experience

That we're crafting why not put the Ultimate theme park exclusive Experience into there So the podcast that we're at the second gate has private Clubs that you can join why not put the ultimate theme park exclusive experience into there? So the podcast that we're at the second gate has private clubs that you can join. Yeah, it really makes me laugh, putting the Club 33 episode there. Makes sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

These are champagne episodes that you're going to get. So, yeah, that's the beginning. As we said, we won't always know what all of them are but if those are enticing to you then head to patreon.com slash podcast the ride no colon in that web address there's never a colon in the middle of a web address anyway only after http yes oh yes only there but so um but just the words podcast our famous our famous colon. Our famous colon, yeah, is not there. But also you can just click on the link in this episode description or on all of our social media accounts. Because Lord knows we will be screaming about it. I mean, I don't know. Screaming.

Screaming is obnoxious. A little bit screaming. You might be screaming. Yes. Try to keep it mellow. Yeah. Let's be calm about it. But yeah. I got worn out by my initial be screaming. I'm trying to keep it mellow. Let's be calm about it. I got worn out by my initial bellow,

but I was happy to bellow about it, and I'll continue to bellow about it. The Disney Quest one is a lot of fun. That one's in the can. If you don't know Disney Quest offhand, truly one of the strangest things ever on

Disney property. Hear us talk about it. That's a pretty lengthy one, too. It of the truly one of the strangest things ever on Disney property. So hear us talk about it for that's a pretty lengthy one too. It is a lengthy one. Also full discovery realize that's technically coming out on October 26th but cut us a break. You're getting a little early. Just a little treat. So that's technically you're saying that's a November episode but you're

getting it to 26th. So there's three episodes for November. Right. So anyway don't hold us to rules. Yeah don well, you said the three episodes for, yeah. Right. So anyway, if that sounds fun. Don't hold us to rules. Yeah, don't hold us to rules. For $5 a month, you're supporting us in the regular show and you're getting three extra episodes. That's the deal. If it sounds fun, come along.

If not, we have our regular episodes that are still free. Yeah, they're not going anywhere. Yeah, which we are currently in. And I like that after all that, where we sort of had not like rules, but there was a lot of mechanics to explain about Podcast Thread, The Second Gate. And now we get to shift right over to a different type of mechanics, which is the Haunted Mansion. As we said, we're going to break up the Haunted Mansion. We're going to cover it bit by bit, year by year. It'll be a Halloween tradition. And as as we said there is so much here and uh i i thought just to be just to be very clear about what we're going to cover not cover we'll take a couple of things off the table right

now we're gonna my idea to tackle it was to do it sort of chronologically the beginnings of the riot all the way up to the opening in 1969. So what I'm going to take off the table, Nightmare Before Christmas. We're not going to talk about that yet. Go on. Yeah, get in the back of the bus, Nightmare Before Christmas. Maybe in 2025. Phantom Manor in Paris, which is wonderful. We won't cover quite yet.

Or the Tokyo version or the Disney World version. That's how much there is in this single. There's just, there's so many specifics and wonderful stories, particularly about the creation of this ride. And there's plenty to do right there. What else are we, well, I would go so far as to say Phantom Manor and Mystic Manor in Hong Kong, two separate different attractions than just Haunted Mansion. And those episodes could be done potentially not Halloween week. It depends. Or they could.

We'll figure it out that schedule wise later. That's a sort of trick a ghoulie in the Haunted Mansion might play on you. I would say don't count on us getting to the hatbox ghost today i don't know i don't know i'm not prepared for this no i'm not prepared for me either i don't think i think that's we're looking 2019 2020 at least before we get to hatbox ghost so we'll maybe we'll talk about maybe we get to the even the hallway where there's pictures of hatbox ghost on the wall maybe i don't i'm not convinced we're even going to make it into the house it's possible we won't talk about the ride today or this year i

mean but this is also we're kind of in doing all of this rule setting we are also under selling how cool everything is oh yeah that we have to talk about of course and that this well here i will throw i'll throw this out i'll i'll i want to extract some opinions from you guys before we get going too far do you think at least at the time in 1969 this ride opens is it in 1969 the greatest theme park attraction in the world? It might be now. Yeah. Like, I don't know what ride looms larger in my mind than the Haunted Mansion.

And even just doing research for this, I feel like I've read as much for this as any like any episode I could pinpoint besides maybe Hard Rock Park. And that was a whole park. Well, that was a we just like, you know, we thought we were going to get like a drop of oil and instead it gushed. It was a geyser. That was the problem. We think we all that day. We're like, oh, God, oh, God, oh, God. It's time.

We have to start. But yeah, this way, I think we knew there was a ton here. And I agree. Even like the story of how this got made is interesting enough on its own. Like it's so big. There's so many people involved and there's so many huge events that touch it. And it took so long to get it off the ground. It's part of the fabric of Disneyland before Disneyland even broke ground.

There's so much there. It's for sure the best ride when it opens. For sure. Because if you're a Pirates guy, Pirates doesn't open until a few years later. No, Pirates is first. 67. Oh, I'm confused. But it's close.

It's neck and neck. If Pirates is second, it's not a distant second, certainly. Like, I'll give due to Pirates. But how insane, what a crazy run that those attractions were relatively close together, a lot of the same team involved, and that they're in the same area of the first new land of Disneyland, New Orleans Square. Yes. Is that level of immersiveness, of architectural accuracy, there's such a neat vibe there there was all kinds of live

entertainment at the time and that the first two rides are probably still in anybody's list of the top 10 attractions ever yeah and they seem like you can feel that they're like in the same era you can feel there's like obviously like a lot of similarities because the same people worked on them and there's there's a there's it's they're both kind of follow a little bit of a same pattern in the sense that like it ends with a big party they both kind of end with big parties starts out slow starts out scary and starts out in just like kind of relatively unassuming like patios right hallways they really like save the they really save the magic there's no videos obviously i have no problem with a video getting you into the experience of the ride those are

often my favorite things but i i love the fact that these are these are pure analog experiences yeah it's it's it's crazy like they always they get lumped together still to this day. Like I feel like they're inseparable when you're talking about I don't know, like it's when you're talking about rides, you're always lumping these two together because the proximity, I think, but also because of the fact that they're so similar and maybe struck maybe structure is the word I'm looking for. And they both explode the amount of audio animatronics at the park. I think that by this point you've got Small World, but some of those are more minimal.

You've got Carousel of Progress, but you're kind of following new iterations of the same character over and over again. And there's not too many audio animatronics in that, all told. Or the Tiki Room, but they're small. The fact that there's so many grand life-size and and memorable characters in both of these rides that you could like describe oh that weird guy or that weird lady offhand like there's so many of them and it's part of by the way not to get us on a tangent but another thing that we

will not be addressing in this episode except maybe for right now the eddie murphy film which i've never seen and i imagine we'll talk about it someday and i'll i'll see it but from my vague knowledge of it the fact that they don't use the characters other than little cameos right or they and that it's not the mansion because the mansion is so memorable well jennifer tilly is leota yeah that is the only thing that really sticks out and we're like the busts or something like in it at some point so kind of that that seems to be one we could do something with if we uh pop by howl at the Moon first before recording that. If you catch my drift. Liquid courage before dealing with the Eddie Murphy film.

Get a blue bucket full of blue stuff. Bucket full of blue stuff to talk about blue Jennifer Tilly. It's like ectoplasm. Yeah, I mean, that's sort of I've been corrected about my country bears. I've never seen the country bears movie, but all featured prominently on the cover of country bears that are not any of your favorite country bears oh yeah or at least they're not recognizable don jones of course is like no they are in the movie and the movie's good he said that to me so i i guess maybe i have to watch it now that's a debate we can have yeah maybe we talk country bears with him on the movie specifically

um but yeah it's like that people like those characters. Why are you running away from using that? I mean, that's what and we won't talk about too much the Guillermo del Toro idea for the Haunted Mansion. But he, I think, is so focused on the Hatbox Ghost. But again, we're not talking about him very much. But how smart, like if that film ever happens or any future Haunted Mansion property, you have, yeah, I have a feeling that it will be more central to the actual, like what the fans like about this ride. Because why would you not utilize that? People are super passionate about every single, every room, every piece of wallpaper.

I sat in one of those Van Eden auctions and i watched just replicas of the like uh is it is it a raven or an owl what is the like the the top of the line dividers that's this little light it's a bat okay um but there is a raven that follows you throughout the attraction yes yeah but um okay the the bat heads of the poles that divide the line. I watched a replica of one of those sell for, you know, twenty thousand dollars. Like there's so much like people freak about every single piece of this. And I hope there one day is a film that like does the does all this stuff in a cool, respectful way. The way the best comic book movies do like really pull from the from the actual culture of the ride.

Yeah, of course i mean it's yeah it's it is like the whole thing has become so iconic as you're saying like every piece of it is iconic and i guess even though i'm because i was really struggling with pirates versus haunted mansion of like what i like better and i feel like maybe i often want to go on pirates more but if i really think about it the pieces that make up haunted mansion do feel more iconic to me and more memorable there's more things i think if i listed a hundred things about haunted mansion i feel like i can easily come up with that list faster than pirates that i go yeah man that's great that's great that's great yeah and i feel so like yeah what you're saying about like every piece of it feels now at this point like it's its own thing.

You know, I also maybe this it's really splitting hairs. But if I I think the fact that the Haunted Mansion is is this smooth experience that never is only if there's a little like slow loading or an accident or something does it slow down. But like it is such a dependable experience. That's like, you know, you're getting you know what you're getting every time and you never get tired of it. Pirates does have that issue of the boat backups that go so deep into the ride at this point. It's gotten really bad the last few years. Yeah, I think they're running too many. Yeah, they run so many boats because they try to get people in and out fast but yeah it ends up being it ends up like in that last scene when the pirates are shooting at you you're just like sitting there forever that makes

you a little like by the time you're off of the ride and then you get back and it does it ends with just kind of you see where you came in again yeah i think that ending is maybe the only thing that i often feel like i get off of pirates and go okay well i'm ready to eat or like chill out or something it does feel like you get checked out of the ride like a minute before you should or at least two minutes before you check your phone at the end but haunted mansion you're you're in it i pirates you can run into i think because i ran in this once it was like my family family. And then we had like the whole boat to ourselves, except for a row of people a few rows back who were hammered. And then you're just stuck with these people for the whole ride.

Haunted Mansion, you have a little more privacy. The only issue you really run into that makes me neurotic is people firing off a flash in Leota's seance room. Oh, really? Trying to take a picture and forgetting to turn the flash off because it's so like you know oh it's just automatic the flash the flash on your phone just detects when it should go off uh that sucks though that's like then you're like 30 seconds of the ride adjusting your vision trying to react to that devilish deeds don't take those flesh photos folks um yeah well it's wonderful there's there's so much and do you want i feel like we all probably looked into the the history of the ride uh uh beat by beat so do we just try to move through this chronologically

and then see where we're at and see if we even have time to talk about specific rooms. Well, the earliest iteration or thinking about this ride goes all the way back right here to beautiful Burbank, California, when Walt wanted to build the Mickey Mouse Park across from his new studios. Which we don't talk, we haven't talked aboutkey mouse park a lot um but sort of the original like smaller iteration of what became disneyland and if you're in la and you drive past the burbank uh disney animation studios in that building and a big plot of land that is still undeveloped right next to that building that is the original spot that's where mickey mouse park would have been built right right right next to the

studio yeah uh uh but either there are illustrate you know concept art from that and there's a little little part of it says like correct me if i'm wrong it says church graveyard haunted house or old house oh okay uh and it's just like he they always envision some sort of spooky house some sort of haunted house because even at even just back in the day pre-disneyland carnivals you know fairs haunted houses were very common yeah i mean because the famous story of course is walt wanted a place to take his his daughters that wasn't just a shitty old carnival so yeah and on his head he was like how do we plus up this crappy like fun house haunted house type thing yeah and that came up a lot in a lot of different versions of it like and this was one of the battles thought about the

haunted mansion is that like some of the design showed it as like a shitty old decrepit house and walt was like i don't want a shitty old decrepit house in my park especially in the another early version where it was going to be off the main drag of main street which she's kind of like... That was interesting. Yeah. I mean, that's a real... That's a thing I feel like you think... I think about like Americana, especially To Kill a Mockingbird or Winesburg, Ohio, like these little towns with the main streets.

There's always like one shitty rundown house. And at the time, it probably made sense. But to us, they all look old now. And it's like, oh, look at that old house from the early 1800s, as opposed to these modern houses from the late 1800s. Now it's just like, look at all that old crap. Sure. Sure. It all just blends into a much.

That's funny. Yeah. And that so I didn't know that that the it was initially going to be like an offshoot of main street and there's been various things if you go down main street today there's these little alleyways but there's nothing too significant down there but those were earmarked in the early days in the 50s and 60s as potential like expansion zones yeah and whatever was it just gonna be like liberty street Street? What became Liberty Square in Disney World, which is where the Haunted Mansion is in Disney World and the Hall of Presidents. There was going to be like a little like in the past colonial area shooting off of Main Street.

Walt loved Liberty and he wanted it represented, but it didn't happen until Disney World. Edison Square was also one of those possibilities. Oh, yeah. I don't know much about edison square offhand um was there also international was there going to be an international street oh maybe yeah kind of the early seeds of what became world showcase yeah yeah but yeah evidently there was going to be a little side street with uh with the haunted house at the end and then they started talking about doing something as sort of an annex of Adventureland.

And I think by, I might be wrong, but in 58, they were already starting to talk about a New Orleans area, but not where it ended up, per se, more along the river. It was going to be sort of tucked into a part of Adventureland. And in 58, there was a map put out where Walt made the New Orleans announcement official, although it was all stuff that never, didn't quite end up getting built the way that he said. But that included a wax museum potentially of pirates.

Right. And that's what turned into the Ride Pirates of the Caribbean. Something called a thieves market. That's fascinating to me, I guess. What does that mean? Like a bazaar? Maybe. Like a thieves market kind of a thing.

Yeah, like you could run by and steal an apple on a vest. Will we finally see some of that in Star Wars Galaxy's Edge? Oh, and proper thieves market, perhaps. Or stealing from the Toydarians. Is that what they're called? The aliens who make toys? Wado's race is called the Toydarians. Is that what they're called? The aliens who make noise? Watto's race is called the Toydarian. Yes, you're correct.

So you think there's bad deeds going on in the marketplace? What's it called? Oh, well, you're talking about Star Wars Galaxy's Edge, which is on the planet Batuu. Yeah, in the Outer Rim. In Black Spire Outpost. Black Spire Outpost. Black Spire. Okay. So Black Spire Outpost is not a clean shopping destination like CityWalk. That's what Jason's suggesting. Yes, of course.

Okay. So yeah, perhaps this was the original Black Spire Outpost while I was thinking about. So we can see the origins of Black Spire Outpost in the Thieves' Den. Is that the same map that has the Munition Depot and the burning of the town? There's some old maps. This is what I'm looking at. One of the resources is

a book called The Haunted Mansion, Imagineering a Disney Classic by Jason Sorrell. It's really great. A lot of stuff we're talking about is in here. A lot of pictures. You can read it yourself if you don't want to hear us essentially slowly read the book to you. Try to remember what is in here a lot of pictures you can read it yourself you don't want to hear us essentially slowly read the book to you try to remember what's in here also uh and this is another uh check mark in the plus column for the haunted mansion i don't know of any other

attraction that has as thorough website as doom buggies.com like this in meticulously researched fan site and i read the six-part history i started to read the and there were there were all these offshoot articles from that six part hit like i still have six tabs open on my ipad that i just didn't get around to save it a year yeah you got plenty of time i i can always go backwards. Unlike the Haunted Mansion itself, our doom buggies can go backwards and forwards again. Yeah. So, well, if we're going chronologically, like then the man in charge of the ride eventually put in charge of the whole project was a guy named Ken Anderson. And he was like the one who's making these early sketches, trying to come up with the concepts. And he was I associated him offhand making these early sketches, trying to come up with the concepts. And he was, I associated him offhand with, I want to say Sleeping Beauty.

But he wrote a lot of the animated. He's like the screenwriter of the Winnie the Pooh shorts, the original ones, among many other. I couldn't even begin to say the whole list. A lot of former animation department guys working on this. Yeah. The other name, and I forgot about this. This is how much I've read about this now. The other name that I saw pop up with Ken Anderson's,

Ken Anderson's was Harper Goff in the early days, who went on to design the Glamour Trams, Universal's first tour trams. Oh, really? He was the art director on that. And then he was also the art director of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Oh, right. Okay. Yeah.

So he was involved very, very early on in this cast of thousands that worked on the Haunted Mansion. Was he part of one of those other, like, either King's Island or Astroworld, you know, offhand? Ooh. I would believe that. Because, yeah, a lot of people did go work for other places. Yeah. I wonder if that... He might be people did go work for other places. Yeah. I wonder if that. Not a way.

Yeah. There really should be like an IMDB for everyone's theme park work. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that would be the greatest. I mean. I spend a lot of time on Discogs.com looking up session musicians. And that's my. I want these.

I want these things to be more easily cataloged. But it all gets so fuzzy. Like people don't get the you know the way when we found out tony baxter kind of like helped originate soren a little bit like you never you have you have no idea or raleigh trump making marvel mcfay and berry tales right right uh i yeah i we're gonna need that because i i very much want to do an article about six flags power plant in baltimore absolutely which i have been to that building it it eventually Because I very much want to do an article about Six Flags Power Plant in Baltimore. Oh, absolutely.

Which I have been to that building. It eventually became an ESPN zone, a Hard Rock Cafe, and a massive Barnes & Noble. But it was once, like Disney Quest, an indoor amusement park, but they didn't want to call it an amusement park. Right. Because they'd had grand plans for rides. And what ended up happening was that they didn't want to call it an amusement park. Right, because they'd had grand plans for rides, and what ended up happening was that they didn't make any rides. It was just shows. And walkthroughs and such.

But all these Imagineers, it's all walkthroughs. Which Walt became very against, the Haunted Mansion being, and rightfully so. But yeah, I'm 100% on Six Flags Power Plant. That's a really fascinating, bizarre failure. It was only open a couple of years, right? Yeah, it did not last very long. And then, yeah, the next generation, yeah, the restaurants and the bookstore was one of the revitalization. That whole area of the Baltimore Inner Harbor, it has the giant Baltimore Aquarium on one side, the Science Center on the other.

It's just like a ton of tiny malls. Okay. That aren't connected, but there's just like a ton of tiny malls okay that aren't connected but there's just like four malls i see and obviously the harbor keeper will be joining us for an adventure step-by-step adventure through the yeah uh to give ken anderson is his due here i'm looking at his imdb he has story credit on cinderella on uh winnie the pooh and the honey tree the jungle book aristocats uh and then he's just every like many different roles on many different and also like storyboards and like all the art is him that's so crazy like so many people are writing the writing the scripts or writing the

songs and also doing the concept art like the multi-talent nature of these imagineers is uh mind-blowing yeah like i think it's in this the haunted mansion book where exitensio like they what was like you're gonna write the script for pirates and he's like i've never written a script before in my life and then it was like but then i figured it out like and walt just told you to do something and then these guys were like talented enough to figure it out. Pretty crazy. Yeah. Really cool. I am so excited to tell you about a lovely meal kit delivery service that I'm obsessed with. It's called HelloFresh. HelloFresh shops, plans, and delivers step-by-step recipes and pre-measured ingredients so you can cook, eat, and enjoy.

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HelloFresh. um so well so ken anderson uh yeah he drew the initial the concept art for what became the creepy old house and it was i didn't know that it was so specifically a specific house yes baltimore to bring it back the shipley leidecker house um and if you look at photos side by side it absolutely is very much like the haunted mansion it was destroyed i think not long after the real the haunted mansion opened um but yeah there essentially was a real haunted mansion and he also based it a lot on the winchester mystery house which is an attraction in oh is it santa cruz where is the or San Jose where I think San Jose San Jose

yeah that was one that Walt really got I mean that I think made him think like it should be a walk through like the Winchester Mystery House or San Simeon I saw a quote mentioned a lot I don't know about San Simeon that's the Hearst Castle oh okay

and then the Winchester was the Winimeon. That's the Hearst Castle. Oh, okay, okay. And then the Winchester was the Winchester gun. Like, that's the family that created the gun. Now, of course, filled with doors and open to walls and stairs that go nowhere. The Winchester widow thought the house was haunted by everyone who had been killed by a winchester gun and she was very much into the occult wow yeah that sounds like a good ride at least a good maze now that i'm a big haunt fan i feel like i could make up a good winchester maze the house that already exists but i mine would be different it would be more theatrical i could

really you know they're not gonna let me do everything I want to do in the actual house. I have to think they must do a whole thing, right? The Winchester. They're smart. Look that up. Of course, there was that movie with Alan Mirren not too long ago playing the widow. Right. What was that called?

I think it was just called Winchester. Is there a point where the people who are there, do you see ghosts who died from a bullet from a Winchester gun? And then they say, well, I'm upset that I died, but, you know, price of freedom. Yeah. On the other hand, I cannot question the quality of the workmanship and the fair pricing of the Winchester munitions. Never had a problem. Never stoppage. Didn't have to polish it very often.

Yeah. No misfires. No clogs. No complaints there. Complain about the death, but not on the mechanics. When I was shot with it, I was also holding a Winchester rifle. They have tours of the estate, daily tours, but then they also have what's called

the Halloween Candlelight Tour. But I'm trying to figure out if there's teenagers that'll scare you, too. Oh, I don't think if you're holding candle. Did this come up before? My family took the Candle Lantern Tour of Plymouth, Massachusetts. Plymouth is filled with ghost stories up before where i took the my family took the candle lantern tour of plymouth massachusetts plymouth is filled with ghost stories and hauntings and stuff because it's so old and

uh in the early days of plymouth people were very big fans of dying all the time from diseases and uh lack of medicine and food and such So there's a lot of spooky hauntings and goings on. There were a ton of more ghosts per capita in the 1600s than these days. Yes, absolutely. And people didn't have television or movies to entertain themselves. So even if there wasn't ghosts, people would just be like, ah, there's a ghost over there. We got to kill the time until we go to sleep.

Possibly forever. We may never wake up from that sleep. We don't have medicine. You paint a glorious picture of the of the era i hear salem uh though leans even hard much harder into it plymouth leans into the founding of the country more and salem i think leans into the spooky the witch trials and the black cats and everything. Understandably. Gotcha. Yeah. So, Ken Anderson designs this exterior. Walt says, as you said, I don't want a decrepit old mansion ruining the skyline of my beautiful park.

So, we end up with... Wait, is this Walt's line or is it somebody's response to him? We'll take care of the outside and let the ghosts take care of the inside. I think that was one of those ones often attributed to Walt. To Walt. Okay, okay. Who, in terms of the other thing, in terms of the, like, he died before this ever opened.

Yeah. Walt died before this ever opened and was to his death, was like, oh, there's got to be a walkthrough. Oh, had they not made the switch yet? I don't think they made the switch until after his death. Maybe right. Maybe right at the end, because the World's Fair kind of kickstarted that. But we're getting I'm getting at myself.

Sure, sure. Yeah. So they but they at least have the idea that you're going to enter this big themed experience through a mansion facade. But they had to settle on what the story of this was. And Ken Anderson came up with a couple of stories. And I imagine you guys came across these. The most fleshed out of which seems to be the story of Captain Bartholomew Gore, who was an old sea captain who murdered his wife. This is so great like we always talk about

how we want to see that batman 5 like a joel schumacher like batman triumphant like that with the howard stern scarecrow howard stern scarecrow like jack nicholson back whatever like you imagine this when i'm looking at the legend of captain gore i love this i imagine in the same way of like god what would this have been like sure and why not do it in some regard now why not do this as a like disney's getting into the the void thing and there's the horror void nicodemus what if now we had the tale of catherine captain bartholomew i was thinking that disney does you know the mickey not so scary stuff for halloween but why not throw some mazes because again i'm a big haunt why not throw some mazes? Cause again,

I'm a big haunt fan. Now throw some mazes in California adventure and make captain Gore. Cause that's essentially what they're saying with when the mansion was going to be a walkthrough, they're talking about haunts. They're talking about what now universal and not just do for a month and a half or two and a half months. Yeah.

So like you could do literally every one of ken anderson's ideas in different haunts and people will lose their minds you go oh well it's an old disney thing that didn't get made and even if you never heard of it you go that's amazing and it would sell out and they would make a shitload of money this is like lost demo like weird fragments of shakespeare plays that didn't get made or yeah like it's these alternate what could have been i think it's that's a genuine money idea absolutely yeah it's a great idea and i'll i'll go one step further and give it a modern long naming style uh like some modern rides uh the legend of captain gore colon another haunted mansion. Ooh, yeah. Oh, sure.

You get the term in there. You get the title in there. There doesn't have to be the single haunted mansion. That's really cool. Just call it the haunted mansions. Yeah. Haunted mansions. That's good.

And already we're in there. In case you've only been to the U.S. ones, Phantom Manor is totally different. Mystic Manor is totally different, but they're in similar in spirit. It's a there's a similar thing going on with Tower of Terror where some of those have different stories. And yeah, why not? Like the idea of this being more of a franchise and sure. Tales of more crusty old murderers that will tell the real Robert Durst story. Some of them can be based on fact.

Like Law and Order, some of the automatic mentions are factual. Instead of coming back, hurry back, hurry back, the little ghost at the end goes, okay, bye-bye. There should be one based on that Chicago guy that you love, the killer. Oh, H.H. Holmes?

Oh, yeah, H.H. Holmes. Castle House. Regional haunted... uh what the chicago guy that you love the killer oh hh homes oh yeah at hh homes uh castle house regional haunted well we hey once again you can go check out our episode about disney quest right now but that was an attempt to do regional right little disney theme parks this is the idea you do like pop-up haunted mansions in different cities maybe based on stories from the cities you go to galveston and you build the Durst mansion on a mansion. You go to Chicago. Where was the H.H. Holmes story? Yeah, Chicago during the World's Fair.

We're bringing back the Disney Quest idea, but with your favorite local murderer. Making a murderer in Baltimore. There's a lot to do in Baltimore. We're going to take over that harbor. These are great murderer. Yeah. Making a murderer in Baltimore. There's a lot to do in Baltimore. We're going to take over that harbor. These are great ideas. Yeah. Also, like, looking through all this art, like, Star Wars is a thing that it's been mined so thoroughly for nerds and fans of things. Like, every single alien in the background of a scene has been named.

And there are figures. And there are comics about that character and then there are full like like there's toys based on the concept art of characters now to the this thing has been mined so thoroughly and disney hasn't even they don't even know what they're sitting on as far as i'm concerned like it, with something this popular, all this art and all this crazy stuff, there's at least something to do with it. And was this, again, so many different attempts, variations. So Captain Gore,

the story there was that he was about to be married and he told his wife, don't go in the attic. And she went in the attic and she found out his secret which was that he in his in another you know in the past he was a murderous pirate he was black bart he was black bart yeah i've seen black beard is it black beard i see black bart oh he's black bart he's black bart another famous pirate right black beard the most

famous pirate perhaps not at this point captain, the most famous pirate, perhaps? Not at this point, Captain Jack. I think so. There was probably a Black Bart. But Black Bart was, I think, also a famous pirate as well. Okay. Which, I mean, I guess it seems, I mean, this is before, wait, this is, yeah, this is in the 50s, so they didn't have pirates open yet.

So, although I think that's kind of a cool thing to tie the two attractions together. It seemed like, well, that's, yeah, that's that Mark davis connecting those two yeah um but yeah so he was black he has a pirate secret and instead of letting the secret get out he throws his soon-to-be wife down a well which here's a thing i came across this blew my mind and i'm gonna break a rule here because this was so crazy to me figuring this out when you leave the attic you turn around and you go downhill backwards to get to the graveyard and i read one i only came across this i forget where that you that is a simulation of the bride being thrown out the window what by captain but that was a thing that is really like a holdover i never read that before i don't know if it's true but now i could not get it out of my

head that that is why you go down backwards do you think maybe it's just sort of a holdover from a design because like you're going backwards into the party but maybe you're dead now is that the idea is that the transition to you being dead potentially because we're dead like yeah you you're dead at the end of the haunted mansion like is that because a ghost follows you home right yeah you're right maybe you aren't so then you have to come back and bring your death certificate right so then you're not so then it can't be that but it's a simulate it's like you know maybe that maybe the idea is come back when you're dead yeah but i this i think that's an interesting example whether it's a simulate it's like you know maybe that maybe the idea is come back when you're dead

yeah but i this i think that's an interesting example whether it's true or not there's so many little things that in some way through all of these creators involved uh stayed in the haunted mansion there's so many little bits in the soup fragments yeah exactly there's early uh early iterations where there's a character named madam x and that became madam leota down the road or like yeah there's all kinds of where this this didn't get fully fleshed out but it's acknowledged in this photo on the wall so like all of this the many years of development by the way in everything we're discussing as you said mike we're still in the 50s rides not open to 69 there's so much this thing plugged along at the slowest pace possible it's crazy like i mean

movies still sometimes take this long to make and i maybe not this long but there's like this is like reminds me of hearing those nightmare stories of movies that were in development hell for 20 years like walter middy like walter but it all came out right or uh this is about to come out i can't believe this i gave to this indiegogo uh four years ago and i'm finally getting the reward orson welles's final film the other side of the wind comes out on november 2nd and it sat unfinished for decades and they finally got all the footage together and got the rights cleared away that's farther along, though. That got farther along than what I'm saying.

Oh, yeah, that's true. Because there'll be movies and then there'll be like 25 writers or like 10 story credits, 10 screenwriters. Yeah. And then like, which is what happened to this, what you're saying, like so many different people. Traded hands? I don't think people were fired off of it, but I think people like disney and weren't part of it or other people got put in charge it almost is a similar to a big tortured blockbuster right but yeah that way ended up working out very few of those movies end up coming out as good as the heart of man oh yeah yeah really yeah it's the rare one for sure

yeah so yeah look at in this book the art is really cool like there's a ghost chasing a woman around uh and then it was like big hairy hands or something yeah and then there was like it was it's interesting because it was a walkthrough but there's there was a big conveyor i don't know what you would even call it like a big platform that would lower into the ground instead of taking you upstairs oh um. It looks dangerous, actually, to me, too, though, because, like, the way that the elevator works in the Haunted Mansion is very safe, I feel like, but this was just, like, a thing in the ground

would just lower. Oh. And I feel like somebody was definitely going to, like, hit their head on the side or... Yeah, if you weren't, like, evenly on that thing. Yeah, yeah. Right, or somebody's hand... A kid would get caught in it and... Yeah something i didn't worry about that they would have figured

it out um well clearly the walkthrough element had to change and that was kind of a component of why in these early versions walt was not totally satisfied and there were a lot of like it seems like in the early versions they'd like rig up these ideas of an effect, but they would sort of take two minutes to play out. It sounds almost akin to, like, what they do now in the Harry Potter windows, the little, like, things you can activate with a wand. But you'd have to, like, stop and look at it. And I think Walt needed something that could continuously be getting people in and out. Were you talking specifically, there's this sea captain effect that they had oh yeah yeah what was the deal with this like you're saying it took two minutes to play out like so this old sea captain they had like mocked up or

figured out a version of it would like appear at a certain point in the ride and then he would just turn into water and people were and like it's described as like the imagineers were like oh my god like it was amazing effect but it took so long to set up and do that it was scrapped it's not repeatable it's not just run constantly right so 12 hours at a time because it does seem like over and over again they are worried about like ride capacity which is funny because it doesn't seem like they were worried about that for star wars land yeah i don't know how that's gonna work out because they got rid of the ride that would have eight people which was that bantha people mover but like it does seem like they're very concerned with like there's gonna be a lot of people we got to move them in and out so even in a cool effect like this

we can't do it which sucks because it sounds cool and i don't even know if there's a version of it anywhere in in a theme park well um one thing I want to bring up that I kept seeing referenced, and I think the timing is kind of crazy on this. So inspirations, you know, we talked about the Winchester Mystery House. Architecturally, there's a bunch of houses that kind of inspired it. But yeah, that Baltimore one, especially with the columns and the iron grating all the way around the outside patio yeah um another thing that i saw referenced uh that that inspired it was the uh 60s horror movie

the haunting which was remade in the 90s and remade just recently as the netflix original series the haunting on hill house is that all the same thing? Yeah, or The Haunting of Hill House. It's based on a book which is supposedly like one of the scariest books, like horror books ever written. I mean, just look at, so here's a haunted mansion. This is an ad for the Disney World one. And this is the poster for The Haunting. Oh, wow. Pretty similar.

Pretty close. Sure. And there were specific gags, to use kind of an off word, but that were kind of borrowed from The Haunting. Yeah. It was the movie in 63. Yeah. Featuring Russ Tamblyn. Russ Tamblyn was the name I read.

There was like four main characters. Huh. That's the name of the actor or the character? The actor. The actor. And related to Tamblyn's father, I think. Really? Yeah. Yeah. I feel the name of the actor or the character? The actor. The actor. Amber Tamplin's father I think? Really? Yeah. Yeah, I feel like I've heard that name before. Huh.

Interesting. So, but the like especially the door sequence, like the there's like the third or fourth thing in the ride where there's like doors kind of pounding and one seems like it's breathing or they're all and the knockers are going of their own accord. seems like all that was very haunting influenced

yeah i think that's right um although not to be confused with the house on haunted hill a very fun campy horror movie where uh vincent price lures people to spend the night uh in a house and uh if they can do it and survive they will get a large amount of money and everyone is given a little coffin when they get their little handheld coffin they open the coffin and there's a gun inside and the house used in that is the hollyhock house in uh barnesdale art park right in the los ales neighborhood of Los Angeles. Is this the somebody had posed the question to me, where does the trope of spending the night in the haunted house to get some reward come from? And I wonder if it's from that movie.

I think in popular modern pop culture, I would say, yes, that is the thing that is parodied a lot. Is there probably an example of it in gothic horror? Yeah, sure. I don't know sure i don't know i don't have time for that stuff i can't read i read very slow and there's a lot of those books and it's hard to tell them apart and is there does this happen in real life does it can anyone listening hook us up with oh an old man who will challenge us to spend the night in a haunted house

which is essentially the plot of the eddie murphy movie also oh yeah something like that it's similar to that i think i i have not seen the whole thing i yeah if you know an old character actor who's willing to take in a few boys to see a challenge to them uh yeah please let us know or if you are that old character actor uh i was disappointed because i watched some of that netflix show and i thought it was a new version of the vincent price actor uh i was disappointed because we watched some of that netflix show and i thought it was a new version of the vincent price thing oh i was like here we go what new old character actor do they have to invite oh what it's a family it's a family drama oh no but the house on haunted hill and the haunting uh were both remade in the 90s too.

I think one of them has Jon Stewart in it. I could be wrong about that. Or somebody, or like Chris Kattan is in one of these. Yeah, there's something like that. Jon Stewart's in The Faculty. Maybe I'm thinking of The Faculty. Yeah, but Kattan could be right. Also, obviously, we'll cover the Jon Stewart filmography, beat by beat

in The Patriot for no reason. Why not? Big Daddy. Death. Death to Smoochie. Oh boy. What a lineup. So where are we?

Well, I mean, we're still poking around. Ken Anderson. Yeah. Oh my God. We're still poking around these walkthroughs. And this was one of the things that delayed the development of this route what was committed to doing it but just didn't like some of these stories found some of the stories too dark uh oh also ken anderson in his multiple propositions proposed a thing that would have

culminated in the headless horseman from right uh they're sleepy what do you it's i mean it's adventures of ichabod and the adventures of yeah ichabod i forgot what you call just the ichabod part but yeah so there would have been a free standing disney character in it but walt wasn't totally happy with everything but they still i'm not sure the mechanics of how this worked out but they built the house they were committed enough to this is going to work out and they had the plan of it'll be a small house that you enter with elevators that take you down and below the berm and that there's a bigger show building behind the train tracks which is how it works at disneyland that's part of what's happened they have to get as with pirates they got to get you behind the the train tracks and it's in this big like it's for you you just look

at those on on google earth or whatever like those show buildings are so weird and boring oh yeah clunky industrial warehouses which i forget like if i'm really into it like if i'm in a great mood at the park having fun like oh yeah i'm excited to go on the haunted mansion i forget like oh yeah this all has to exist in space somewhere in physical space you kind of you, you get sucked in the illusion, especially as a kid, that you're in the house. The house, yeah. And that it's all happening in the, but that house is so small.

Similar to down the road, the Indiana Jones adventure, where you enter the temple, but the temple is the smallest thing ever. Yeah, a quarter mile away. And you gotta go into a massive, yeah, yeah. Well, it was like when I was on Pirates pirates and i was with the guide in april and he was like you know we're not going underground that's just sea level is the whole ride the train is elevated for pirates yeah everything everything that when you load and everything it's it's elevated and the restaurant is all of new orleans square is

built up but always just your brain is like well we're going underground that's where the pirates live we're going but it's like that's all just built up it's like so you're going to ground level you're just growing yeah ground level and everything else is just because it makes sense when you think about how like everything is like built up huh yeah yeah okay so you're not actually yeah you're not going into a town but anyway that those basics were established and this until i started doing research for this, I didn't realize, I knew that there was a delay between the building getting built and the ride opening. But I didn't know it was, that that building was there in 63 and the ride was not open until 69.

Until 69. And for a good amount of time, it was this mansion that was just unlabeled with no reference to what it was. Which ended up making like free what we would now call viral marketing because then people just started making up their own stories or urban legends and declaring that it's too scary or someone died in there or there's actual like oh they can't open it yet because they got to make it less scary there was a ride that was to not unlike alien encounter later all of these like

what's happening in there yeah um i think that's so crazy and it was just up there for for six years partially because story problems partially because walt without a lot of heads up got pulled into this 64 world's fair thing where he built all these attractions in New York, Small World, Carousel of Progress, the Primeval World thing. So a lot of people got pulled off and the place just sat vacant. Yeah, and I feel like I saw something. Were they giving out flyers for it in 61? Wow.

Like CN63 or CN66? Yeah, really. They really thought, like this thing got delayed so much but they were yeah they like marketing people are like well if past rides are any indication it will take this long to build it and i guess at the time the biggest expansion had been matterhorn monorail subs came in at the end of the 50s yeah it's it's i'm trying to imagine like a modern equivalent of this like if the temple in indiana jones just was there for and you could like see it very clearly for five years.

They did it for a year. And I remember walking around and they did open just that little zone. Right. And that was the coolest. And it did make you wonder what the hell's going on. It was like a teaser trailer. Did you not know it was Indiana Jones? No, they they told you that right but there was no indication maybe there's one piece of concept art of what the ride was going to be but it sure let you spin your

wheels and go what is what the hell is this thing these aren't perfect one-to-one comparisons but it would be like say releasing concept uh art for a couple possible hotels in a parking garage and never fucking building them i mean it's not it's certainly a a cruel tease but it's not quite one to one it would be if they just built if they built the outs the they built like part of the hotel no this doesn't work it'd be it well if they if they built the haunted mansion and then demolished it and and put back in the sandwich restaurant the holiday world is back for a limited time depending on how these local elections go this is totally out of order but i have to say it before i forget there was in and i don't remember what era this was it there was a plan at

a certain point for a restaurant yeah yeah which is crazy to me yeah they did like blue bayou and then they were gonna do a haunted mansion restaurant and that obviously got cut but so crazy so yes there was a haunted mansion sandwich shop at least possible that seems like a good spot to bring in the next couple of people who worked on this right yeah sure yeah yeah yale greasy and raleigh crump yeah sure um so yeah raleigh crump has come up before probably pretty well we just mentioned uh marvel mcfay but probably mainly associated with the the sort of kooky art style and the tower that was outside of small world in the in the world's fair forget all this all the rally crown power of the four winds a lot of another animation

guy right another guy pulled over from animation like all of these all of these guys did something backgrounds or or character design something for animation yeah uh but the his his thing was that there was like there was talk of some kind of like pre-show which potentially was a restaurant the way the blue bayou gets you into the world of pirates and then when that got cut there was this other idea the museum of the weird and i i have to admit i'm not the biggest museum of the weird experts so somebody feel free to take it from here but it was kind of this and like again another facet of developing this ride that raleigh crump had collected all of this all of these oddities and designed all this weird stuff like a clock with a face and a gypsy cart and it was like how do we fit all this

in and walt figured out this potential pre-show area before your walkthrough experience began yeah I mean I haven't uh Diven that's not the right word dove in dove into the uh Museum of the Weird yet but Raleigh Crump there was a article about him in a newspaper like what a month ago and like he very much is like he's like if this name means anything to you the wavy gravy kind of he's like a very hipp, kooky kind of guy who likes. He kept talking in that article about like, we got to make Disneyland weird again. Like he's very much up on like, like a lot of like psychedelic stuff. Oh, yeah.

Concept art is very much like minimal and stylized. Yeah. I mean, it kind of there's at least the color wise. There's a Jack Kirby vibe. I kind of almost get from it around the same time um and he he seems like there's he is such a specific type and i don't know that there's any other imagineers i've read about that are so specifically like i don't know that he got high a lot but like a sit in marty croft aesthetic almost coming from like another Imagineer more than Rolly Crump. Yeah, he well, he wrote a book called I think it's called It's Kind of a Funny Story.

There was just a gallery show exhibiting his work, I think, here in California. I went to God, what was it called? I think it just closed. There used to be a store a collectible store here in burbank where i've bought disney merchandise before but they did a museum of the weird inspired art show a few years ago so um and and they and so as people interpretation of of like his models or art from what it could have. Yeah, of like the chair with a face in it or the candle wax man. The candle wax man,

the man made of candle wax, is very unnerving to me. Sure. That picture and the cat going around. Yeah. Right, right. It's weird. It's kooky.

It is weird stuff. It's like surrealist. I assume he would like Pee Wee's Playhouse. That's in my head what Raleigh Crumper would like peewee's playhouse that's what in my head yeah that's talking furniture and and this stuff get has gotten revit there was talk of a museum of the weird movie at some point in the 2000s probably didn't get that far along eventually made yeah they're sitting into a comic book called seekers of the weird by marvel is in disney's like theme park uh disney kingdom's line with theunted Mansion comic and the Big Thunder comic. They're sitting out and just making another haunted maze, the Museum of the Weird, and everyone glues their minds and pay them $100 extra on top of the Disney admission to go to it.

This is all really smart. The fact that there's like these subcultures and it also reminds me of weird, like, you know, the like the the bands that the guy you like played with before it became the, you know, Elvis Costello hung out with Brinsley Schwartz and these weird like proto the Corey men. And that's what all these things feel like to me. I just started listening to Brinsley Brinsley Schwartz the other day. That's Brinsley Schwartz. Good. Very good. Nick Lowe. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's great. He writes a great song it's a good band you should listen to it yeah

you got your rock pile uh stemming off before rock pile right yeah no that was way later but i yeah that's what this feels like to me weird little like you know that didn't become the main thing but uh uh you know it was part of the dna also, and I think it might be true that the first notion of a seance room came out of the Museum of the Weird. So another thing that was, and eventually, if they hadn't done this development, it might not have been in the Haunted Mansion.

Yeah, in the book, there's like a very colorful version of a seance room. And it looks more like, I want to say gypsy, but that's probably like a very lame way to describe it. But it's very colorful.

It doesn't seem like spooky at all, but it seems like a cool place. Like it seems more like what I've seen from Mystic Manor than Haunted Mansion. Oh, sure. And that the drawing of the cart, forget what exactly the term for that cart, but that there is a cart like that outside of the disney disney world haunted mansion in florida oh gotcha kind of a little you know a little steps removed because you know all of these ideas changed there's a little cart in disneyland and there's a little cart but the florida one is more colorful like that yeah you're looking at this stuff it all reminds me of like

it's his style is like so individual so individualistic and it's land and clearly done in the 60s and so bold and and it reminds me of like the point like the the harry nelson scored uh uh animated feature or like uh or like what's that it's it's the french movie um is it fantastic it's not fantastic voyage what's the like weirdo psychedelic um oh it's been i i apologize for blinking on this name but it like his stuff just like feels like cool crazy counter or lord or more obvious reference yellow submarine like uh yeah definitely fits in that yeah yellow submarine is a good is a good example of something where like i bet that's his completely his aesthetic and the art doesn't it look looks very similar to it

and the way that years later you end that they that everywhere that once a year you get this wonderful mashup of the what became the haunted mansion aesthetic and the tim burton aesthetic it would be so cool to like walk around raleigh crump world oh yeah specifically uh because within just yeah there's so much character and specific choices within his his art and yeah they gotta start oh i'm upset i know there's an idea we just had right now yeah i hope someone somewhere is thinking about doing these these spinoffs the company in general does not know what they've got. They know this stuff makes a lot of money

and it's currently like maybe one of their more consistent businesses. But I don't think they have any clue really what they're sitting on as far as material that's already there. That's what a thing that impressed me. It's talking to, and you can hear this on the season past podcast episode about not scary farm but talking to their merchandise guy down there and he was just like anytime we were to bring up an old knots thing that we don't even i mean we're not the most knowledgeable about knots he's like yeah we're working on that yeah we're working on some pins

for that or we're working on this or that or stuff like they are like mining their full 100 year history yeah and i mean they obviously probably have less um less stuff but they still have a ton of stuff because it's been around for so long and disney does some version of it but they still only do the very bare minimum like i would think that if they sold like they're like we're recording this a couple days before what's going to come out and this Hatbox Ghost Tiki mug sold out which I went down to try to get it and I was too late I was hours late and it's just shattered me and I've been depressed

about it for a few days but like stuff like just merchandise stuff of all this old design or that just like a little toy of this cart and be like well it's the original roly crump haunted mansion cart from the promo or people lose their mind people go nuts like people would love that shit and it's not just us there are thousands as you can see the people

lined up for the hat i know hatbox ghost is a little mainstream now but he's not that mainstream right really only became he only got put on the ride a few years ago and it didn't it grew out of people keeping this legend yes alive and being like there was a much it was a again in a music way it was like a little like cult audience that uh that grew and grew and now can sell out a stadium the story of the hat half box ghost. Again, probably its own episode. I think it might be, yeah. I don't know where it should be in this. Well, here, we're talking about artists and their influence on this ride,

and maybe now we can start getting into the primary people who the Haunted Mansion story comes from. Unless you want to go backwards or something? Well, I think we've got to talk about Yale Grac gracie before who oh sure yeah so yale gracie uh was the guy who was tasked with you know raleigh crump's doing all these designs uh and ken anderson did plenty of design work and a lot of the early storyline development i think went to ken came from ken but yale gracie was the one who came up with all he was tasked with the illusions how do you make it look like there's ghosts in this damn building

ah and oh yeah so uh and him and crump uh uh happened upon the uh old theater technique of pepper's ghost okay oh they heard of the you credit them for bringing that into the ride? Yes. Yeah. I mean, it goes back to the 1800s and it's where you have an object or a person

like out of view of people, but there is a piece of glass. So we're in modern times plexiglass. And the way it reflects light

off of it, it makes the object looks transparent to the audience there's probably if you saw a spooky play in the 1800s and you saw pepper's ghost thing i bet you lost your fucking mind probably like i met yeah yeah it's just people going like we still don't have medicine yet but we can do this we die less but like look at that there's a ghost you can see through that thing you can see how does that work how possibly yeah how many funds to this there's uh less from keeping my child alive how many church outings do i have to go to to balance out the

seeing this creation i've been bedeviled i yeah and then there's there's a story i think this was all in this haunted mansion book about that crump and gracie just got to have this room of madness where they were just experimenting with different illusions some of which ended up in the ride some of which didn't and that there and there was a story in there about how they uh they were asked to turn the light on keep the light on at the end of the day because the janitors were getting spooked yeah janitors did not want to walk in there and have to clean the object clean the office and find all of this crazy stuff and they were like oh sure we'll leave the light on but they also rigged up that when a motion sensor when you entered the room that a black light would would

turn on and now all of the illusions would be operational and lit in the scariest way possible and they came back in the next day and all of the effects were running and there was a broom dropped on the ground so clearly the janitors fled in horror and said you're gonna have to clean your own office from now on we're not doing it that is one of the fun urban legends associated with with the the haunted mansion i i i saw other stuff in there too that Raleigh said he had drawn the original stretching portraits and that Mark Davis said, I'm going to redraw these. Oh, weird. Or that he drew the original wallpaper design, which that I kind of believe more. With all the eyes.

Yes, the purple wallpaper with black. Gotcha. Wow. Which is incredibly popular on merchandise now. Yeah, for sure. Lots of apocryphal stuff around the mansion. Reading about a lot of Imagineering stuff, it doesn't sound fun, but

reading that in the book, that sounded fun to me. That's funny. I'm just trying to figure out effects. It just seemed like, yeah, oftentimes it seems like, oh my god, how are we going to do this? Especially in the early days. It seems like these guys were cut loose to just try stuff and this is going a little out of order but i might as well say it you guys might have come across come across this uh the the busts that follow you that uh that as you move the

perspective changes and they're always staring at you yes still spooks me yeah absolutely and i here's a here's a bigger thing about the haunted mansion this will apply to the episodes we do in the next five years all of them that they're i'm so impressed that there are so many effects in this ride that i didn't really know offhand. And I think they've done a good job of keeping some of this stuff, if not totally secret, then like it's still, you've got to wrap your head around how do they, literally how do they do that? And the bus is one of them, and feel free to skip a minute ahead

if you don't want to hear how they do it. You're talking about the bus in the line or at the end? Yeah, before you board yes you that uh that is not a regular bust it is a little window box and you are seeing into your late it's like a cut open uh bust essentially and you're seeing into the inside of it and it's lit in such a way that it looks like the front of a of a bust but in fact it's the hollow inside of one and it's and uh so it's just like this optical illusion thing and gracie and crump stumbled upon this because they were also working on the lincoln animatronic and there was a bust of lincoln's head that was like open at the back and they passed by it and it was like hey

look at that doesn't it look like lincoln's looking at you like here go back and forth and lincoln followed the whole way wow yeah so that's a hollowed out it's not a real bust it's a hollowed out yeah reverse of a butt that's crazy you're looking into a like a sculpture of a face that's interesting. And it was originally Lincoln. Because Lincoln was just lying around. I can kind of see it now in my head. Because I always have kind of thought that there was a dimension.

I always kind of could tell it felt like it was maybe an inverse. But that's very interesting. There's something that bugs you. And it doesn't feel like tangible. Sorry. It doesn't feel tangible. It feels like a like. But like is it some weird proto hologram? But no, in fact, there's no, which again, analog effects.

So this is all pre-dig but that all of the animatronics are run by this gigantic server room that's all punch cards and everything to pull this right off in 69 it's so not that computers like help make a ride easy now every all the biggest best rides in the world the most complicated things to wrap your head around ever the processing power of the falcon ride it's going to be mind-numbing but like that it's just computer rooms it's just big crazy banks of how did they do this thing it's so it is why it's quite and a bunch of like throwing a bunch of like animators and story guys and then not some of these people engineering backgrounds too but like just yeah hey figure this out yeah we're moving you we're moving you off of cinderella and on to figuring out how to make ghosts come alive yeah which it seems like there was a lot

of tinkerers too like crump was like a tinkerer and and gracie and like the way they talked about yale gracie is like he would just be in his all and he would just come up with stuff and he just have stuff sitting around on the shelf and even if it wasn't used on a ride or a movie they're like we can actually use that on a different ride or movie uh oh gotcha right and the other thing to think about that all these guys doing this like this is a very funny picture of yale great this and probably you're to talk about the picture? There are so many good pictures of Yale Gracie with ghosts. With ghosts. It is a treasure trove.

This is a very similar picture to what we'll post these. You just Google image Yale Gracie ghosts. This picture of him pouring champagne or booze or something into a glass of one of the ghosts is fantastic. I like this one. He just looks like somebody's cranky grandpa or dad all these guys too like a pipe firmly in his mouth he's the pipe guy yeah because there's a yeah there's a video you can watch also from a special called disneyland showtime and kurt russell narrates kind of what we've been describing, like these offices. And who knows if they were set up for the cameras or not.

But like, you know, here's a workshop, your ideal image of what Imagineering could be, where there's just ghosts everywhere. And yeah, you watch a guy with a pipe go and like make an adjustment. And he's smoking a pipe while working on the. So that's real. He just was this short-sleeved workman guy with a pipe. The only he's got, even the pictures of Raleighump uh in the miniature of the tower of the four wind he's like in a short sleeve like sure looks like on you know johnny all-american yeah well they're all very i mean this is the same exact time as you know the moon the moon landing in apollo 13 and but yeah it looks like the it's

all a bunch of clint howards they're all yeah so even the psychedelic artwork guys look like that and that's the same thing of jack curby's and pictures of jack curby sitting at his desk working i mean like sleeves rolled up smoking a cigar right because that's what you wore to work there's a picture of roly with a yellow shirt which is i think scandalous maybe for the time oh shows what uh yeah yeah yeah kind of a handsome he's kind of a quarterback yeah yeah pretty pretty built dude yeah i mean he he's he's in some of these videos too there's one where he and walt have really kind of got this poor woman cornered or and oh that i think that is the miss tensenial of disney she was the ambassador for the that's another do we know the name of that special oh yeah it's so

great i mean i'm sure you could find it that's the one where like walt is seems a little lit i feel like i heard someone talking about this recently where he seems like a little like he's like in our spook how or so scary how and he's like and then gracie is like haunted mansion walt like he's yeah yeah and he keeps going like haunted mansion and uh oddities uh from oh yeah beyond the mind now they see ramble like that's not no that's not the name it does seem like colloquially around a lot around wed they would call them the people working on this the illusion ears because they were coming up with so many tricks and and they're called and it's wed this is all this all this is pre-becoming called Imagineering.

They keep saying Wed Illusioneers. Yeah. Illusioneer is cool. Yeah, that's not the worst alternate name for sure. I get it. Imagineers is, I guess, a better catch-all, but still. Do the Universal ones, are they Universal-ears? I think just Universal Creative.

Yeah, there's not a fun... They really should have come up with a fun name. We should borrow from an upcoming topic, the Bill and Ted show, borrow a joke from them and call the Universal Imagineers Harry Potheads. Hey, hey, don't tip the appearance of Harry Potheadhead on an upcoming spoiler yeah yeah harry pothead coming um but anyways well so more more in the parade of wonderful the wonderful short sleeve

stiff shirts yeah uh i guess but now we could probably get into mark Davis, Claude Coates, and a lot of the ride, a lot of the story of what... Now we're finally getting into what the actual... What the actual automation ended up being. We're an hour and 23 minutes into the podcast and we're finally getting... I knew it. I knew we weren't going to get in the door. But there's so much there.

Also, you know what we're not doing too much is like jokes. We're so like... There's not a lot of jokes here. This is at some topics when there's not anything to rail on. I'm worried about getting stuff wrong, too, in this episode. And I already got the pirates wrong because I Googled pirates and it popped 73 up because it's when Magic Kingdom opened. And I went, oh, it must be 73. And I'm like so worried now that we're going to get like there's going to be like haunted mansion.

Oh, what opened in 73? Pirates. Pirates in Florida. Oh, in Florida. be like haunted mansion oh whoa what opened in 73 pirates pirates in florida in florida i'm saying i already got something wrong and i started sweating because i did it because i so i'm saying like we're just like not a lot of jokes but we're going here and we're just trying to like tell talk about what's interesting but i'm worried there's gonna be a ton of modern driven episode where there's more room for error right but there's gonna be 50 haunted mansion nerds frothing at the mouth.

We haven't even talked about the Bloodmere family yet. Oh, I know. But I don't know where they show up in the timeline, honestly. I think it was a Ken Anderson alt version. That was a Ken Anderson version, yeah. Yeah. That was going to be this family who all killed each other in comical ways, and they are the ghosts singing at the end.

That sounds great, too. That should be one of but then also there's this like picture of like 11 that that image the marketing image from the haunted mansion in orlando had all of these pictures of weird family members and i think they were the blood or maybe not again there's so much yeah yeah yeah weird and let's so let's get blood mirror manner going all of them but so okay let's get into we're finally at least two years we're stepping up to the main general concept and the just to break down the real basics of how the the story ends up being told is that claude coates was kind of the we talked about him with Snow White, Snow White, Florida, his primary doing.

He was he was more he was a master of like locations and setting and mood and feel and environments. Mark Davis, more of a character guy down the road, worked on Country Bears, America Sings, Jungle Cruise. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So like he's the guy with the he's the responsible for the jokes on the jungle cruise too like in addition to characters and stuff it's his like whims he's a whimsical guy so many of these yeah yeah so many which piquet which is many of the tableaus on splash mountain now so so many of the like famous oh that little animatronic scene is is mark davis and uh so being a character person he's probably more

about personality and more about comedy and the big breakdown of this ride is where was should it be scary should it be funny and the arbiter of this at some point in time might have been walt disney himself but walt dis Disney passed away in 1966, so these Imagineers were left to fight it out on their own. And I think it's interesting because Coates and Davis did work together on Pirates.

But you never hear about the war for Pirates. But Walt was alive. Maybe Walt was helping with that. The difference is that Walt would just make a decision. He would go, here's what I want. Claude would say, I want to do this. Mark would say, I want to do this. And Walt would go, okay, we're saying like he would like the difference is that walt would just make a decision here's what i want claude would say i want to do this mark would say i want to do this and what would go okay we're doing the you pick one because mark was characters and coats was set or like yeah i mean there's that breakdown but also clearly with that there's also i think this the the horror versus comedy yeah right a Coates is pushing more for scary environments.

And we'll explain how it kind of ended up working out. And to me, it seems like Mark Davis, his attractions have a lot of character. Like Claude Coates is Tony Baxter's mentor. From what we can tell, Tony does seem to like a ride where you're the person on the ride. Maybe all of his rides don't have a ton of

animatronics. You're sort of experiencing something. Whereas Mark Davis's seem like you're going to go and watch a bunch of fun characters do something a little bit more. He's more about that's for my eye, my untrained eye. That's what I see when I look at the different rides.

There's exceptions to the rule. But there's, you know, it has a lot of personality, obviously. There's this general, if you think about the flow of Haunted Mansion and the ride that we may or may not talk specifics about. But that for a while it is a character free ride and you sort of just like get, you or you hear the ghost host but you don't uh or you see or you hear dead men tell no tales in uh in in pirates but it's so much of that that's another very long drawn out a lot is happening before you see specific characters and right they're kind of luring you into this world uh not unlike uh indie in a way also that until you whip around that corner you don't that there's this big sudden reveal of oh there's indiana jones but it's been all about

going through this tunnel and right long long long build up which is a pretty cool way to to do a ride i find it a little strange that harry potter and and the gang are in the line they do make an appearance yeah not on the ride or just in general i mean they're in the right but the like that they aren't saved for the ride i think it's kind of a when you end up in that room and they're there you're like digital peppers ghost almost yeah which is cool it's not a big complaint but it feels like a kind of like underselling. Oh, we're going to go see Harry Potter. And then he's just in the specialness of it. Yes, I see what you're saying.

I think I know the justification. I know the justification, I think, is that Hogwarts is so special that of course they're there. Like, of course, the characters would be in Hogwarts, because I would argue also that like the Harry Potter ride is great. I think that there should be a full on Hogwarts dark ride. I would argue that there should be something that really lets you explore Hogwarts even more to a degree than it. And more like stuff happening than like just it's on the way to other stuff. Yeah. stuff happening then like just it's on the way to other stuff yeah so i feel like maybe that's i you're you're right but i do get what they're thinking is of like you're in the school you

should see the students like i would like to see a full hogwarts ride where it's like the students are there and like stuff is going on and like it's a bustle like i just feel like you say harry i mean you're you're not you're i think're right. I'm just saying that's probably their justification, is that it is a working school, and all you're really seeing are a couple people in robes, and then there's a bunch of tourists. Mine was more practical, and I'd have to go back. I'd have to get maps from when I first went and now.

But I feel like when I was first there, there was a line on the map about take the castle tour and there was a separate one of the queue lines was just you could just walk through hogwarts and not get on the ride and i feel like they were trying to pitch that as like a separate like hey if you don't want to ride the ride it's a little ride is a little intense we just want to walk through you can do that i can't really tell the last times i've been there if they were pushing that because i feel like they use it for express now or they just also anyone i've lines anyone i've ever tried to warn that the ride is intense laughs at me after they get off of it it's happened like five times now

where i go that's a pretty scary ride and then like they come on there and be like what are you talking about and like this is anywhere from our friend marissa to my mom like i went with my mom and i was like it's gonna be pretty scary my mom's like it's not that scary i would only i would give the motion sickness warning like because i don't feel motion sickness on a lot i don't have that that's the one rare theme i don't have uh but i do i feel it on that that's interesting yeah i don't have that problem but yeah so we're almost going upside down like that was the thing that always struck me as would like as a kid i was scared to death of rides that went upside down this goes like 70 of the way there i was scared of the dementors yes no i especially don't like them yeah they get close to you the

dementors there's like 12 more yeah but now that again again, now that I'm a Haunt fan, maybe I'll go back and I won't be so scared of the Dementors. You also became a real big fan recently of laying it on thick. I think, to be fair, I think I've always been a fan of that. You and I both, yeah. Okay, let's keep...

I think we can get to the door. Let's try to get to the door. Well, anything more about Dave... Oh, we can't. Davison Coates is still going. Because the Peacemaker eventually arrives. Exitensio.

Uncle of Hollywood director Peter Atensio. Oh, that's right. And a guy who was around around the the church that i went to growing up and my mom knew his daughter and i ran it i got to meet him in the church parking lot one time and he drew a mickey for me and i still have that it's a it's a very treasured thing uh but so he that thought also when you talk about why pirates and on a mansion feel like two parts of a whole uh that it's that it's coatsates, it's Davis and it's Exitensio.

Exitensio wrote the script, also wrote the song and had never written songs in his life. He could like wrap his head around the fact that in both both Yo-Ho Pirates Life for me and Green Green and Ghosts, that it has to be kind of in the round. It has to be kind of in the round it has to be a right circular song it cannot be a uh you know a live and let die with all these different sections and uh uh changes of tempo it has to uh it has to be one flood it's the best example i could think of that's perfect yeah that that is opposed to like bohemian rhapsody live and let die um the you know it has to be this like that that's i think how he could wrap his head around doing a song having not done one is that like okay well i know from rides how this has to function it has to loop like uh like animatronics

so music by the music part of that by buddy baker okay yeah yeah and they were i think he like both of both of those be both baker and ntencio were surprised that they got the assignment. They were like, I think, fiddling around with an idea. And then we're like, and then Walt will give it to the Sherman brothers. But in this case, they did not. So it's actually strangely two of the most, you know, even though they did so many of the famous park songs, it was this was both. Both of these were Atencio. And and he beyond doing the song also like had to make heads or tails of all the stuff we've been talking about for an hour and a half.

All of the various show elements, the different directions that Coates and Davis wanted to go, these weird scraps of here's an idea Raleigh Crump had, here's an illusion that Gracie thought of. He had to tie it all together. And also at this point, he was stuck with the general notion of, OK, what the fans are going to expect now is that this is a retirement home for ghosts. We are backed into that because when the mansion was just sitting with no attraction inside, Walt's tasked new imaginary hire, Marty Sklar, who became eventually the head of the whole thing and worked there for decades And decades and decades one of the first things he ever Did was write this big note that was left On the gate explaining the backstory Of it the gist of which is And as Walt Disney had said in various media

This will be a place for Homeless ghosts to stay One of the first time Walt ever talked about it on record He was for the BBC and he talked about How he had sympathy for all of the ghosts in England that have nowhere to go because London got bombed during World War II. I read that, too. That was the most bizarre thing. Yeah.

What a bizarre thing to say. Can you imagine if a head of a company said that now? Referred to, yeah. And not that long after, because we now are about the same distance of time from 9-11 so like we're a place for the 9-11 ghosts to go bob eiger announcing that the 9-11 ghosts are free to come to disneyland like what they've been swirling around the skies of manhattan but now yeah that he'd have to resign i mean that's if he tweeted it yeah go away for like lame bad dirty gross jokes from 10 years ago bob eiger inviting the 9-11 ghosts he needs to be

punished for this thing we made up that i agree you know what he does well in all fairness though walt's famous last words of course were i will be ghost number a thousand change the script yeah one of those he's not one of the impressive but he's just one like the third like knocking door that's walt i used to think when i was a kid that he was one of together we shouldn't be talking about this but the end of the ride with the heads that are singing i used to think one of the heads was him i did too i think i, too. I don't know if it was. It's not Thurl, I don't think. Thurl Ravenscroft.

I don't think that's who I was mistaking for Walt, but it might have been. It's just a vibe. Those heads, you can't see it. But all those heads underneath the neck are wearing short-sleeved dress shirts with pocket protectors and somehow a full carton of cigarettes. If all those heads were smoking cigarettes, that would be the best. Oh, God. Can you imagine how exhausting that would have been on message boards? I was like, I think they should always be smoking cigarettes.

I can't believe they took out the smoking bus. Walt wanted it. Walt wanted them to smoke. All the ghosts were smoking in the graveyard and they should have been smoking forever. Smoking's okay, but drinking is not. Those people would, if there was a Taunin Mansion bar, they would shut the fuck up. Let's be honest. These anti-Disneyland drinking people.

If you get the drink and then you get, I was going to say a real tiny glass a fancy shot a hat box shaped shot glass that you put into like a margarita cadillac style and you put the little he like dumps it himself if that was possible everything's dry ice everywhere there we go

again it's crazy that that doesn't exist they were going to do that Tower of Terror bar in Florida and they didn't for some weird reason. But Mike Carlson would draw the line if they served wine. An alcoholic's drink. Yeah, well, that's an alcoholic's drink. Margarita is a fun drink. Or a colorful drink.

This, to me, one of the strangest things ever said out loud by anyone or been certainly on the podcast itself. Well, I mean, in full disclosure, we're recording this on the 20th of October, which is our one year anniversary. And I picked up a bottle of sparkling wine for us to enjoy at this episode. And Scott has been like licking his lips and salivating this whole time. So in Mike's defense. Yeah, you probably haven't heard it. Mike said to edit out beat by beat all of my smacks. And also people probably, on a lot of episodes, though, my neighbor has a window sill with a pie on it. And Jason oftentimes is licking his lips and salivating.

So I have to edit that out often as well. There's just a cherry pie cooling on a window sill. You knew what you were getting into when you moved here. And I have to oftentimes, as you're floating off the couch toward it i have to pull you back down and yeah i have an anchor around my ankle now yeah to prevent that but when you close the blinds then you can't see your neighbor who is a burlesque model in a 40s bathing suit get her no um indecent all right so uh where are we uh we're getting there we're 40 minutes into the haunted mansion and we haven't talked about i love okay well i think the divide is becoming clear i think the door is come back next year and we'll talk about you know the stuff inside

we'll talk about some of it so uh how about the so we have the war we have exitensio making peace i think like the it seems to me like how it ended up working out is that the beginning of the ride pre characters is like that's the scary zone spooky and that and it's and it's kind of keeping this this tone of okay like there's going to be there's going to be awake ghosts are going to start appearing but is that going to be okay or is that going to be terrifying and you get to live in that for a little while and then probably the leota scene starts to transition she's not funny but she's like making you comfortable with the idea we're going to start seeing ghosts.

And then the ballroom starting to get a little funnier. And then by the final, by the graveyard party. Now, oh, ghosts are fun, actually. I like ghosts. I want to. I like a ghost. Ghosts aren't scary to me. I was going to ask, where do you guys personally think the line where where does where is the brackish water

between the fresh water and the salt water where is like the delta i think it's the uh um my very my favorite thing in the ride uh is the uh the duel the two ghosts in the paintings who are facing apart from each other and then they turn and they shit i agree and that to me is where it starts that's exactly what i was going to say yes because it's like it's still kind of scary that whole room yeah that scared me as a kid i was like i like this but i'm happy i'm on the second floor like i'm happy i'm above like above them because they don't have like and i don't know this we didn't need to research this because we won't do this until 2020 2021 but. But I didn't like the feeling you get, because I think it's a little bit farther away than the graveyard ghosts,

is that those people aren't as full of life, even though they're moving. They don't have as much character to them. I don't see them as friendly. I see them as like having a party and I'm intruding upon it. Whereas when you're in the graveyard, you're enjoying, they're happy that you're there. Well, and they're part of like a very formal functional like if you went to like a royal banquet yes order to that here now is the

dancing part and now we sit at the table and we use this knife and we but the by the graveyard party all bets are off everybody's hanging everywhere there's lampshades on heads there people have broken out into different clusters there's no order right left and that's my so my my view of how this that's the story works is that yeah that you're like nervous about ghosts am i gonna like ghosts so wait they're having a fun party i actually i shouldn't have been afraid uh the whole time so then you're accustomed to like i guess i'm i guess i'm a fan of ghosts all right well very good one very good. One's going to follow you home. And it's like, well, wait on a second. I didn't agree.

Let's not go nuts here. Yeah. Uh, that's, that's my, that's, that's how I perceive the story. Uh,

and I think I, I, so I think you get this gradient from coats into, uh, into Davis in a very fun way. But as we talked about a little bit in snow white, um, you know uh coats didn't get to do his full-on hit like trapping people in a scary stressful environment

which is why when he he got his dream in florida and did the snow white ride it was super scary soup not character oriented um so somebody's just yelling in the other room goose um but that's that's like where uh you know so to tie our whole spooky month uh together yeah uh you know snow white probably doesn't happen as terrifying as it uh as it is and as a friend of the show uh pointed out recently like we said claude coates was tony baxter psyched him as a mentor figure so when it came time to do haunted mansion in paris phantom manor definitely leans more towards the scary yeah and the whimsical although there's also competing stories about that that you know the know, the French, they get scary. Tony always says they get scary.

They get funny. They don't get them together. So they have to kind of go in one direction or the other. This is, I'm sure this, excuse me, this point has been made before, but the Haunted Mansion and Pirates are structured like Wilco front man. Jeff Tweedy talks about putting a concert together. He's like he likes to start out with like maybe like a challenging, like moodier stuff. And by the end, it's a celebration. And it made a lot of sense to me when I heard him talk about what a concert structure like that.

You want to end on a very fun, triumphant note, but you start out kind of wading into something that's a little bit more like dark or challenging so it really is kind of a perfect structure for a show in general like just to use so you know you start out with ashes of american flags but then by the end you're playing monday you're playing i got you you know all your fun wilco rockers it like makes a lot of sense to me when when we're talking about like the way they transition out and then the way this stuff ends and in this case you get scary version of grim grinning ghosts into mid-step waltz version of uh of grim grinning ghosts into fun kooky uh ragtime grim grinning yes and i'm describing j's Dream, a concert that is

all Grim Grinning Ghosts, front to back, 70 minutes. And I'm gonna do you one better on that, Mike. Go for it. The Wilco Album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, a very labored creative process.

Yes, very labored, yes. Much like the Haunted Mansion, an album that, in my mind, looms very large. Also, probably did Pitchfork give that a perfect 10? The year that came out, it was the album of the year. So do we give the Haunted Mansion a perfect

10? A perfect 10, yeah. Are we the snobbier end of Pitchfork and it's just 7.8? Fine. It's pretty 7.8. Fine. It's pretty good. Why did they give the rafts to Tom Sawyer Island at 7.9? I don't understand. Maybe instead of the whole scale plus it up, we should just start doing the Pitchfork rating on these rides.

Oh, yeah. For all the rides, we'll give a very precise amount. And then strangely, to make a point, we give 10 out of 10 to the Jimmy Fallon ride. It's just like, yeah, pop art. What's the problem with that? All right. Which of them had a job interview with those people this week? They're trying to get to a more mainstream audience.

I'm heading to MTV.com. Well, where are we and how do we proceed? Well, we keep trying to get into the queue and we keep getting spooked by curveballs. And I've got another one. The World's Fair, the 64-65 World's Fair. Yes. Probably, I mean, the second big event that affected this ride, in addition to the other being Walt Disney's passing.

But the World's Fair, a lot of Imagineering, a lot of WED, and presumably MAPO, which is the manufacturing arm of WED, diverted to making World's fair sort of stuff but greatly uh the work done for that and the research done for that greatly influenced this ride um all the animatronics work uh done for the world's fair attractions and the ride says the early early pre-omni mover ride system for the ford magic skyway oh of a continuously moving ride vehicle that was refined into the omni mover used in um adventures through adventures through inner space and other clod coats yes so if you don't know about if you don't know the mechanics of Adventures Through Interspace, those were what became the Doom Buggies. It's these pods with the high backs, the best vehicles in which to make out at Disneyland.

Yes. Thus leading to Haunted Mansion being the best ride in which to make out. Have you? Didn't you make out in a Doom Buggy? Oh, you know it. Or like you kissed? Oh, no, no, no. No, no.

What was the story oh no i did well there was i like knowing that you know uh knowing that i like this was if i was gonna get it done right that's the time that's yeah yeah i think i talked about this is the same one where i had some of this some of this mischief with the matterhorn oh yes yes and we were like the whole day doesn't end we were trying to evade the very overprotective mom, me and my long distance girlfriend, who I only saw once a week. So we had to make out at Disneyland

because there was no other option. Did you say once a week? I'm sorry. I only saw her a week a year. That's what I missed. That was how I spent my high school years for you, the listener. I had a girlfriend I only saw one week a year. So any exploration I wanted to do i had to do at family-friendly uh theme park destination so once again if you've been listening for a year that's just a reminder

that things like that are why we are the way we are uh crucial backstory just like all this crap about raleigh crump and uh led to the iconic podcast the ride boys we are today so iconic no no so we like knowing the layout of it we was we were like always trying to we're always trying to escape the overprotective uh you know just uh you know like very much like in a movie, like the Katie Holmes's first daughter trying to escape from the prying eyes of the Secret Service. I swore you were going to go with Amanda Bynes and Frankie Muniz trying to escape movie executive Paul Gia Botti.

Big fat liar. By hiding in the costume department? Yes. And then having a wild romp through all the costumes and props? Universal Studios, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. That's another, that's a big theme uh all the costumes and props oh yeah yeah that's another that's a big theme park movie well uh we can uh that's maybe that's a patreon that sounds like a patreon commentary on big fat liar uh so anyways i like i had to like when the elevator doors opened i like broke off and like we got away from her mom and i could see her like getting

lost in the crowd and pushed back and we're getting steps ahead and now we're like seven doom buggies ahead of her so we can do whatever we want oh yeah she was furious absolutely they're gonna enjoy this attraction on their own he might

lightly graze her boob over the shirt without me watching. That pale, wet boy. Who knows what he'll do? Did you say wet? Yeah, he's sweating. I see.

You're not incorrect. Also, keep in mind, if you've seen a photograph of me, I had hair twice as long. Oh, yeah. I think I've seen something. So that's my that's my honey hey worked out great i was the happiest haunt in the whole mansion i will be back with my death certificate did you just run to get back in the line then after that that would have been smart no then we then we were we were good to be on yeah no cell phones you

won't you don't want to get too lost you know no there yeah so i'm not sure we all had so this we're talking like 2001 or so which is two uh anyway so we've obviously covered all the important stuff my makeout adventures in the year 2001 we've talked about first daughter uh and wilco what um what can we how can we wrap this up for this this chapter i mean we've i actually I think the entire origins episode makes a lot of sense. Yeah. I feel good about it, but what's it, what's anything big that we haven't,

Oh, you were starting to say the, well, the doom buggies, the doom buggies, as they call them in the haunted mansion. Um, a couple of interesting things about that.

One, the, uh, only time doom buggies is said in the haunted mansion is when they come to a stop and that recording that says like you know oh spirits have you know interrupted your journey please stay in your doom buggy that is exitensio oh saying it that is i know that who's also the skull in uh pirates pirates yeah yeah uh wow no no same guy does the safety announcement wrote the song wrote the dialogue yeah and here look we've talked about this we've talked about everything any and everything except for this

besides these specific stuff in the right but the dialogue indelible famous people quote it with the exact intonation so many lines from this are so quotable that it was all from this same guy that's uh that's totally bonkers and i'm sure we'll get into our favorite stuff you know next year um but that's also a fit the um i remember that being one of the like early oh let me let me try to impress people i'm taking here with my little, you know, my odd little knowledge. You know, these are called Omni Movers. I remember knowing maybe Aaron was, the early sign Aaron was the one is that she, I told her about Omni Movers and she thought that was neat. Other people, I'm like, these are called an Omni Mover.

What? Who cares? Could the difference have been she just smiled and was like, cool. When you say neat or was she literally like, oh, that's very cool. Like you believed it. Oh, yeah. No, no, no. A very, very earnest smile and the word neat.

And she still likes to use the word Omni move. She likes to point out Omni movers to others. It's a match made in Omni mover. I mean, I wasn't saying she wasn't actually interested i was just saying that the difference between some the average person when they hear omni mover they their eyes glaze over and they go who cares the shit and then just the difference between somebody going oh cool yeah seems like yeah that's a yeah yeah yeah that's all that's all you're the one marry me now. Yeah, absolutely agree. Mild interest in what you're saying.

That's what I'm saying. But the ride system is like, and there's not a ton of rides that are this, but you wish there were more rides that were this. That it's not individual cars. It is a trail of cars that is never stopping. That's continuous. And that's where Little Mermaid is. And that's how they solved the, that was one of the big problems with the walkthrough ideas

is you weren't going to get enough people through. The Omnimover pretty much doubled how many people could get through this thing. There really should be, in each theme park, there should be like three versions of this. Yeah. Like there should be, like, because PeopleMover is a version of this, especially the one in Florida. I think Florida moves more. Whatever.

It's a bigger, longer thing. you can eat it more people yeah like people mover version of this is your like inner space was uh little mermaid sorry um it because like it's it wasn't like a dream flight or isn't um i guess you'd call it's not the pod but buzz lightyear is that's true yes good point yeah dream flight and a few wings yeah it's not the pod, but Buzz Lightyear is. That's true, yes. Good point. Yeah, dream flight and a few wings. Just something you can literally get people off the ground. And the Imagineers liked it because they could control the speed and what your perspective would be and what you were going to look at. Oh, I think the idea when you see the early discussion of this ride that we can make you, that we can spin you around, can go backwards right that that i think is a mind-blowing uh mechanism that they got to put in yeah yeah the amount of control they suddenly added it really is like one of the most ingenious uh uh very and

it seems like it would have been a version of this is that third ride that got canceled from star wars land is that you think that's the deal supposedly it was like a people mover bantha ride and bantha is a big like furry creature i don't know how they're going to make it look like you were on the back of it but like it was just a people mover type thing where it would just be a continuous and you just zip around above the whole land yeah and colloquially called people eaters because they take so many people out of the park. This was interesting to me. This is concept art of the dune buggies going down the portrait hallway. Ah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Which isn't some of that stuff or the busts or something saved for when you're on the ride in Disney World.

I think some of the elements are different. Like, it's not a line. It's on the ride. The line is a little shorter when you get off the elevator. It's a different line. It's a better line after the elevator to the ride in Disneyland. Okay. Oh, interesting.

But some of it's on the wall a little bit. This is stuff we will get into also. The differences between, which I thought there were just a few but as you go through this book that we've pulled a lot of this info from there are a ton of different a ton of differences between all of these places and you'll be hearing this in a few years when president michael avenatti uh has made everything right president con man the second uh he's in charge he's our con man though he's our con man i've been getting more on board the avanadi train day by day only because i've lost all hope but i don't do i think he'd be a good president of course not but i think we need a guy who can like you know who would like

smack trump in a debate well look scott the residents of river city were very fond of professor harold hill when he rolled into town to save them from the ills of billiards. He was a nice man. The boys band. He seemed nice. It kept being nice, right? By and large, in the end, actually, yes. I've fucked myself

with that point because everyone likes him at the end. Lyle Manley would have been better oh yeah he does actually yeah that's a good point uh um so i mean we're at the climax we talked about what omni movers are yep um what i'll see that what's a good like how do we lead when what and and how do we so i guess we'll pick it up next time in a year. Yeah, in a year. By going room by room. Because I truly, and I think going room by room, do we even get to the end of the ride? No.

I don't know. I don't know. Because there's so much just in each of, there's so much personality. There's so many wonderful gags. I have a lot of thoughts about the employees working. And we all have, I think, our own taste of what we would do if we were working the haunted mansion that's sort of a dream everybody kind of fantasizes stretching portrait is yeah everyone fantasizes about working i think haunted whenever you go hey if you worked at disney where

would you want to work i think most people say haunted mansion that seems like a numb probably the number one or our i guess tower of terror of terror. Usually people like to say, Oh, I could be like creepy to people. Something where you get to do stuff or like the late great movie ride, you know? Yeah, sure. But I think, what are you talking about?

Yeah, interact with people. Oh, after all that, he materializes. Yeah. Different actors. See?

Uh, yeah, I, I guess you're right. I, I'd have to think about that where I would want to did you guys I didn't know until there's a little tease of stuff to talk about that there were live actors briefly in the 80s that's crazy

people hated it but you today I would love it because I'm a big Haunt fan Jersey Shore haunted houses like i would go to the person working the line like excuse me are there real people in this or is it just the robots and if they said there's real people that jumped out i'd be like no no thank you i think it's somehow might be worse than haunts because at least haunts you are you are moving and you can look wet like if you're in a little car you're

trapped i i mean we've all been on this ride so many times but i thought now since i know that fact i've thought about it being on the ride so especially going down the hallway i'm like what would be a really what would scare the shit out of me right now i guess if somebody actually came through the door like very fast if somebody's popped through the door oh yeah you lose your mind uh-huh um but yeah if you if a person was just like can i ask you some questions about wrecking ralph ralph breaks the internet you have a couple minutes to answer a survey uh if like the if the omnimover like turns around and there's just a person like like staring at you like it right i guess maybe after i'm trying to think like maybe when you enter the

attic because the attic is so claustrophobic oh yeah yeah like stuff like that i've thought about i think if leota shattered and like hopped into my car and not the others only my like her like her decrepit uh like you know her her pale hardened uh rigor mortis face uh you know and there's like little squishes with each pounce and then she's up in my yeah yeah i think if she if it shattered like a fishbowl and leota was in my lap i'd be uh that's the worst thing i could think of that's a rolly crump idea that's a weird idea i think's a little weird, but I think it's good. I think you can make it work with some finessing. Yeah, it's scary, but it's weird.

Part of the development. And we'll keep perfecting that. Let's see. If we were, let's say, Crump, Coates, and Davis, who of the three of us, like, which of us are which guy? What do you think? Who's the weirdest of the three? We're all us are which guy hmm uh what do you think who's the weirdest we all we're all little uh uh i don't know i mean we're all parts of all of them but for the fun exercise we all go a little mad sometimes i mean i'm a little i feel like i'm clawed now because of how much i like scary stuff so i'm clawed i'm i'm crump because of how i trip out on psychedelic wine that's true and

jason is clearly mark davis because he's a whimsical yeah he's a whimsical a lot of character very specific character i mean certainly the most memorable of the three of us you know oh well i'll take that compliment put that in my pocket for later you were designed if we could have you know i really don't want to call for fan art, but if you could draw a picture of Mark Davis creating Jason on an animation desk, that would be really great. Remember, it all began with a Jason. Hey, I like that. That's good. With a nice call for fan. Okay. Well, then I think I can say you survived a Hauntcast the Fright in which the ride in question was not discussed.

Right. But I hope you found all of this information interesting. I think it's all crucial backstory and crucial development for what became the iconic ride that we will get into next year. Yes. We hope you'll meet us at the wrought iron gates this halloween season next october yes and if you're only listening if you if you only intend on listening to our haunted mansion episodes then i would say don't hurry back because you got a while to wait uh we were going to be waiting as long as people waited for the actual ride to be built in disneyland that's a good idea we get it done and can we get it done in six years

we'll try we'll try we'll do our best uh we'll we'll give it a go um so for me for uh hey guess what uh uh next week we're going to be covering a a spooky theme park attraction that I think is every bit as iconic, indelible, clean and perfect as the Haunted Mansion. So come back to find out what that is. And we're as positive about it as we are about this. You will find us glowing about all of the incredible writing and detail in this attraction. In the meantime, please go to patreon.com slash podcast the ride. It's so exciting to say.

We will waste two more hours of your time with a totally different attraction. Different building full of attractions. For only five little dollars a month. You can barely get a McDonald's meal at that deal. No, you can't. if you use the app like i

do i can get a two to three dollar meal and it's actually very satisfying but like you barely get a comic book for that price well that's true we'll give you hours of entertainment hours of entertainment and you know what's funny is that like the haunted mansion today the first patreon topic disney quest is a building with no windows and no doors. Very good point. Very good point. Tie it all together. So yeah, head to patreon.com slash podcast. I'm so excited it's open and thanks people for

encouraging us to do this and thanks in advance for checking it out if you're going to do it. And for our regular hijinks head to Twitter at podcast the ride, Instagram podcast the ride, our Podcast the Ride Facebook group, Podcast the Ride at gmail.com. And which, again, I'll keep saying it, send us ideas, stuff that you want to see as Patreon content or any kind of content or write us letters or complain about the very slow speed the almost omnimover like pace at which we are

moving through the haunted mansion yes well you've survived haunt cast the fright I did say that already but hurry back he said that to you I think this is the second time you forgot that we said it already I honestly this time I did not remember

that's okay. I just wanted to do the hurry back voice. See you over at the second gate. Forever Dog. This has been a Forever Dog production. Executive produced by Brett Boehm, Joe Cilio, and Alex Ramsey. For more original podcasts,

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