October 23, 2013 • 36 mins
The second installment in the story of the Haunted Mansion going from concept to fully-realized theme park attraction covers the reboot the team went through after the World's Fair and the loss of their leader.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, welcome to the podcast I'm
calling from and I'm Tracy V. Wilson, And we left
you with a cliffhanger tlimb around. We were talking about
the history of the Hammond Mansion in Disneyland and how
(00:22):
it came to be built and how that concept went
from just an idea in the early fifties to becoming
an actual thing that park visitors know about today, because
it really is quite a long and winding road for
that that right in particular. Uh. And so when we
left off, uh, really Crump and Yale Gracey were two
gentlemen that we're working on effects that we're going to
(00:43):
go into the Haunted Mansion, and they had done this
really amazing uh demonstration where they kind of made a
mock up of the whole attraction and how it would work,
and other imagineers and Walt and their stakeholders in Disneyland
got to walk through it and experience it. They were
all completely blown away by it. So amazing. Uh was
(01:08):
also very slow. Yeah, those amazing effects had really wowed
the whole crowd, but they also took away too long.
To play out. Uh. And the show was deemed inefficient
at that point, so there was no way they could
move people through quickly enough to avoid long lines and
log jams. And there's a h term that's often used
(01:30):
for rides when they're talking about um load and how
quickly they can get things through that they wanted them
to be people eaters, like they had to just be
able to move people through really quickly. Uh. And so
even if some of the elements of this show had
been omitted, the time it was going to take to
reset some of the effects for each new group coming
through on the tour was just still not going to
be workable. In addition to this whole timing issue. While
(01:53):
it had kind of cool and on this idea of
the Haunted House being a walk through attraction, Sleeping Beauty's
Castle features a walk through story display that's been there
since the opening, and he had really never been too
happy with it. And then, to make matters worse, we
talked about this in the first episode. There had been
a debate over whether the exterior should look Christine or
(02:15):
just as shambles. Uh. Walt wanted it to look Christine
to match the rest of the park. And other designers
wanted it to look crumbling like a crumbling old mansion
and a little rundown like a haunted house normally would
the kind of place you'd look at and go that
is haunted me. Yeah, So that had been a little
bit of a problem. And back when Ken Anderson, who
(02:36):
was head of UH this project at the time, UH
had been talking to Walt about it, he just decided
he would move to focusing on the interior and they
would table this issue. But they had just stopped talking
about the outside of the attraction. There had never been
an agreement on how it was actually gonna look, and
so that remained unresolved. So as the nine fifties came
(02:58):
to a close, so did plans for eight Disneyland Haunted House,
and they basically put the whole thing on hold. Yeah,
so the Haunted House UH just to um review quickly.
Had been part of the plan for Disneyland since Walt
first envisioned the whole park in so they had spent
almost a decade at this point working on things and
(03:21):
then they just had to kind of say goodbye to
it for a bit. Yeah, And sometimes I get frustrated
when I am banging my head against something trying to
work on it for like an hour and a half,
and they have been banging their heads working on this
for like ten years. Yeah, I mean, not the whole team,
although they do go on for many more years. But
so the Haunted House project then languished until so it
(03:45):
was a couple of years, but what was still really
eager to expand the park, and the W E. D
Team or WED depending on what you prefer, which eventually
became Disney Engineering, decided that they were gonna once again
take on this tuble, troubled project. There was such a
strong desire to get this thing up and running that
they started passing out handbills in the park that very year,
(04:08):
announcing that in nineteen sixty three, two years down the road,
the Haunted Mansion, as it was now officially was being called,
would be open to guests and haunts. So a little
bit of let's light a fire under ourselves to get
this done, and also a little bit maybe putting some
of the cart before the horse. Yeah, I mean, they
(04:28):
were throttled by the deadline, and so construction really did
kind of catapult forward, but even so it was not
quite at the pace that was hoped for. UH, And
while the exterior of the Haunted Mansion was in place
pristine by the way, they went with Walt's pristine plan,
which is not really a surprise. UH. In ninety three,
the exterior was completely done, but the interior was far
(04:50):
from finished. Walt asked Martins Sklar to come up with
copy for a real estate sign that would be inviting
ghosts to move into this home in Disneyland. And here's
the sign that appeared outside the empty building. Do you
want to read this? I bet you like it? Sure? Uh.
It reads Notice All ghosts and restless spirits post lifetime
(05:15):
leases are now available in this haunted mansion. Don't be
left out in the sunshine. Enjoy active retirement in this
country club atmosphere for the fashionable address for famous ghosts,
ghosts trying to make a name for themselves, and ghosts
afraid to live by themselves. Leases include license to scare
the daylights out of guests visiting the Portrait Gallery, Museum
(05:36):
of the Supernatural, Graveyard and other happy haunting grounds. For reservations,
send resume of past experience to Ghost Relations Department, Disneyland.
Please do not apply in person. I love that it's
so charming. So things were behind schedule at this point,
but they were progressing along. Guests were getting at least
(05:58):
a little sense of the flavor of the attraction because
the exterior was there, and so things were kind of
back on course. But then they were put on hold
again when Walt agreed to build four attractions for the
nineteen sixty four to nineteen sixty five World's Fair. Yeah,
and this is an interesting one as a brief aside.
I have heard people say before when you're talking about
(06:20):
disney history like you do, which I do. Uh, there's
often this misconception that the World's Fair actually came before
Disneyland opened, and that because some of the pieces that
Walt worked on for the World's Fair moved into Disneyland.
I think there's been this confusion about the timing of
when Disneyland happened, but in fact it was up and running.
(06:41):
They just paused on all current projects. Um, because those
four projects that Walt was doing for the World's Fair
ate up all of his time and all of the
time of the designers and artists that he routinely used,
because he had put them all to work on these
World's Fair projects. Uh. So every project for Disneyland that
was on, including the Haunted Mansion, was just going to
(07:02):
have to wait until the attractions for the New York
displays were complete. Once the World's Fair projects were completed,
it was time to go back to the Haunted Mansion.
So in July nineteen sixty four, the team was reassembled
and it shuffled around a little bit. Ken Anderson had
gone back to work in the studios, but Rolly Crump
and Yale Gracie returned to the mansion, and Walt added
(07:24):
Mark Davis, Claude Coats, and x Attencio to the mix.
X is short for Xavier Um and Mark Davis, who
had worked on other Disneyland attractions, was tasked with creating
the inhabitants of the mansion, so the ghosts were under
him UH. Claude Coates put his skills as a background
artist to work UH designing the environments throughout the attraction,
(07:48):
and x Atencio worked on the script. He had just
done one for Pirates of the Caribbean, so every member
had a role to play and assigned duties. But they
were starting with that kind of a clean slate story eyes,
so initially they were all coming up with pitches for
different versions of the story that would run the Hide Mansion. Yeah,
and uh, just for clarification, so really Crump and um
(08:11):
Yale Gracie were still working on effects, so we didn't
mention them, but they were all still working on it. Uh.
And there was another major element of this reboot of
the project and that they had decided to add an omnimover,
which is a car system rather than a walk through
as had originally been envisioned, so that they could keep
people moving through this attraction at the rate of thousands
(08:32):
of people per hour. So that's how the Doom Buggies
were formed, uh, which are the cars that go through
the Haunta Mansion. And one of the installations that Disney
and his team had done for the World's Fair was
this people mover that had been developed in conjunction with
the Ford Motor Company. Uh. And it was basically this
omnimover system, and that had been a really great success
(08:52):
at the World's Fair. So it pretty quickly was that
concept was adopted over not just into the Haunted Mansion,
but in several places in Disney. That's a common element
that you will see. And there's still a people mover
magic Kingdom. Oh, it's a magic kingdom. You were right,
I was smashing them all in my head together. Well,
it seems it's in Tomorrowland, which is a little futuristic,
(09:14):
so people, it's easy to do that and slip it
over to like Epcot's Future World. Yeah, it's a great
place to take a break, especially if it's hot out
to eat a nice cruel ride. You get to go
inside some of the attractions while you just sit placidly
pretty much anything that involves sitting in a boat or
sitting in a little car. Yeah, for like ten minutes,
about ten minutes awesome. Yes, really, Crump's work when they
(09:37):
were working on concepts was way outside of what the
other men were working on, and even he admitted when
Watt was reviewing everybody's work but didn't know how it
fit into the attraction. He had designed things like a
melting candleman and a sentient walking chair. Yeah. So, as
they were all pitching these new versions of the Haunted
Mansion story and like how it would all go together
(09:59):
in terms a uh continuous thematic thread, Roly Crump was
just drawing these bizarre things that no one knew what
to do it. He was off in his own world
of weird, weird kind of I mean, he's still alive
today and he talks about it a lot. Uh But yeah,
his style of art is really unique. Um. It's now
(10:20):
pretty much accepted that he his some of his crazy
designs are what led to the famous Dama squallpaper that's
got the eyeballs in the Haunted Mansion. For a while,
it was a matter of debate over where that actually
came from. But if you look at some of his
early sketches and some of these works, he was puzzling
over its very similar style to some of the pieces there. Um.
(10:41):
And so after having done this review where Roly Crump
is like, I don't know how it fits in. It's
I'm just spitballing weird things that I think are you know,
a little bit more new and interesting than the standard
like Haunted Mansion. Fair um, because you know, he didn't
want to do the same stuff that any other haunted
house would have. He won a unique and interesting and
outside of what people had experienced before. Uh So, apparently
(11:06):
after not sleeping on it, just interviews with Crump, he
loves to tell this story and he specifically always mentions
that when uh Waltz comes to see him the next morning,
that he was actually there before really Crump got there,
sitting in his chair. He was wearing the same clothes
as the day before, and said that he couldn't get
any sleep because he was thinking about what to do
with these designs. Walt had decided at that point that
(11:29):
Role's designs were going to be part of what he
called a museum of the weird that would fall at
the end of the attraction as guest exited, and that
they could walk through at their own pace, so kind
of the way that people um will know, now, many
rides in any Disney park will kind of shoot you
out into a gift shop. This was going to shoot
you out into this weird museum Roly Crump's Museum of
(11:51):
the Weird. Once Crump had been tasked with making this
museum show, he came up with all kinds of odd
and wonderful things for it. He pulled out things he'd
worked on earlier in the attractions development process and embellished
their designs, and he envisioned lots of things that will
kind of ring familiar to those who've been to the
Haunted Mansion. In Disneyland or disney World, like a seance
(12:14):
with floating furniture, marble busts whose gazes followed the guests,
portraits that morphed and changed before people's eyes. There was
even a haunted fortune teller's cart. Shall we get back
to the Haunted Mansion? Nothing would please be more so
much so all Disneyland projects, including the Haunted Mansion, went
(12:36):
back on hold again when it was time for the
installations of the World's Fair to be moved into their
permanent residence in Disneyland, and even after the task was completed,
other projects were then prioritized over the now basically beleaguered
Haunted Mansion. Yeah. This poor things been going on forever.
They just were trying to drag it to the finish line.
(12:57):
Empty buildings standing there with a sign in front of it,
what you can go in because there's not stuff in
it yet. People are like, wasn't this supposed to be
years ago? Yes? Uh, And then things kind of take
a really rough turn. At this point, Pirates of the
Caribbean is under construction and almost complete, I think, uh.
Tomorrowland was being refurbished. Work on a second park in
(13:20):
Florida was underway and Walt died, and to some people
it seemed very sudden, But I think it's one of
those cases where he never talked about being sick. Uh.
He had undergone a surgery in November of nineteen sixty
six to remove a tumor in his lung that had
been discovered when he went in for treatment of a
neck injury that he had gotten from a sporting injury. Uh.
And then just that following month, December fifteenth of that
(13:42):
same year, he died of acute circulatory collapse that was
associated with his lung cancer. So this was really just
emotionally devastating for the people who worked for him, And
losing Walt meant that there was no longer a referee
in the whole Haunted Mansion project, which had always had
a problem bloom of just big personalities clashing and disagreeing
(14:03):
over how to do things. Yeah, and especially when it's
set up in that way where you have a lot
of really brilliant people and you're like, everybody pitched me
a new version of this, and they all want there's
to be the one that goes forward. Of course, it
could be contentious, um and with or w E d
leadership felt that the best solution at this point was
to put the team of Mark Davis and Claude Coats
(14:24):
in charge of the mansion. Uh. At this point, the
Haunt the Pirates of the Caribbean had launched, and they
had worked a lot on it and it had been
very successful, so they seemed like the ideal team. However,
it turned out that after that big success, each of
the men kind of felt like he should be the
one that was in charge, with the other taking a
secondary management role. And you can imagine how well that
(14:47):
played out. Yeah, at this point there had been a
decade of exasperating on again, off again production. Then there
was the grief over the loss of Disney. The head
betting of the two leaders created this perfect storm for
what had become really one of the most contentious battles
in Disney imagineering history. It sounds silly, but the question
(15:09):
of whether the Haunted Mansion should be funny or scary
caused these huge arguments and a giant split in the
development team. Yeah, Mark Davis really preferred more of the funny,
character driven stuff, whereas Coats, who was an environmental designer,
wanted it to be about spooky scary erie, and because
(15:29):
they were having such a hard time co managing this project,
it just became this tug of war between these two
concepts and designers were kind of lining up on either
side of the debate, and it really was just constant
bickering over something. It seems so small, but you can
see how when the stakes are high, because it is
a thing that's gone on forever, you have just lost
(15:50):
your leader, you are a little chuffed with your you know, success,
and feel like you're not maybe not getting as much
credit as you want. You could see how it could
quickly become this boilerpot, especially with a bunch of creative people. Well,
I'm a creative people. I'm married to a creative person,
and I know we can have some temper. Yeah, you
(16:10):
know what I think is funny. What the jump scare
at the very beginning of the ride, when all the
little kids completely lose their minds. This is because I'm
a terrible person. No, it's fun. It is fun. I
mean it's you're kind of enjoying everyone experiencing it, and
for some people it is the terror of it. And
it's that's part of like what makes any haunted house
(16:32):
like kind of fun is watching people freak out, so
I understand, So how do they get over this? Holly? Well, eventually,
um Dick Irvine, Richard Irvine, who was the w e
D Vice president of design, he kind of sided more
with Mark Davis's vision and so at least verbally, that
was how it settled. But even so, the attraction kind
(16:52):
of is segmented, and if you think about it when
you go through it, it's almost like, here's the cloud
Coats part, Here's some Art Davis part. Um Coats's vision
for the Moody and Creepy is really more the first
half of the ride, like when you're going through all
those environments and you're seeing you know, the creepy coffin
with the guy talking out of it and the long
(17:13):
hallway trip, and there aren't a lot of characters about.
There are a lot of like ghosts that you see
you have like this about mood like the doors that
are knocking themselves exactly. And then the second half becomes
more about the characters and the illusions that Mark Davis
was really a fan of. So that's when you start
seeing the ghosts in the ballroom and um, you know
(17:35):
Leota Seance and all of those elements and the big
Pepper's ghost illusion, which is the ballroom. Um, that's when
all of that happens. So it's kind of like the
ambiance portion at the front and then the funner we're
gonna set the stage and then we're gonna have a story. Yeah,
and some people have even said likes a this kind
(17:58):
of set up a perfect like act break to the
story of the Haunted Mansion that it did break out
in that way that one half favors one design philosophy
and one half favors the other. So this was only
Extensio's second ride script. Before he had written the script
for Pirates, he had been a storyboard artist who worked
in the story department at Disney Studios, and it failed
(18:19):
him to find some kind of way to marry all
these disparate elements that had been thrown out by this
team that was of two different kind of incompatible stylistic minds. Yeah,
poor guy like makes sense of this. We've built it,
figure something out well, and you and I both edit
as some of our work here. Yeah, we know that
(18:41):
feeling of when you get something that is like somebody
sent you their notes salad and you're like how do
I make this note salad into a thing one thing
that's not note salad. Now picture two note salads and
they argue with each other, and you have to find
a way to make peace. And if you've ever seen
interviews with Extensio, I have to say I can see
(19:05):
where he was the perfect person for this job because
he has a very um, calm demeanor. He seems very
you know, sweet and earnest, uh, but also extremely smart.
And so you can see where and and he'll talk
about often how you know Walt Disney one of his
greatest um, what Extencio feels is one of Disney's greatest
(19:26):
triumphs was that he could see what people were capable of,
even if they had never done it and didn't know
they could. Uh. And so that's kind of how he
became a scriptwriter on shows. Disney just said, I think
you're the guy to do this, and he's like, I
don't know how to do this, You'll be fine, and
he was. Uh. And so in the end he drew
inspiration from that real estate signed copy that Marty Sclar
had written, and so that's how he wove the story
(19:49):
of the Nine Happy Haunts throughout the Haunted Mansion that
are ready to recruit number one thousand, and it could
be you. So all the way from the stretching Portrait
Room to the a hiking ghosts, it's all about, you know,
these many different spirits that have made their home in
the Haunted Mansion, and how they would love to invite
another member, which I think it's kind of fabulous and
(20:12):
an ingenious solution to this problem. Well, and it wound
up being a really memorable one. Yeah. I've been to
Disney twice in my life, once when I was five
and once when I was in my late thirties. Uh.
And from that five year old men, you watch me
freak out and um one of the because you know,
(20:35):
you don't remember giant piles of stuff when you were five. Yeah,
it's usually impress kind of piecemeal. And one of the
few absolutely clear memories I have of Disney from the
trip when I was five was the hitchhiking ghosts in
the Haunted Mansion. Yes, they're very lovable. I think I
was quite concerned that one of them actually was coming
home with me. I'm always quite sad that they're not
(20:57):
in the car when I leave, Like Phinny has come
on so At Long Last on August nine, nineteen sixty nine,
more than eighteen years after the product had started, and
six years after the empty house that appeared on in
(21:17):
a corner of Disneyland, finally the Haunted Mansion opened its doors. Yeah,
if you ever want perspective on a work project, just remember,
like Golf was doing his designs, his first sketches in
I also want to gripe away less about like video games,
they get perpetually delayed or maybe never happened. Usually that
(21:38):
does not go on for eighteen years. Yeah, that's it's
a long time. And I can only and I think
that also led to kind of some of the I mean,
we we talked about it tying in, but I can
only imagine the fever pitch of potential frustration and just
taught nerves by the end of it. While they're having
all those arguments about the style of it, and they've
(22:00):
just put on this project for some of them a
decade or more. Just be they just probably want it
done and they want to go home and have a
life that has nothing to do with the Haunt. I maasion,
but it was immensely successful from day one. There are
photographs from day one where you can just see the
crowd just the line goes on forever. Uh. And a
week later, the Haunted Mansion set a single day attendance
(22:23):
record a two thousand, five hundred and sixteen guests went
through its doors one day. I have a hard time
imagining that many people. That's how that works. So there
was a rumor leading up to the opening that one
of the reporters at a press viewing had had a
heart attack and died, causing the ride to be redesigned
(22:43):
at the last minute. Extencio has said that the preview
period for attractions always reveals some problems that need tweaking,
but no, no one died of fright. One of the
early tweaks to the ride was the removal of a
character that is now referred to as the hat Box Ghost.
And this is one that if you are into Disney,
(23:04):
particularly if you're into the Haunted Mansion, you know about. Uh.
This featured an elderly looking ghost that was holding, surprise
a hat box, and his head was supposed to vanish
off of his shoulders and then appear in the hat
box and then switch back again. But the illusion never
worked quite right. It didn't work as planned at the
angle at which guests we're seeing it in the place
(23:25):
that it was meant to go in the mansion from
their doom buggies. So it just never worked well enough
and they ended up pulling it really quickly because they
didn't want a mediocre effect. Um. And as I said,
the hat Box Ghost is now immensely popular amongst Hana
Mansion fans. Uh. An updated version of it appeared at
d twenty three, which is the official Disney convention, just
(23:46):
last month, so this summer, and there have been rumors
that if Guermo del Toro's Haunted Mansion movie ever comes
to Fruition, which is another on again, off again, on again,
off again, people say it's canceled. Guerma Deltora will stand
in an interview. No, we're still working on it, so
we don't really know, uh. But the rumors that the
good old hat Box Ghost will be prominently featured. But
(24:06):
what plans, if any, Disney really has for the character
is not known to the public at this time to
the best of my knowledge. So hopefully hat Box comes back.
There is a I think there is a site called well,
I know that there's a site called Doom Buggies dot Com,
and I think they have a picture that someone managed
to take very early on in those either preview days
(24:27):
or one of the first days that it was open
before it got pulled, where you can see what the
hat box ghost looks like. Nice. He's very popular. Versions
of the Haunted Mansion have been installed in Walt Disney
World in Florida and Tokyo Disneyland. Reimagined versions of the
attraction appear in Disneyland, Paris and Hong Kong. Disneyland. Phantom
Manner in Paris is set in a wild West mining town,
(24:50):
and Mystic Manner in Hong Kong has an adventurer kind
of World Explorer theme. Yeah, it's almost for people that
have been to Disney in year prior. This place is
now closed, but there used to be a place in
downtown Disney called the Adventurers Club, which is kind of
like an old school hunting club, like the place you
would expect to see Hemingway hanging out. Uh. And the
(25:12):
Mystic Manner is almost like a marriage of that concept
and the Haunted Mansion idea, so they they have slightly
different twists. The Phantom Manner is fascinating and it has
really good music. Mystic manner has music done by Danny Elfman,
so you know it's awesome. Each holiday season, the original
Anaheim Hanted Mansion and the Tokyo Disneyland Haunted Mansion. Uh,
(25:33):
they both get a nightmare before Christmas overlay, which is
called Haunted Mansion Holiday, and so from roughly the beginning
of October through the end of the year and usually
the first couple of days of January, instead of going
and seeing the usual haunts that you would see on
the attraction, the visitors get to see Jack and Sally
and Zero and Oogie Boogee and the rest of the
inhabitants of Halloween Town because it's kind of turned into
(25:54):
a Halloween Town situation and it is amazing. I cried
the first time I was on, and I'm not embarrassed
to tell you because I also a love nightmare before Christmas. Um,
it's lovely. I wish I could go every year, but
I never managed to do so. So UH. Probably will
not be a surprise to anyone that there have been many,
many claims of actual ghost sightings in the various Haunted
(26:14):
Mansions around the world, both by guests and by cast members.
He and there's always the stories of people scattering ashes
in the mansion. I don't like that idea, no, and
Disney doesn't either. I don't know if there have ever
been any confirmed ones, but uh, you'll hear kind of
apocryphal stories where people are like, no, we vacuum that
(26:36):
right up. Um, So if you think you might want
to do that, no, that you're not really know they're
going to end up in a vacuum. And that seems
inconsiderate of other Yea, yeah, it's not good, you know.
I don't want to dis on how people choose to
express their grief and their wishes of loved ones. I
do not really approve of the idea of getting are
(27:00):
people's remains on me? While I didn't right, I understand
there's no where I would rather be scattered, but you
know the rules. Uh. And what is missing in this
final build of the Haunted Mansion was Raley Crump's Museum
of the Weird because as they were, you know, really
ramping up towards the last chunk of production, they realized
(27:21):
it wasn't gonna work. Um, so it got scrapped. But
many of his ideas for the museum are in the
attraction itself. Uh And as we mentioned, like the seance
room with the floating furniture that was his idea originally.
The busts that follow people, which is a really cool trick.
They're actually cast in recess, so they're set back and
(27:43):
it's just kind of a natural cool effect that when
you go by the way they're painted, they look like
they're bus standing outside, but they're actually a negative and
it looks like they're following you. It's awesome. Um And
what's interesting is that, um there isn't some of the parks,
there's a souvenir stand outside because it doesn't dump out
(28:03):
into a gift shop, and the souvenir stand looks a
lot like really Crump's haunted fortune teller cart, which is
kind of fun. And that's another thing that there have
been rumblings about through the years that the Museum of
the Weird is being kicked around as a possible starting
point for a full length feature film, script, that it's
going to be incorporated into a video game. There have
(28:23):
even been rumors that it's going to be its own
attraction eventually, but so far those have not materialized. There's
a story I think that l a times ran like
three years ago that Ahmed Zappa was working on a
script treatment about it, and then Disney was like no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
that's not happening. So you know, there's there's always more
to talk about, imagine more. Yeah, I mean, we've hit
(28:47):
on some of the higher points, but there's so much
story there in legacy, and because so many of those
imagineers are still with us and are often, um, you know,
make appearances or do interviews. Really Crump's book came out
at the end of last year, and it's quite fun.
He's kind of a pistol. He's got an interesting history
both in and outside of Disney, and you know, he's
(29:08):
led a wildlife in many ways, and he doesn't really
hold back. He's very fun Excitencia, like I said, just
comes across as the sweetest man you would ever want
to meet on the planet. And they love to wax
repsodic and talk about the old times and working on
this project. And I'm sure it was a trial by fire,
but they still seem to look back at it kind
of lovingly because they recognize what it became. Yeah, if
(29:29):
I had been working at Disney in the in the fifties.
I'm sure I would be waxing repsodic about that all
the time, even if it was really hard, because of
what it grew into. Yeah, and it does sound like
it again. It's one of those things where we see
it today and it's a huge, massive company. And you know,
uh many people talk about how they their dream job
(29:52):
would be to work for Disney, and it was even
for these guys. But I think people don't realize it
wasn't like you instantly get rich. Like I was watching
an interview with Roly Crump not too long ago, and
he was saying when he got hired at Disney, they
offered him less than half of what he was making
working in uh I think a ceramic tile factory. And
he was like, I have a kid on the way,
I don't know what to do. Man, I really want
(30:14):
to work for Disney. Uh So he took it, and
he had to take a second job. Like I mean,
these weren't like Pie in the Sky, super dreamy, easy
coasting jobs. They worked really really hard. So I could see,
we're looking back, he would be very proud of that
work because you really had to be committed. Uh So
that's our We'll let the haunts rest for now. Yeah,
do you have some listener mail would do this? That
(30:36):
makes me laugh, which is sort of me now that
I think about it, But it is from our listener Will,
and he's talking about our episode on the Nasca Lines,
and he says, I actually have a related story about
the Nasca Lines that I wanted to share when I
heard you mentioned wanting to view them in person yourselves.
Last summer, I traveled with my girlfriend's family to Peru
(30:56):
for a three week trip. For her family, it was
mostly about rek connecting with family, friends, and heritage since
her parents immigrated to the U s from Peru in
the early nineteen eighties. On top of this, we also
did a lot of the typical tourist ventures, including touring
the Valsa Garado near Cusco and hiking Machu Picchu. The food,
the people, and the sites were stunning and it was
simply an amazing experience. One of the final day trips
(31:18):
we did involved a lengthy Van rhyne down to the
small town of Nasca from Lima. In order to do
aerial viewings of the lines. We had to go in
two groups because the largest plane available was a small,
six person Cessna, so there were two seats that were
for the pilot and the co pilot, and the rest
was people from their group. He says, while everyone else
was cautious and took drama being prior to the flight,
(31:40):
I decided I didn't need to. I never get motion sickness,
and I used to spend most of my summers working
on the water. Unfortunately, my confidence lasted all of about
ten minutes once we were in the air. My girlfriend,
her sister, and her brother in law all enjoyed the
flight and took plenty of pictures. I could only manage
a couple of pictures, and then I had to stare
at the horizon most of the time to keep from
(32:00):
getting too nauseous. The views were stunning, but my mind
and body were distracted by the constant swaying and bucking
of the tiny plane. Also, since drama mean makes you
very drowsy, I spent the majority of the two mile
drive back to Lima. Is the only one to wake
besides the driver. So if you ever go on this flight,
yes it's worth it, but make sure to take some
drama means so you can enjoy the whole thing and
(32:20):
not have to keep assuring your group or significant other
that you're fine despite that sickly look on your face.
I love this. Thank you for the work you do
on the podcasts. So he mentions that he would like
to hear some of these things about African history. So
we uh so it's so cool. Well, I'm so sorry.
This is sort of um. The the treachery of those
(32:41):
ones in a lifetime trips is that you can't do
a rehearsal right, and sometimes your body, because you're traveling,
it won't even react the way it normally would know.
And I uh, I have a weird threshold for motion
signats like I've I've been on a ship before that
was fine, and then a different ship before that was
not fine. I empathize with the motion sick. It is
(33:06):
why I can never ride Star tours again in my life,
and probably cannot go on the Hogwarts ride at the
Harry Potter World. Yeah, I am. I have had almost
the identical thing to him, not on a cool tourism thing,
but I go deep sea fishing usually every year with
my dad, that boat rocking. I'm usually the only one
(33:27):
that's not getting sick. We've had some really good luck
to a couple of times at the weather, but I
seem to be okay on those. But I remember taking
a small puddle hopper plane with my husband back from
a trip to Disney World. Actually we were making a
connecting flight from Orlando to Tampa and then picking up
our flight to Atlanta. I have no idea why we
book that. Were like, why are you doing this? It
(33:48):
was probably really cheap, but I just remember my husband
looking at me and going, I've never seen a person
actually turned green before, because you were like cartoon bugs,
bunny green pale. I was like, yeah, I don't know.
Sometimes I'm fine. That one was that we did fly
through a thunderstorm, I should say, so there was a
(34:09):
lot of shug sugar sugar going on, but no one
else seemed to have the problems. So sometimes it's hard
to predict. And I've been on small place before and
not gotten that. And your body doesn't always do what
you think it will. Unfortunately, if you would like to
write to us, yeah, tell us about your motion, sickness,
maybe not other things you can. I'm fine. I hope
(34:30):
my laughing does not make will feel bad, because I'm
not laughing at his um discomfort. I'm just laughing into
fact that you cannot predict life and even your body,
which you would think you would know better than anything
else in the world. Well, and I have enormous empathy
for the motion sick. Yeah, and I have both been
motion sick. But if you want to write to us,
do so at History Podcast at discovery dot com. You
(34:52):
can also connect with us on Twitter at missed in History,
and you can visit us on Facebook at Facebook dot
com slash his reclass stuff. We are also on tumbler
at missed in History dot tumbler dot com, and we're
panning away on Pinterest. If you would like to learn
a little bit more about part of what we talked
about today, you can go to our website and uh
(35:12):
do a search for Walt Disney and one of the
interesting articles you will get is fifteen notable people who
dropped out of school because he did and yet went
on to a life of great accomplishment. If you would
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you can think of, you should do that at our website,
which is how Stuff Works dot com for more on
(35:33):
this and thousands of other topics. Because it has to
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(35:56):
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Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, welcome to the podcast I'm
calling from and I'm Tracy V. Wilson, And we left
you with a cliffhanger tlimb around. We were talking about
the history of the Hammond Mansion in Disneyland and how
(00:22):
it came to be built and how that concept went
from just an idea in the early fifties to becoming
an actual thing that park visitors know about today, because
it really is quite a long and winding road for
that that right in particular. Uh. And so when we
left off, uh, really Crump and Yale Gracey were two
gentlemen that we're working on effects that we're going to
(00:43):
go into the Haunted Mansion, and they had done this
really amazing uh demonstration where they kind of made a
mock up of the whole attraction and how it would work,
and other imagineers and Walt and their stakeholders in Disneyland
got to walk through it and experience it. They were
all completely blown away by it. So amazing. Uh was
(01:08):
also very slow. Yeah, those amazing effects had really wowed
the whole crowd, but they also took away too long.
To play out. Uh. And the show was deemed inefficient
at that point, so there was no way they could
move people through quickly enough to avoid long lines and
log jams. And there's a h term that's often used
(01:30):
for rides when they're talking about um load and how
quickly they can get things through that they wanted them
to be people eaters, like they had to just be
able to move people through really quickly. Uh. And so
even if some of the elements of this show had
been omitted, the time it was going to take to
reset some of the effects for each new group coming
through on the tour was just still not going to
be workable. In addition to this whole timing issue. While
(01:53):
it had kind of cool and on this idea of
the Haunted House being a walk through attraction, Sleeping Beauty's
Castle features a walk through story display that's been there
since the opening, and he had really never been too
happy with it. And then, to make matters worse, we
talked about this in the first episode. There had been
a debate over whether the exterior should look Christine or
(02:15):
just as shambles. Uh. Walt wanted it to look Christine
to match the rest of the park. And other designers
wanted it to look crumbling like a crumbling old mansion
and a little rundown like a haunted house normally would
the kind of place you'd look at and go that
is haunted me. Yeah, So that had been a little
bit of a problem. And back when Ken Anderson, who
(02:36):
was head of UH this project at the time, UH
had been talking to Walt about it, he just decided
he would move to focusing on the interior and they
would table this issue. But they had just stopped talking
about the outside of the attraction. There had never been
an agreement on how it was actually gonna look, and
so that remained unresolved. So as the nine fifties came
(02:58):
to a close, so did plans for eight Disneyland Haunted House,
and they basically put the whole thing on hold. Yeah,
so the Haunted House UH just to um review quickly.
Had been part of the plan for Disneyland since Walt
first envisioned the whole park in so they had spent
almost a decade at this point working on things and
(03:21):
then they just had to kind of say goodbye to
it for a bit. Yeah, And sometimes I get frustrated
when I am banging my head against something trying to
work on it for like an hour and a half,
and they have been banging their heads working on this
for like ten years. Yeah, I mean, not the whole team,
although they do go on for many more years. But
so the Haunted House project then languished until so it
(03:45):
was a couple of years, but what was still really
eager to expand the park, and the W E. D
Team or WED depending on what you prefer, which eventually
became Disney Engineering, decided that they were gonna once again
take on this tuble, troubled project. There was such a
strong desire to get this thing up and running that
they started passing out handbills in the park that very year,
(04:08):
announcing that in nineteen sixty three, two years down the road,
the Haunted Mansion, as it was now officially was being called,
would be open to guests and haunts. So a little
bit of let's light a fire under ourselves to get
this done, and also a little bit maybe putting some
of the cart before the horse. Yeah, I mean, they
(04:28):
were throttled by the deadline, and so construction really did
kind of catapult forward, but even so it was not
quite at the pace that was hoped for. UH, And
while the exterior of the Haunted Mansion was in place
pristine by the way, they went with Walt's pristine plan,
which is not really a surprise. UH. In ninety three,
the exterior was completely done, but the interior was far
(04:50):
from finished. Walt asked Martins Sklar to come up with
copy for a real estate sign that would be inviting
ghosts to move into this home in Disneyland. And here's
the sign that appeared outside the empty building. Do you
want to read this? I bet you like it? Sure? Uh.
It reads Notice All ghosts and restless spirits post lifetime
(05:15):
leases are now available in this haunted mansion. Don't be
left out in the sunshine. Enjoy active retirement in this
country club atmosphere for the fashionable address for famous ghosts,
ghosts trying to make a name for themselves, and ghosts
afraid to live by themselves. Leases include license to scare
the daylights out of guests visiting the Portrait Gallery, Museum
(05:36):
of the Supernatural, Graveyard and other happy haunting grounds. For reservations,
send resume of past experience to Ghost Relations Department, Disneyland.
Please do not apply in person. I love that it's
so charming. So things were behind schedule at this point,
but they were progressing along. Guests were getting at least
(05:58):
a little sense of the flavor of the attraction because
the exterior was there, and so things were kind of
back on course. But then they were put on hold
again when Walt agreed to build four attractions for the
nineteen sixty four to nineteen sixty five World's Fair. Yeah,
and this is an interesting one as a brief aside.
I have heard people say before when you're talking about
(06:20):
disney history like you do, which I do. Uh, there's
often this misconception that the World's Fair actually came before
Disneyland opened, and that because some of the pieces that
Walt worked on for the World's Fair moved into Disneyland.
I think there's been this confusion about the timing of
when Disneyland happened, but in fact it was up and running.
(06:41):
They just paused on all current projects. Um, because those
four projects that Walt was doing for the World's Fair
ate up all of his time and all of the
time of the designers and artists that he routinely used,
because he had put them all to work on these
World's Fair projects. Uh. So every project for Disneyland that
was on, including the Haunted Mansion, was just going to
(07:02):
have to wait until the attractions for the New York
displays were complete. Once the World's Fair projects were completed,
it was time to go back to the Haunted Mansion.
So in July nineteen sixty four, the team was reassembled
and it shuffled around a little bit. Ken Anderson had
gone back to work in the studios, but Rolly Crump
and Yale Gracie returned to the mansion, and Walt added
(07:24):
Mark Davis, Claude Coats, and x Attencio to the mix.
X is short for Xavier Um and Mark Davis, who
had worked on other Disneyland attractions, was tasked with creating
the inhabitants of the mansion, so the ghosts were under
him UH. Claude Coates put his skills as a background
artist to work UH designing the environments throughout the attraction,
(07:48):
and x Atencio worked on the script. He had just
done one for Pirates of the Caribbean, so every member
had a role to play and assigned duties. But they
were starting with that kind of a clean slate story eyes,
so initially they were all coming up with pitches for
different versions of the story that would run the Hide Mansion. Yeah,
and uh, just for clarification, so really Crump and um
(08:11):
Yale Gracie were still working on effects, so we didn't
mention them, but they were all still working on it. Uh.
And there was another major element of this reboot of
the project and that they had decided to add an omnimover,
which is a car system rather than a walk through
as had originally been envisioned, so that they could keep
people moving through this attraction at the rate of thousands
(08:32):
of people per hour. So that's how the Doom Buggies
were formed, uh, which are the cars that go through
the Haunta Mansion. And one of the installations that Disney
and his team had done for the World's Fair was
this people mover that had been developed in conjunction with
the Ford Motor Company. Uh. And it was basically this
omnimover system, and that had been a really great success
(08:52):
at the World's Fair. So it pretty quickly was that
concept was adopted over not just into the Haunted Mansion,
but in several places in Disney. That's a common element
that you will see. And there's still a people mover
magic Kingdom. Oh, it's a magic kingdom. You were right,
I was smashing them all in my head together. Well,
it seems it's in Tomorrowland, which is a little futuristic,
(09:14):
so people, it's easy to do that and slip it
over to like Epcot's Future World. Yeah, it's a great
place to take a break, especially if it's hot out
to eat a nice cruel ride. You get to go
inside some of the attractions while you just sit placidly
pretty much anything that involves sitting in a boat or
sitting in a little car. Yeah, for like ten minutes,
about ten minutes awesome. Yes, really, Crump's work when they
(09:37):
were working on concepts was way outside of what the
other men were working on, and even he admitted when
Watt was reviewing everybody's work but didn't know how it
fit into the attraction. He had designed things like a
melting candleman and a sentient walking chair. Yeah. So, as
they were all pitching these new versions of the Haunted
Mansion story and like how it would all go together
(09:59):
in terms a uh continuous thematic thread, Roly Crump was
just drawing these bizarre things that no one knew what
to do it. He was off in his own world
of weird, weird kind of I mean, he's still alive
today and he talks about it a lot. Uh But yeah,
his style of art is really unique. Um. It's now
(10:20):
pretty much accepted that he his some of his crazy
designs are what led to the famous Dama squallpaper that's
got the eyeballs in the Haunted Mansion. For a while,
it was a matter of debate over where that actually
came from. But if you look at some of his
early sketches and some of these works, he was puzzling
over its very similar style to some of the pieces there. Um.
(10:41):
And so after having done this review where Roly Crump
is like, I don't know how it fits in. It's
I'm just spitballing weird things that I think are you know,
a little bit more new and interesting than the standard
like Haunted Mansion. Fair um, because you know, he didn't
want to do the same stuff that any other haunted
house would have. He won a unique and interesting and
outside of what people had experienced before. Uh So, apparently
(11:06):
after not sleeping on it, just interviews with Crump, he
loves to tell this story and he specifically always mentions
that when uh Waltz comes to see him the next morning,
that he was actually there before really Crump got there,
sitting in his chair. He was wearing the same clothes
as the day before, and said that he couldn't get
any sleep because he was thinking about what to do
with these designs. Walt had decided at that point that
(11:29):
Role's designs were going to be part of what he
called a museum of the weird that would fall at
the end of the attraction as guest exited, and that
they could walk through at their own pace, so kind
of the way that people um will know, now, many
rides in any Disney park will kind of shoot you
out into a gift shop. This was going to shoot
you out into this weird museum Roly Crump's Museum of
(11:51):
the Weird. Once Crump had been tasked with making this
museum show, he came up with all kinds of odd
and wonderful things for it. He pulled out things he'd
worked on earlier in the attractions development process and embellished
their designs, and he envisioned lots of things that will
kind of ring familiar to those who've been to the
Haunted Mansion. In Disneyland or disney World, like a seance
(12:14):
with floating furniture, marble busts whose gazes followed the guests,
portraits that morphed and changed before people's eyes. There was
even a haunted fortune teller's cart. Shall we get back
to the Haunted Mansion? Nothing would please be more so
much so all Disneyland projects, including the Haunted Mansion, went
(12:36):
back on hold again when it was time for the
installations of the World's Fair to be moved into their
permanent residence in Disneyland, and even after the task was completed,
other projects were then prioritized over the now basically beleaguered
Haunted Mansion. Yeah. This poor things been going on forever.
They just were trying to drag it to the finish line.
(12:57):
Empty buildings standing there with a sign in front of it,
what you can go in because there's not stuff in
it yet. People are like, wasn't this supposed to be
years ago? Yes? Uh, And then things kind of take
a really rough turn. At this point, Pirates of the
Caribbean is under construction and almost complete, I think, uh.
Tomorrowland was being refurbished. Work on a second park in
(13:20):
Florida was underway and Walt died, and to some people
it seemed very sudden, But I think it's one of
those cases where he never talked about being sick. Uh.
He had undergone a surgery in November of nineteen sixty
six to remove a tumor in his lung that had
been discovered when he went in for treatment of a
neck injury that he had gotten from a sporting injury. Uh.
And then just that following month, December fifteenth of that
(13:42):
same year, he died of acute circulatory collapse that was
associated with his lung cancer. So this was really just
emotionally devastating for the people who worked for him, And
losing Walt meant that there was no longer a referee
in the whole Haunted Mansion project, which had always had
a problem bloom of just big personalities clashing and disagreeing
(14:03):
over how to do things. Yeah, and especially when it's
set up in that way where you have a lot
of really brilliant people and you're like, everybody pitched me
a new version of this, and they all want there's
to be the one that goes forward. Of course, it
could be contentious, um and with or w E d
leadership felt that the best solution at this point was
to put the team of Mark Davis and Claude Coats
(14:24):
in charge of the mansion. Uh. At this point, the
Haunt the Pirates of the Caribbean had launched, and they
had worked a lot on it and it had been
very successful, so they seemed like the ideal team. However,
it turned out that after that big success, each of
the men kind of felt like he should be the
one that was in charge, with the other taking a
secondary management role. And you can imagine how well that
(14:47):
played out. Yeah, at this point there had been a
decade of exasperating on again, off again production. Then there
was the grief over the loss of Disney. The head
betting of the two leaders created this perfect storm for
what had become really one of the most contentious battles
in Disney imagineering history. It sounds silly, but the question
(15:09):
of whether the Haunted Mansion should be funny or scary
caused these huge arguments and a giant split in the
development team. Yeah, Mark Davis really preferred more of the funny,
character driven stuff, whereas Coats, who was an environmental designer,
wanted it to be about spooky scary erie, and because
(15:29):
they were having such a hard time co managing this project,
it just became this tug of war between these two
concepts and designers were kind of lining up on either
side of the debate, and it really was just constant
bickering over something. It seems so small, but you can
see how when the stakes are high, because it is
a thing that's gone on forever, you have just lost
(15:50):
your leader, you are a little chuffed with your you know, success,
and feel like you're not maybe not getting as much
credit as you want. You could see how it could
quickly become this boilerpot, especially with a bunch of creative people. Well,
I'm a creative people. I'm married to a creative person,
and I know we can have some temper. Yeah, you
(16:10):
know what I think is funny. What the jump scare
at the very beginning of the ride, when all the
little kids completely lose their minds. This is because I'm
a terrible person. No, it's fun. It is fun. I
mean it's you're kind of enjoying everyone experiencing it, and
for some people it is the terror of it. And
it's that's part of like what makes any haunted house
(16:32):
like kind of fun is watching people freak out, so
I understand, So how do they get over this? Holly? Well, eventually,
um Dick Irvine, Richard Irvine, who was the w e
D Vice president of design, he kind of sided more
with Mark Davis's vision and so at least verbally, that
was how it settled. But even so, the attraction kind
(16:52):
of is segmented, and if you think about it when
you go through it, it's almost like, here's the cloud
Coats part, Here's some Art Davis part. Um Coats's vision
for the Moody and Creepy is really more the first
half of the ride, like when you're going through all
those environments and you're seeing you know, the creepy coffin
with the guy talking out of it and the long
(17:13):
hallway trip, and there aren't a lot of characters about.
There are a lot of like ghosts that you see
you have like this about mood like the doors that
are knocking themselves exactly. And then the second half becomes
more about the characters and the illusions that Mark Davis
was really a fan of. So that's when you start
seeing the ghosts in the ballroom and um, you know
(17:35):
Leota Seance and all of those elements and the big
Pepper's ghost illusion, which is the ballroom. Um, that's when
all of that happens. So it's kind of like the
ambiance portion at the front and then the funner we're
gonna set the stage and then we're gonna have a story. Yeah,
and some people have even said likes a this kind
(17:58):
of set up a perfect like act break to the
story of the Haunted Mansion that it did break out
in that way that one half favors one design philosophy
and one half favors the other. So this was only
Extensio's second ride script. Before he had written the script
for Pirates, he had been a storyboard artist who worked
in the story department at Disney Studios, and it failed
(18:19):
him to find some kind of way to marry all
these disparate elements that had been thrown out by this
team that was of two different kind of incompatible stylistic minds. Yeah,
poor guy like makes sense of this. We've built it,
figure something out well, and you and I both edit
as some of our work here. Yeah, we know that
(18:41):
feeling of when you get something that is like somebody
sent you their notes salad and you're like how do
I make this note salad into a thing one thing
that's not note salad. Now picture two note salads and
they argue with each other, and you have to find
a way to make peace. And if you've ever seen
interviews with Extensio, I have to say I can see
(19:05):
where he was the perfect person for this job because
he has a very um, calm demeanor. He seems very
you know, sweet and earnest, uh, but also extremely smart.
And so you can see where and and he'll talk
about often how you know Walt Disney one of his
greatest um, what Extencio feels is one of Disney's greatest
(19:26):
triumphs was that he could see what people were capable of,
even if they had never done it and didn't know
they could. Uh. And so that's kind of how he
became a scriptwriter on shows. Disney just said, I think
you're the guy to do this, and he's like, I
don't know how to do this, You'll be fine, and
he was. Uh. And so in the end he drew
inspiration from that real estate signed copy that Marty Sclar
had written, and so that's how he wove the story
(19:49):
of the Nine Happy Haunts throughout the Haunted Mansion that
are ready to recruit number one thousand, and it could
be you. So all the way from the stretching Portrait
Room to the a hiking ghosts, it's all about, you know,
these many different spirits that have made their home in
the Haunted Mansion, and how they would love to invite
another member, which I think it's kind of fabulous and
(20:12):
an ingenious solution to this problem. Well, and it wound
up being a really memorable one. Yeah. I've been to
Disney twice in my life, once when I was five
and once when I was in my late thirties. Uh.
And from that five year old men, you watch me
freak out and um one of the because you know,
(20:35):
you don't remember giant piles of stuff when you were five. Yeah,
it's usually impress kind of piecemeal. And one of the
few absolutely clear memories I have of Disney from the
trip when I was five was the hitchhiking ghosts in
the Haunted Mansion. Yes, they're very lovable. I think I
was quite concerned that one of them actually was coming
home with me. I'm always quite sad that they're not
(20:57):
in the car when I leave, Like Phinny has come
on so At Long Last on August nine, nineteen sixty nine,
more than eighteen years after the product had started, and
six years after the empty house that appeared on in
(21:17):
a corner of Disneyland, finally the Haunted Mansion opened its doors. Yeah,
if you ever want perspective on a work project, just remember,
like Golf was doing his designs, his first sketches in
I also want to gripe away less about like video games,
they get perpetually delayed or maybe never happened. Usually that
(21:38):
does not go on for eighteen years. Yeah, that's it's
a long time. And I can only and I think
that also led to kind of some of the I mean,
we we talked about it tying in, but I can
only imagine the fever pitch of potential frustration and just
taught nerves by the end of it. While they're having
all those arguments about the style of it, and they've
(22:00):
just put on this project for some of them a
decade or more. Just be they just probably want it
done and they want to go home and have a
life that has nothing to do with the Haunt. I maasion,
but it was immensely successful from day one. There are
photographs from day one where you can just see the
crowd just the line goes on forever. Uh. And a
week later, the Haunted Mansion set a single day attendance
(22:23):
record a two thousand, five hundred and sixteen guests went
through its doors one day. I have a hard time
imagining that many people. That's how that works. So there
was a rumor leading up to the opening that one
of the reporters at a press viewing had had a
heart attack and died, causing the ride to be redesigned
(22:43):
at the last minute. Extencio has said that the preview
period for attractions always reveals some problems that need tweaking,
but no, no one died of fright. One of the
early tweaks to the ride was the removal of a
character that is now referred to as the hat Box Ghost.
And this is one that if you are into Disney,
(23:04):
particularly if you're into the Haunted Mansion, you know about. Uh.
This featured an elderly looking ghost that was holding, surprise
a hat box, and his head was supposed to vanish
off of his shoulders and then appear in the hat
box and then switch back again. But the illusion never
worked quite right. It didn't work as planned at the
angle at which guests we're seeing it in the place
(23:25):
that it was meant to go in the mansion from
their doom buggies. So it just never worked well enough
and they ended up pulling it really quickly because they
didn't want a mediocre effect. Um. And as I said,
the hat Box Ghost is now immensely popular amongst Hana
Mansion fans. Uh. An updated version of it appeared at
d twenty three, which is the official Disney convention, just
(23:46):
last month, so this summer, and there have been rumors
that if Guermo del Toro's Haunted Mansion movie ever comes
to Fruition, which is another on again, off again, on again,
off again, people say it's canceled. Guerma Deltora will stand
in an interview. No, we're still working on it, so
we don't really know, uh. But the rumors that the
good old hat Box Ghost will be prominently featured. But
(24:06):
what plans, if any, Disney really has for the character
is not known to the public at this time to
the best of my knowledge. So hopefully hat Box comes back.
There is a I think there is a site called well,
I know that there's a site called Doom Buggies dot Com,
and I think they have a picture that someone managed
to take very early on in those either preview days
(24:27):
or one of the first days that it was open
before it got pulled, where you can see what the
hat box ghost looks like. Nice. He's very popular. Versions
of the Haunted Mansion have been installed in Walt Disney
World in Florida and Tokyo Disneyland. Reimagined versions of the
attraction appear in Disneyland, Paris and Hong Kong. Disneyland. Phantom
Manner in Paris is set in a wild West mining town,
(24:50):
and Mystic Manner in Hong Kong has an adventurer kind
of World Explorer theme. Yeah, it's almost for people that
have been to Disney in year prior. This place is
now closed, but there used to be a place in
downtown Disney called the Adventurers Club, which is kind of
like an old school hunting club, like the place you
would expect to see Hemingway hanging out. Uh. And the
(25:12):
Mystic Manner is almost like a marriage of that concept
and the Haunted Mansion idea, so they they have slightly
different twists. The Phantom Manner is fascinating and it has
really good music. Mystic manner has music done by Danny Elfman,
so you know it's awesome. Each holiday season, the original
Anaheim Hanted Mansion and the Tokyo Disneyland Haunted Mansion. Uh,
(25:33):
they both get a nightmare before Christmas overlay, which is
called Haunted Mansion Holiday, and so from roughly the beginning
of October through the end of the year and usually
the first couple of days of January, instead of going
and seeing the usual haunts that you would see on
the attraction, the visitors get to see Jack and Sally
and Zero and Oogie Boogee and the rest of the
inhabitants of Halloween Town because it's kind of turned into
(25:54):
a Halloween Town situation and it is amazing. I cried
the first time I was on, and I'm not embarrassed
to tell you because I also a love nightmare before Christmas. Um,
it's lovely. I wish I could go every year, but
I never managed to do so. So UH. Probably will
not be a surprise to anyone that there have been many,
many claims of actual ghost sightings in the various Haunted
(26:14):
Mansions around the world, both by guests and by cast members.
He and there's always the stories of people scattering ashes
in the mansion. I don't like that idea, no, and
Disney doesn't either. I don't know if there have ever
been any confirmed ones, but uh, you'll hear kind of
apocryphal stories where people are like, no, we vacuum that
(26:36):
right up. Um, So if you think you might want
to do that, no, that you're not really know they're
going to end up in a vacuum. And that seems
inconsiderate of other Yea, yeah, it's not good, you know.
I don't want to dis on how people choose to
express their grief and their wishes of loved ones. I
do not really approve of the idea of getting are
(27:00):
people's remains on me? While I didn't right, I understand
there's no where I would rather be scattered, but you
know the rules. Uh. And what is missing in this
final build of the Haunted Mansion was Raley Crump's Museum
of the Weird because as they were, you know, really
ramping up towards the last chunk of production, they realized
(27:21):
it wasn't gonna work. Um, so it got scrapped. But
many of his ideas for the museum are in the
attraction itself. Uh And as we mentioned, like the seance
room with the floating furniture that was his idea originally.
The busts that follow people, which is a really cool trick.
They're actually cast in recess, so they're set back and
(27:43):
it's just kind of a natural cool effect that when
you go by the way they're painted, they look like
they're bus standing outside, but they're actually a negative and
it looks like they're following you. It's awesome. Um And
what's interesting is that, um there isn't some of the parks,
there's a souvenir stand outside because it doesn't dump out
(28:03):
into a gift shop, and the souvenir stand looks a
lot like really Crump's haunted fortune teller cart, which is
kind of fun. And that's another thing that there have
been rumblings about through the years that the Museum of
the Weird is being kicked around as a possible starting
point for a full length feature film, script, that it's
going to be incorporated into a video game. There have
(28:23):
even been rumors that it's going to be its own
attraction eventually, but so far those have not materialized. There's
a story I think that l a times ran like
three years ago that Ahmed Zappa was working on a
script treatment about it, and then Disney was like no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
that's not happening. So you know, there's there's always more
to talk about, imagine more. Yeah, I mean, we've hit
(28:47):
on some of the higher points, but there's so much
story there in legacy, and because so many of those
imagineers are still with us and are often, um, you know,
make appearances or do interviews. Really Crump's book came out
at the end of last year, and it's quite fun.
He's kind of a pistol. He's got an interesting history
both in and outside of Disney, and you know, he's
(29:08):
led a wildlife in many ways, and he doesn't really
hold back. He's very fun Excitencia, like I said, just
comes across as the sweetest man you would ever want
to meet on the planet. And they love to wax
repsodic and talk about the old times and working on
this project. And I'm sure it was a trial by fire,
but they still seem to look back at it kind
of lovingly because they recognize what it became. Yeah, if
(29:29):
I had been working at Disney in the in the fifties.
I'm sure I would be waxing repsodic about that all
the time, even if it was really hard, because of
what it grew into. Yeah, and it does sound like
it again. It's one of those things where we see
it today and it's a huge, massive company. And you know,
uh many people talk about how they their dream job
(29:52):
would be to work for Disney, and it was even
for these guys. But I think people don't realize it
wasn't like you instantly get rich. Like I was watching
an interview with Roly Crump not too long ago, and
he was saying when he got hired at Disney, they
offered him less than half of what he was making
working in uh I think a ceramic tile factory. And
he was like, I have a kid on the way,
I don't know what to do. Man, I really want
(30:14):
to work for Disney. Uh So he took it, and
he had to take a second job. Like I mean,
these weren't like Pie in the Sky, super dreamy, easy
coasting jobs. They worked really really hard. So I could see,
we're looking back, he would be very proud of that
work because you really had to be committed. Uh So
that's our We'll let the haunts rest for now. Yeah,
do you have some listener mail would do this? That
(30:36):
makes me laugh, which is sort of me now that
I think about it, But it is from our listener Will,
and he's talking about our episode on the Nasca Lines,
and he says, I actually have a related story about
the Nasca Lines that I wanted to share when I
heard you mentioned wanting to view them in person yourselves.
Last summer, I traveled with my girlfriend's family to Peru
(30:56):
for a three week trip. For her family, it was
mostly about rek connecting with family, friends, and heritage since
her parents immigrated to the U s from Peru in
the early nineteen eighties. On top of this, we also
did a lot of the typical tourist ventures, including touring
the Valsa Garado near Cusco and hiking Machu Picchu. The food,
the people, and the sites were stunning and it was
simply an amazing experience. One of the final day trips
(31:18):
we did involved a lengthy Van rhyne down to the
small town of Nasca from Lima. In order to do
aerial viewings of the lines. We had to go in
two groups because the largest plane available was a small,
six person Cessna, so there were two seats that were
for the pilot and the co pilot, and the rest
was people from their group. He says, while everyone else
was cautious and took drama being prior to the flight,
(31:40):
I decided I didn't need to. I never get motion sickness,
and I used to spend most of my summers working
on the water. Unfortunately, my confidence lasted all of about
ten minutes once we were in the air. My girlfriend,
her sister, and her brother in law all enjoyed the
flight and took plenty of pictures. I could only manage
a couple of pictures, and then I had to stare
at the horizon most of the time to keep from
(32:00):
getting too nauseous. The views were stunning, but my mind
and body were distracted by the constant swaying and bucking
of the tiny plane. Also, since drama mean makes you
very drowsy, I spent the majority of the two mile
drive back to Lima. Is the only one to wake
besides the driver. So if you ever go on this flight,
yes it's worth it, but make sure to take some
drama means so you can enjoy the whole thing and
(32:20):
not have to keep assuring your group or significant other
that you're fine despite that sickly look on your face.
I love this. Thank you for the work you do
on the podcasts. So he mentions that he would like
to hear some of these things about African history. So
we uh so it's so cool. Well, I'm so sorry.
This is sort of um. The the treachery of those
(32:41):
ones in a lifetime trips is that you can't do
a rehearsal right, and sometimes your body, because you're traveling,
it won't even react the way it normally would know.
And I uh, I have a weird threshold for motion
signats like I've I've been on a ship before that
was fine, and then a different ship before that was
not fine. I empathize with the motion sick. It is
(33:06):
why I can never ride Star tours again in my life,
and probably cannot go on the Hogwarts ride at the
Harry Potter World. Yeah, I am. I have had almost
the identical thing to him, not on a cool tourism thing,
but I go deep sea fishing usually every year with
my dad, that boat rocking. I'm usually the only one
(33:27):
that's not getting sick. We've had some really good luck
to a couple of times at the weather, but I
seem to be okay on those. But I remember taking
a small puddle hopper plane with my husband back from
a trip to Disney World. Actually we were making a
connecting flight from Orlando to Tampa and then picking up
our flight to Atlanta. I have no idea why we
book that. Were like, why are you doing this? It
(33:48):
was probably really cheap, but I just remember my husband
looking at me and going, I've never seen a person
actually turned green before, because you were like cartoon bugs,
bunny green pale. I was like, yeah, I don't know.
Sometimes I'm fine. That one was that we did fly
through a thunderstorm, I should say, so there was a
(34:09):
lot of shug sugar sugar going on, but no one
else seemed to have the problems. So sometimes it's hard
to predict. And I've been on small place before and
not gotten that. And your body doesn't always do what
you think it will. Unfortunately, if you would like to
write to us, yeah, tell us about your motion, sickness,
maybe not other things you can. I'm fine. I hope
(34:30):
my laughing does not make will feel bad, because I'm
not laughing at his um discomfort. I'm just laughing into
fact that you cannot predict life and even your body,
which you would think you would know better than anything
else in the world. Well, and I have enormous empathy
for the motion sick. Yeah, and I have both been
motion sick. But if you want to write to us,
do so at History Podcast at discovery dot com. You
(34:52):
can also connect with us on Twitter at missed in History,
and you can visit us on Facebook at Facebook dot
com slash his reclass stuff. We are also on tumbler
at missed in History dot tumbler dot com, and we're
panning away on Pinterest. If you would like to learn
a little bit more about part of what we talked
about today, you can go to our website and uh
(35:12):
do a search for Walt Disney and one of the
interesting articles you will get is fifteen notable people who
dropped out of school because he did and yet went
on to a life of great accomplishment. If you would
like to learn more about that, or anything else that
you can think of, you should do that at our website,
which is how Stuff Works dot com for more on
(35:33):
this and thousands of other topics. Because it has to
works dot com, Audible dot com is the leading provider
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Hosts And Creators
Tracy V. Wilson
Holly Frey
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