Greg Maletic
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Haunted Mansion Holiday

I had the pleasure of taking a long weekend to visit Disneyland in late October, partially to stay at the Grand Californian (nice, though not a great value), partially to see the new A Bug’s Land play area (very well done), but mainly to see the Haunted Mansion Holiday makeover that I unfortunately missed last year. Walking through New Orleans Square early that Saturday morning, I felt a sense of terror, dread, foreboding…but not because I’m scared of ghosts. Haunted Mansion is a classic, after all-one of my very favorite attractions-and this seemed like an excellent opportunity to screw it all up. So many things could go wrong: how would Disney’s ghouls match up with Tim Burton’s undead? Sure, they’re both "scary" in an un-scary sort of way, but aside from that, they seem to hail from completely different universes. I could visualize a handful of cheap plywood cutouts of Nightmare figures nailed up, blocking the view of the ballroom, graveyard, etc., positioned in just such a way to obscure the classic scenes behind. So imagine my surprise when I tell you that Haunted Mansion Holiday is excellent. So good, in fact, that I’m not even sure I want them to bring the original Haunted Mansion back.

There is a fair amount of plywood in the new attraction, actually, but I have to complement Disney on how it handled this: it never looks cheap. And as a bonus, there’s much more "dimensional" work than I would have expected, most dramatically, the curlicue mountaintop that towers over the graveyard sequence. The Jack Skellington Audio-Animatronic figure moves much more impressively than the figure it substitutes for. And the additions are anything but tight-fisted: every room in the attraction is liberally covered with Nightmare figures and artifacts. You’ll clearly recognize this as the same attraction you’re familiar with, but very little is unchanged. There are even standout effects, too: the replacement of the graveyard’s singing busts with…well, instead of giving it away, let’s just say it’s a much more arresting effect than the singing busts ever were. Some Mansion fanatics might be disappointed that the regular Mansion scenes and figures are so de-emphasized, but I think the designers made the right choice. Going "half-way" would have produced the least satisfactory result. A stingy application of Nightmare characters to two or three rooms in the Mansion would have managed to infuriate both the Nightmare fans that wanted to see more, and the Mansion fans whose attraction had now been corrupted.

I walked out of the Haunted Mansion with a big smile on my face, and that hadn’t happened in a long time. Haunted Mansion Holiday’s designers knew exactly what they were trying to show us-one of the more charming aspects of the film, namely, the Nightmare spooks’ complete inability to comprehend Christmas-and as great as the original Haunted Mansion is, its designers never quite figured this out. The original never commits itself to being either funny or scary, and ends up not totally delivering on either count. In fact, a similar problem inhabits many of the "classic" Disney attractions created in the 50s-60s era. So many veer back and forth between painstaking realism and corny humor. They fail to set a consistent tone.

I especially noticed this while riding Pirates of the Caribbean. Incredible pains were obviously taken by the original designers to make the swamp-like boarding area realistic. As much as is possible in a theme park, the whole thing is impressively subtle. (A shooting star does pass overhead with astonishing regularity-perhaps every 30 seconds or so-but in general, it’s fairly restrained.) The next scene in the grotto shows a couple of realistically detailed rotting skeletons with pickaxes and shovels, pirates who failed in their search for buried treasure. This is cool: something straight out of the Treasure Island universe that Disney’s pirates hail from. It’s realistic, at least in the context of the movie-ish world the ride has placed us in, and it’s a little scary.

Next is something a little confusing: another skeleton standing on the deck of a wrecked ship, turning the ship’s wheel in a torrent of simulated rain. I always thought they should have had the skeleton’s hands lashed to the wheel so there was some excuse for why a skeleton would be piloting a ship. But no…I kind of feel like we’re supposed to think that it’s a skeleton consciously piloting a crashed ship. Why is this skeleton alive when the previous ones were so obviously dead (like they’re supposed to be)? The realism of the initial scenes starts to dissipate.

The ride then shifts tone, from moody creepiness to outright gags. In the next scene we see more "living" skeletons, one of them swilling grog. (It’s a neat effect, but exactly how is that supposed to be happening?) A haunted harpsichord plays itself. A comically carved wooden sign reads "Thar Be No Place Like Home."

If the rest of the ride maintained the corny tone, it would have been fine. But it doesn’t: the scenes for the remainder of the ride jump back to the realism we saw in the beginning. Pirates of the Caribbean is about mood and atmosphere, and when a jokey sign pops up saying "Stow Yer Weapons," the ride makes painfully clear to me that it is artifice. I knew that, to be sure, but for a while I’d forgotten.