[Dark Shadows] Episode 813: Happy Haunts

[Ubiquitous]

“It suddenly occurred to me that you might be telling the
truth.”

Meanwhile, in the other spooky old haunted house of the American
imagination, 999 restless spirits were settling into their new digs
on the opposite coast.

This is the week that Disneyland opened the Haunted Mansion, a
long-awaited E-ticket attraction that invites theme park guests to
tour a post-mortem retirement home for the corporeally liberated.
This is the old house, abandoned by the family after the dark and
terrible tragedies of the distant past, now left available for
whatever ghouls care to move in and set up housekeeping. I wonder if
Quentin knows about this one?

To be honest, the Haunted Mansion has nothing to do with Dark
Shadows, but I love Disneyland, and there’s no way I’m going to
ignore the other spook sensation of ’69.

Now, the Mansion may have opened its doors three years into Dark
Shadows’ run, but the idea of a haunted house at Disneyland goes
back to 1957, a couple years after the park opened in Anaheim,
California. In the early days of Disneyland, there was an area
called Magnolia Park, sort of a transitional space along the Rivers
of America between Adventureland and Frontierland. Walt Disney
decided to build up this zone into its own themed land, New Orleans
Square, which would include restaurants, shops and a haunted house.
Excited by the idea, they included New Orleans Square on the
official Disneyland maps in 1958, with a haunted house in the
middle.

Unfortunately, they didn’t really have a good plan for what to do
with a haunted house attraction. Also, they didn’t end up putting
New Orleans Square there. They were making things up as they went
along, and sometimes the maps had bloopers.

The original idea for the haunted house was a guided walk-through
attraction, with a butler leading a group of guests through the
mansion, where things would get progressively scarier until the
guests were hastily ushered out through a secret panel. There were a
bunch of early treatments, and most of them involved a murdered
bride and the ghost of a wicked sea captain.

It was always about ghosts, right from the start; they never
considered a Dark Shadows-style mix of vampires, werewolves and
witches. They probably thought of that as a cheap Halloween
experience, the kind of thing that anyone could put together for a
carnival. Disneyland’s ghost house was going to be open year round,
and it needed to tell a coherent story.

The original drawings showed a broken-down, dilapidated old mansion,
but Walt said that he didn’t want guests strolling along the Rivers
of America to see what looked like an abandoned house in the middle
of Disneyland. “We’ll take care of the outside,” Walt decided, “and
let the ghosts take care of the inside.”

But they couldn’t make the story work. The Imagineers mocked up
dozens of promising special effects, but it didn’t come together.
One problem was that the walking tour seemed like a hassle — you’d
have to get all of the guests into the room, close the door, do the
effects, and then get them all out of the room before you could
bring in the next group. One frightened kid having a meltdown would
hold everyone up. The project was put on hold at the end of 1959.

By 1961, plans for the Haunted Mansion were back on the table.
Magnolia Park had been taken over by an expansion of the Jungle
Cruise, but they built New Orleans Square a little further down the
river. They started building the mansion exterior in 1962, and
announced that the attraction would be open by 1963 — but they still
couldn’t agree on the story.

The most promising idea was for the tour group to be led by a
disembodied Ghost Host, who told the story of a bride and her
fiancee murdered in the house before the wedding. At the end of the
walk-through, the Ghost Host would appear in person, revealing that
he was the killer, who hung himself in the attic after murdering the
couple. Or it was something like that. They went through a lot of
versions.

Besides, the walk-through idea was still a problem. They finished
the facade in ’63, but the doors wouldn’t creak open for another six
years.

By the late 60s, increasing crowd capacity was a major concern at
Disneyland. They opened Pirates of the Caribbean in 1967, and it was
a huge success — a clever story, spectacular visuals, state of the
art animatronics, plus they could literally send boatloads of people
through the ride. If they were finally going to open the Haunted
Mansion, then it needed to be a “people-eater” like Pirates, and a
walking tour wasn’t going to cut it.

The answer turned out to be a new ride system called the Omnimover,
which they’d just developed for another 1967 attraction, Adventure
Thru Inner Space. This Tomorrowland attraction shrunk guests down to
the size of an atom, and took them on a trip through the molecules
of a snowflake. To achieve the illusion, the Imagineers needed to
direct the guests’ attention to precisely the right place as they
moved through the show. The Omnimovers run on a constantly-moving
endless loop, and the individual cars are programmed to swivel and
tilt so that the guests are always looking where they’re supposed to
be.

At the Haunted Mansion, the Omnimover cars were nicknamed
“Doombuggies,” and the constant flow along the track turned the
attraction into the people-eater they needed.

The final Haunted Mansion ride is a collaboration between two lead
designers — animator Marc Davis and background artist Claude Coats,
who had just wrapped Pirates of the Caribbean. But they couldn’t
agree on the attraction’s tone — Davis wanted a funny attraction
with lots of gags and characters, while Coats wanted to make it a
scary ride, traveling through a spooky environment. Coats was the
Ron Sproat to Davis’ Sam Hall, so to speak, except that Coats was
good at his job.

Scriptwriter X Atencio ended up settling the argument by splitting
the attraction into two parts. The first half is Coats, and Davis
owns the second half.

Haunted Mansion elevator

The attraction begins with a clever trick. The Mansion itself is
just the entrance — the ride is too big to fit in that facade, so
the actual show building is hidden on the other side of the railroad
tracks.

When you enter the Mansion, you’re shown into a parlor decorated
with four portraits of the family members who once lived in the
house. As you watch, the portraits stretch — and reveal the gruesome
fates of the unhappy family. The trick is that the roof isn’t rising
— the platform that you’re standing on is descending, taking you
underground. Then you walk along the portrait gallery — which takes
you under the railroad tracks — and board the Doombuggies, which
carry you into the show building.

The first half of the show is Claude Coats’ spooky version —
traveling through dark, sinister hallways. The doorknobs are
rattling, something is trying to break out and get at you. The
grandfather clock is striking thirteen, and looks like it might fall
on you. Even the wallpaper is glaring at you.

Once you pass Madame Leota’s seance circle, the ghosts come out to
play — and that’s Marc Davis’ half of the attraction, filled with
funny ghost characters and sight gags. You pass through a Grand Hall
full of partying spirits, then travel up into the attic and out the
window, into a backyard graveyard where the happy haunts sing their
endless anthem, “Grim Grinning Ghosts”.

The interesting thing about Marc Davis’ ghosts is that they’re super
pleased to be dead — they’re not tormented spirits lamenting their
fates. They’re happy haunts, grinning ghosts. Dying is the best
thing that ever happened to these people. The feeling is infectious
— as soon as you get off, you want to go through and ride it again.

And like all the best Disney theme park attractions, the Haunted
Mansion is designed to be a repeatable experience. There’s way more
going on than you could possibly see on one trip, which means that
every ride is different, and no matter how many times you’ve been
there, you might see something that you’ve never noticed before.

So what does all this have to do with our vampire soap opera? Well,
the Haunted Mansion and Dark Shadows are both asking the same
question: how do you tell a scary story in a way that people will
eagerly want to come back to, again and again?

Dark Shadows wants to make you tense and uneasy, but they also want
you to tune in tomorrow for another half-hour. In the same way, The
Haunted Mansion actively calls you back for another spin — as you
exit the ride, Madame Leota croons, “Hurry back… hurry back… Be sure
to bring your death certificate…”

And they both solved that problem in pretty much the same way: by
doing a lot of different things at once. Like Dark Shadows, the
Haunted Mansion isn’t the product of one genius auteur, who designed
it from start to finish. Over more than ten years, dozens of people
contributed to the attraction that finally opened its doors in the
summer of ’69. There were bold plans, blind alleys and happy
accidents, and they figured it out as they went along.

Oh, and there might be a little bit of Dark Shadows in the Mansion
after all. There’s a really smart blog about the Haunted Mansion
called Long-Forgotten, which makes a well-researched and plausible
argument that the transformation of Josette’s portrait in episode
405 may have inspired one of the changing pictures in the Haunted
Mansion’s portrait gallery. The dates match up, too.

Maybe sometime after April Third, Josette’s restless spirit managed
to find a new home in New Orleans Square. Stranger things have
happened. Who knows? Maybe they’re still happening.

Tomorrow: Another Thing Coming.


Footnote:

If you want to learn more about Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion and its
counterparts in Florida, Paris, Tokyo and Hong Kong, there’s a great
book you should check out: The Haunted Mansion: Imagineering a
Disney Classic, by Jason Surrell.


Dark Shadows bloopers to watch out for:

Tim stumbles on a line in the teaser: “Well, this is very dear to
me, I need it to be kept in a very — in a very appropriate place.”

Aristede says, “Let’s go pay Tim Shaw a visit!” Petofi responds,
“No, I don’t think — you don’t think it would be that easy, do you?”

At the beginning of act 2, Aristede rubs his palm and then his
fingers on his knife, the Dancing Girl. If it was sharp at all, he’d
cut himself.

When Tim and Petofi talk about Aristede, Tim steps on Petofi’s line.

Aristede tells Petofi, “It seems that Tim Shaw took a carton out of
the hotel — out of the Inn this evening!”

Nora reminds Jamison that Tim and Charity “never got along very
well” — but they were engaged, the whole time that Nora knew Tim.


Behind the Scenes:

This episode was skipped when it aired in syndication on public TV
stations in the 1980s. The video master was missing, and the
syndication company, Worldvision, didn’t realize that there was a
black-and-white kinescope available. The kinescope copy was found
when Dark Shadows was licensed to MPI for home video release in
1989. There are just two more kinescope episodes left in the series
— episodes 1006 and 1017.

Tomorrow: Another Thing Coming.


--
Democrat Primary choices:
1. An out-of-touch crusty old relic that wants to tax you to death
2. Bernie Sanders.

[[e-mail]]

Post by Ubiquitous
“It suddenly occurred to me that you might be telling the
truth.”
Meanwhile, in the other spooky old haunted house of the American
imagination, 999 restless spirits were settling into their new digs
on the opposite coast.
This is the week that Disneyland opened the Haunted Mansion, a
long-awaited E-ticket attraction that invites theme park guests to
tour a post-mortem retirement home for the corporeally liberated.
This is the old house, abandoned by the family after the dark and
terrible tragedies of the distant past, now left available for
whatever ghouls care to move in and set up housekeeping. I wonder if
Quentin knows about this one?
To be honest, the Haunted Mansion has nothing to do with Dark
Shadows, but I love Disneyland, and there’s no way I’m going to
ignore the other spook sensation of ’69.
Now, the Mansion may have opened its doors three years into Dark
Shadows’ run, but the idea of a haunted house at Disneyland goes
back to 1957, a couple years after the park opened in Anaheim,
California. In the early days of Disneyland, there was an area
called Magnolia Park, sort of a transitional space along the Rivers
of America between Adventureland and Frontierland. Walt Disney
decided to build up this zone into its own themed land, New Orleans
Square, which would include restaurants, shops and a haunted house.
Excited by the idea, they included New Orleans Square on the
official Disneyland maps in 1958, with a haunted house in the
middle.
Unfortunately, they didn’t really have a good plan for what to do
with a haunted house attraction. Also, they didn’t end up putting
New Orleans Square there. They were making things up as they went
along, and sometimes the maps had bloopers.
The original idea for the haunted house was a guided walk-through
attraction, with a butler leading a group of guests through the
mansion, where things would get progressively scarier until the
guests were hastily ushered out through a secret panel. There were a
bunch of early treatments, and most of them involved a murdered
bride and the ghost of a wicked sea captain.
It was always about ghosts, right from the start; they never
considered a Dark Shadows-style mix of vampires, werewolves and
witches. They probably thought of that as a cheap Halloween
experience, the kind of thing that anyone could put together for a
carnival. Disneyland’s ghost house was going to be open year round,
and it needed to tell a coherent story.
The original drawings showed a broken-down, dilapidated old mansion,
but Walt said that he didn’t want guests strolling along the Rivers
of America to see what looked like an abandoned house in the middle
of Disneyland. “We’ll take care of the outside,” Walt decided, “and
let the ghosts take care of the inside.”
But they couldn’t make the story work. The Imagineers mocked up
dozens of promising special effects, but it didn’t come together.
One problem was that the walking tour seemed like a hassle — you’d
have to get all of the guests into the room, close the door, do the
effects, and then get them all out of the room before you could
bring in the next group. One frightened kid having a meltdown would
hold everyone up. The project was put on hold at the end of 1959.
By 1961, plans for the Haunted Mansion were back on the table.
Magnolia Park had been taken over by an expansion of the Jungle
Cruise, but they built New Orleans Square a little further down the
river. They started building the mansion exterior in 1962, and
announced that the attraction would be open by 1963 — but they still
couldn’t agree on the story.
The most promising idea was for the tour group to be led by a
disembodied Ghost Host, who told the story of a bride and her
fiancee murdered in the house before the wedding. At the end of the
walk-through, the Ghost Host would appear in person, revealing that
he was the killer, who hung himself in the attic after murdering the
couple. Or it was something like that. They went through a lot of
versions.
Besides, the walk-through idea was still a problem. They finished
the facade in ’63, but the doors wouldn’t creak open for another six
years.
By the late 60s, increasing crowd capacity was a major concern at
Disneyland. They opened Pirates of the Caribbean in 1967, and it was
a huge success — a clever story, spectacular visuals, state of the
art animatronics, plus they could literally send boatloads of people
through the ride. If they were finally going to open the Haunted
Mansion, then it needed to be a “people-eater” like Pirates, and a
walking tour wasn’t going to cut it.
The answer turned out to be a new ride system called the Omnimover,
which they’d just developed for another 1967 attraction, Adventure
Thru Inner Space. This Tomorrowland attraction shrunk guests down to
the size of an atom, and took them on a trip through the molecules
of a snowflake. To achieve the illusion, the Imagineers needed to
direct the guests’ attention to precisely the right place as they
moved through the show. The Omnimovers run on a constantly-moving
endless loop, and the individual cars are programmed to swivel and
tilt so that the guests are always looking where they’re supposed to
be.
At the Haunted Mansion, the Omnimover cars were nicknamed
“Doombuggies,” and the constant flow along the track turned the
attraction into the people-eater they needed.
The final Haunted Mansion ride is a collaboration between two lead
designers — animator Marc Davis and background artist Claude Coats,
who had just wrapped Pirates of the Caribbean. But they couldn’t
agree on the attraction’s tone — Davis wanted a funny attraction
with lots of gags and characters, while Coats wanted to make it a
scary ride, traveling through a spooky environment. Coats was the
Ron Sproat to Davis’ Sam Hall, so to speak, except that Coats was
good at his job.
Scriptwriter X Atencio ended up settling the argument by splitting
the attraction into two parts. The first half is Coats, and Davis
owns the second half.
Haunted Mansion elevator
The attraction begins with a clever trick. The Mansion itself is
just the entrance — the ride is too big to fit in that facade, so
the actual show building is hidden on the other side of the railroad
tracks.
When you enter the Mansion, you’re shown into a parlor decorated
with four portraits of the family members who once lived in the
house. As you watch, the portraits stretch — and reveal the gruesome
fates of the unhappy family. The trick is that the roof isn’t rising
— the platform that you’re standing on is descending, taking you
underground. Then you walk along the portrait gallery — which takes
you under the railroad tracks — and board the Doombuggies, which
carry you into the show building.
The first half of the show is Claude Coats’ spooky version —
traveling through dark, sinister hallways. The doorknobs are
rattling, something is trying to break out and get at you. The
grandfather clock is striking thirteen, and looks like it might fall
on you. Even the wallpaper is glaring at you.
Once you pass Madame Leota’s seance circle, the ghosts come out to
play — and that’s Marc Davis’ half of the attraction, filled with
funny ghost characters and sight gags. You pass through a Grand Hall
full of partying spirits, then travel up into the attic and out the
window, into a backyard graveyard where the happy haunts sing their
endless anthem, “Grim Grinning Ghosts”.
The interesting thing about Marc Davis’ ghosts is that they’re super
pleased to be dead — they’re not tormented spirits lamenting their
fates. They’re happy haunts, grinning ghosts. Dying is the best
thing that ever happened to these people. The feeling is infectious
— as soon as you get off, you want to go through and ride it again.
And like all the best Disney theme park attractions, the Haunted
Mansion is designed to be a repeatable experience. There’s way more
going on than you could possibly see on one trip, which means that
every ride is different, and no matter how many times you’ve been
there, you might see something that you’ve never noticed before.
So what does all this have to do with our vampire soap opera? Well,
the Haunted Mansion and Dark Shadows are both asking the same
question: how do you tell a scary story in a way that people will
eagerly want to come back to, again and again?
Dark Shadows wants to make you tense and uneasy, but they also want
you to tune in tomorrow for another half-hour. In the same way, The
Haunted Mansion actively calls you back for another spin — as you
exit the ride, Madame Leota croons, “Hurry back… hurry back… Be sure
to bring your death certificate…”
And they both solved that problem in pretty much the same way: by
doing a lot of different things at once. Like Dark Shadows, the
Haunted Mansion isn’t the product of one genius auteur, who designed
it from start to finish. Over more than ten years, dozens of people
contributed to the attraction that finally opened its doors in the
summer of ’69. There were bold plans, blind alleys and happy
accidents, and they figured it out as they went along.
Oh, and there might be a little bit of Dark Shadows in the Mansion
after all. There’s a really smart blog about the Haunted Mansion
called Long-Forgotten, which makes a well-researched and plausible
argument that the transformation of Josette’s portrait in episode
405 may have inspired one of the changing pictures in the Haunted
Mansion’s portrait gallery. The dates match up, too.
Maybe sometime after April Third, Josette’s restless spirit managed
to find a new home in New Orleans Square. Stranger things have
happened. Who knows? Maybe they’re still happening.
Tomorrow: Another Thing Coming.
If you want to learn more about Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion and its
counterparts in Florida, Paris, Tokyo and Hong Kong, there’s a great
book you should check out: The Haunted Mansion: Imagineering a
Disney Classic, by Jason Surrell.
Tim stumbles on a line in the teaser: “Well, this is very dear to
me, I need it to be kept in a very — in a very appropriate place.”
Aristede says, “Let’s go pay Tim Shaw a visit!” Petofi responds,
“No, I don’t think — you don’t think it would be that easy, do you?”
At the beginning of act 2, Aristede rubs his palm and then his
fingers on his knife, the Dancing Girl. If it was sharp at all, he’d
cut himself.
When Tim and Petofi talk about Aristede, Tim steps on Petofi’s line.
Aristede tells Petofi, “It seems that Tim Shaw took a carton out of
the hotel — out of the Inn this evening!”
Nora reminds Jamison that Tim and Charity “never got along very
well” — but they were engaged, the whole time that Nora knew Tim.
This episode was skipped when it aired in syndication on public TV
stations in the 1980s. The video master was missing, and the
syndication company, Worldvision, didn’t realize that there was a
black-and-white kinescope available. The kinescope copy was found
when Dark Shadows was licensed to MPI for home video release in
1989. There are just two more kinescope episodes left in the series
— episodes 1006 and 1017.
Tomorrow: Another Thing Coming.
--
1. An out-of-touch crusty old relic that wants to tax you to death
2. Bernie Sanders.

That every time through is different and you see something new each
time, this is another similarity with Dark Shadows and is one reason
why the show works so well on home video. You’re always seeing other
nuances each time you view a given show. Plus the fact that in the Dark
Shadows theme park there are over 1,200 rides, and the scenery is
always changing, never really staying the same for long.

In fact, it would be great if someone could design a Collinsport theme
park. You’d have an Old House and the new Collinwood and maybe Eagle
Hill cemetery and the Collins mausoleum and a few other locations all
done to scale, though not as a series of disjointed sets that could be
crammed together in a small studio that looks like a bowling alley, but
with real exteriors as well. And, of course, after all that Collinsport
sightseeing, you’d need to cap it off by stopping in at the diner of
the Collinsport Inn for cheeseburgers and coffee.

Speaking of which, in episode 813 it’s good to see the diner set for
the Collinsport Inn back, which is what we’d expect since Tim is after
all staying at the Collinsport Inn. Though, I don’t know, the place
just isn’t the same without Maggie Evans behind the counter and Burke
Devlin around to ruffle people’s feathers. And, in 1897, it probably
didn’t even have cheeseburgers on the menu, since that particular item
didn’t become popular until the 1920s.

[jogueva2010]

Post by ***@enghouse.com

Post by Ubiquitous
“It suddenly occurred to me that you might be telling the
truth.”
Meanwhile, in the other spooky old haunted house of the American
imagination, 999 restless spirits were settling into their new digs
on the opposite coast.
This is the week that Disneyland opened the Haunted Mansion, a
long-awaited E-ticket attraction that invites theme park guests to
tour a post-mortem retirement home for the corporeally liberated.
This is the old house, abandoned by the family after the dark and
terrible tragedies of the distant past, now left available for
whatever ghouls care to move in and set up housekeeping. I wonder if
Quentin knows about this one?
To be honest, the Haunted Mansion has nothing to do with Dark
Shadows, but I love Disneyland, and there’s no way I’m going to
ignore the other spook sensation of ’69.
Now, the Mansion may have opened its doors three years into Dark
Shadows’ run, but the idea of a haunted house at Disneyland goes
back to 1957, a couple years after the park opened in Anaheim,
California. In the early days of Disneyland, there was an area
called Magnolia Park, sort of a transitional space along the Rivers
of America between Adventureland and Frontierland. Walt Disney
decided to build up this zone into its own themed land, New Orleans
Square, which would include restaurants, shops and a haunted house.
Excited by the idea, they included New Orleans Square on the
official Disneyland maps in 1958, with a haunted house in the
middle.
Unfortunately, they didn’t really have a good plan for what to do
with a haunted house attraction. Also, they didn’t end up putting
New Orleans Square there. They were making things up as they went
along, and sometimes the maps had bloopers.
The original idea for the haunted house was a guided walk-through
attraction, with a butler leading a group of guests through the
mansion, where things would get progressively scarier until the
guests were hastily ushered out through a secret panel. There were a
bunch of early treatments, and most of them involved a murdered
bride and the ghost of a wicked sea captain.
It was always about ghosts, right from the start; they never
considered a Dark Shadows-style mix of vampires, werewolves and
witches. They probably thought of that as a cheap Halloween
experience, the kind of thing that anyone could put together for a
carnival. Disneyland’s ghost house was going to be open year round,
and it needed to tell a coherent story.
The original drawings showed a broken-down, dilapidated old mansion,
but Walt said that he didn’t want guests strolling along the Rivers
of America to see what looked like an abandoned house in the middle
of Disneyland. “We’ll take care of the outside,” Walt decided, “and
let the ghosts take care of the inside.”
But they couldn’t make the story work. The Imagineers mocked up
dozens of promising special effects, but it didn’t come together.
One problem was that the walking tour seemed like a hassle — you’d
have to get all of the guests into the room, close the door, do the
effects, and then get them all out of the room before you could
bring in the next group. One frightened kid having a meltdown would
hold everyone up. The project was put on hold at the end of 1959.
By 1961, plans for the Haunted Mansion were back on the table.
Magnolia Park had been taken over by an expansion of the Jungle
Cruise, but they built New Orleans Square a little further down the
river. They started building the mansion exterior in 1962, and
announced that the attraction would be open by 1963 — but they still
couldn’t agree on the story.
The most promising idea was for the tour group to be led by a
disembodied Ghost Host, who told the story of a bride and her
fiancee murdered in the house before the wedding. At the end of the
walk-through, the Ghost Host would appear in person, revealing that
he was the killer, who hung himself in the attic after murdering the
couple. Or it was something like that. They went through a lot of
versions.
Besides, the walk-through idea was still a problem. They finished
the facade in ’63, but the doors wouldn’t creak open for another six
years.
By the late 60s, increasing crowd capacity was a major concern at
Disneyland. They opened Pirates of the Caribbean in 1967, and it was
a huge success — a clever story, spectacular visuals, state of the
art animatronics, plus they could literally send boatloads of people
through the ride. If they were finally going to open the Haunted
Mansion, then it needed to be a “people-eater” like Pirates, and a
walking tour wasn’t going to cut it.
The answer turned out to be a new ride system called the Omnimover,
which they’d just developed for another 1967 attraction, Adventure
Thru Inner Space. This Tomorrowland attraction shrunk guests down to
the size of an atom, and took them on a trip through the molecules
of a snowflake. To achieve the illusion, the Imagineers needed to
direct the guests’ attention to precisely the right place as they
moved through the show. The Omnimovers run on a constantly-moving
endless loop, and the individual cars are programmed to swivel and
tilt so that the guests are always looking where they’re supposed to
be.
At the Haunted Mansion, the Omnimover cars were nicknamed
“Doombuggies,” and the constant flow along the track turned the
attraction into the people-eater they needed.
The final Haunted Mansion ride is a collaboration between two lead
designers — animator Marc Davis and background artist Claude Coats,
who had just wrapped Pirates of the Caribbean. But they couldn’t
agree on the attraction’s tone — Davis wanted a funny attraction
with lots of gags and characters, while Coats wanted to make it a
scary ride, traveling through a spooky environment. Coats was the
Ron Sproat to Davis’ Sam Hall, so to speak, except that Coats was
good at his job.
Scriptwriter X Atencio ended up settling the argument by splitting
the attraction into two parts. The first half is Coats, and Davis
owns the second half.
Haunted Mansion elevator
The attraction begins with a clever trick. The Mansion itself is
just the entrance — the ride is too big to fit in that facade, so
the actual show building is hidden on the other side of the railroad
tracks.
When you enter the Mansion, you’re shown into a parlor decorated
with four portraits of the family members who once lived in the
house. As you watch, the portraits stretch — and reveal the gruesome
fates of the unhappy family. The trick is that the roof isn’t rising
— the platform that you’re standing on is descending, taking you
underground. Then you walk along the portrait gallery — which takes
you under the railroad tracks — and board the Doombuggies, which
carry you into the show building.
The first half of the show is Claude Coats’ spooky version —
traveling through dark, sinister hallways. The doorknobs are
rattling, something is trying to break out and get at you. The
grandfather clock is striking thirteen, and looks like it might fall
on you. Even the wallpaper is glaring at you.
Once you pass Madame Leota’s seance circle, the ghosts come out to
play — and that’s Marc Davis’ half of the attraction, filled with
funny ghost characters and sight gags. You pass through a Grand Hall
full of partying spirits, then travel up into the attic and out the
window, into a backyard graveyard where the happy haunts sing their
endless anthem, “Grim Grinning Ghosts”.
The interesting thing about Marc Davis’ ghosts is that they’re super
pleased to be dead — they’re not tormented spirits lamenting their
fates. They’re happy haunts, grinning ghosts. Dying is the best
thing that ever happened to these people. The feeling is infectious
— as soon as you get off, you want to go through and ride it again.
And like all the best Disney theme park attractions, the Haunted
Mansion is designed to be a repeatable experience. There’s way more
going on than you could possibly see on one trip, which means that
every ride is different, and no matter how many times you’ve been
there, you might see something that you’ve never noticed before.
So what does all this have to do with our vampire soap opera? Well,
the Haunted Mansion and Dark Shadows are both asking the same
question: how do you tell a scary story in a way that people will
eagerly want to come back to, again and again?
Dark Shadows wants to make you tense and uneasy, but they also want
you to tune in tomorrow for another half-hour. In the same way, The
Haunted Mansion actively calls you back for another spin — as you
exit the ride, Madame Leota croons, “Hurry back… hurry back… Be sure
to bring your death certificate…”
And they both solved that problem in pretty much the same way: by
doing a lot of different things at once. Like Dark Shadows, the
Haunted Mansion isn’t the product of one genius auteur, who designed
it from start to finish. Over more than ten years, dozens of people
contributed to the attraction that finally opened its doors in the
summer of ’69. There were bold plans, blind alleys and happy
accidents, and they figured it out as they went along.
Oh, and there might be a little bit of Dark Shadows in the Mansion
after all. There’s a really smart blog about the Haunted Mansion
called Long-Forgotten, which makes a well-researched and plausible
argument that the transformation of Josette’s portrait in episode
405 may have inspired one of the changing pictures in the Haunted
Mansion’s portrait gallery. The dates match up, too.
Maybe sometime after April Third, Josette’s restless spirit managed
to find a new home in New Orleans Square. Stranger things have
happened. Who knows? Maybe they’re still happening.
Tomorrow: Another Thing Coming.
If you want to learn more about Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion and its
counterparts in Florida, Paris, Tokyo and Hong Kong, there’s a great
book you should check out: The Haunted Mansion: Imagineering a
Disney Classic, by Jason Surrell.
Tim stumbles on a line in the teaser: “Well, this is very dear to
me, I need it to be kept in a very — in a very appropriate place.”
Aristede says, “Let’s go pay Tim Shaw a visit!” Petofi responds,
“No, I don’t think — you don’t think it would be that easy, do you?”
At the beginning of act 2, Aristede rubs his palm and then his
fingers on his knife, the Dancing Girl. If it was sharp at all, he’d
cut himself.
When Tim and Petofi talk about Aristede, Tim steps on Petofi’s line.
Aristede tells Petofi, “It seems that Tim Shaw took a carton out of
the hotel — out of the Inn this evening!”
Nora reminds Jamison that Tim and Charity “never got along very
well” — but they were engaged, the whole time that Nora knew Tim.
This episode was skipped when it aired in syndication on public TV
stations in the 1980s. The video master was missing, and the
syndication company, Worldvision, didn’t realize that there was a
black-and-white kinescope available. The kinescope copy was found
when Dark Shadows was licensed to MPI for home video release in
1989. There are just two more kinescope episodes left in the series
— episodes 1006 and 1017.
Tomorrow: Another Thing Coming.
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1. An out-of-touch crusty old relic that wants to tax you to death
2. Bernie Sanders.

That every time through is different and you see something new each
time, this is another similarity with Dark Shadows and is one reason
why the show works so well on home video. You’re always seeing other
nuances each time you view a given show. Plus the fact that in the Dark
Shadows theme park there are over 1,200 rides, and the scenery is
always changing, never really staying the same for long.
In fact, it would be great if someone could design a Collinsport theme
park. You’d have an Old House and the new Collinwood and maybe Eagle
Hill cemetery and the Collins mausoleum and a few other locations all
done to scale, though not as a series of disjointed sets that could be
crammed together in a small studio that looks like a bowling alley, but
with real exteriors as well. And, of course, after all that Collinsport
sightseeing, you’d need to cap it off by stopping in at the diner of
the Collinsport Inn for cheeseburgers and coffee.
Speaking of which, in episode 813 it’s good to see the diner set for
the Collinsport Inn back, which is what we’d expect since Tim is after
all staying at the Collinsport Inn. Though, I don’t know, the place
just isn’t the same without Maggie Evans behind the counter and Burke
Devlin around to ruffle people’s feathers. And, in 1897, it probably
didn’t even have cheeseburgers on the menu, since that particular item
didn’t become popular until the 1920s.

I’ve always felt like stepping into the Haunted Mansion, especially the
Florida version with its New England Gothic architecture, was like
walking into a life-sized Collinwood.

The dueling portraits in the Haunted Mansion’s Great Hall always make me
think of Barnabas and Joshua, their portraits facing each other across
Collingwood’s drawing room for 200 years as if the duel never ended.

Since the attraction end of the show or in development at the same time,
I can only imagine that they were both tapping into some aspect of the
zeitgeist people just really felt a psychplogical need for at the moment.