Interview With a Legend: X. Atencio
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LP: On the Haunted Mansion CD there is an out take of Paul Frees where he reads the Haunted Mansion script as Van Drake, it’s very funny.

X.: You know Buddy and I signed 999 inserts for those CDs and we didn’t even get a copy. I gave Martha [ a cast member who helped organize the event] hell for that. At least we ought to get one of the copies.

I went over to the new music shop there on Main Street to see if they had them. They said they sold out in the first few hours. Buddy mentioned somebody said they had them on the Internet for $120.

LP: One went for $230 plus dollars. You should be getting some sort of kickback, you know.

X.: Well Martha said we would get something. But I haven’t seen anything. Someone who came over the other day had one, so at least I got to hear it.

LP: Well they still have the 12 track CD for sale. It just doesn’t have the 13th track. I sure we can rectify this oversight. Maybe throw in a Theme Park Adventure Pirates issue as well.

By the time you got to work on the script on the Haunted Mansion, the original backstory of the Sea Captain and his bride was long gone, correct?

X.: Yeah, that was gone in the early days. When the mansion was erected in New Orleans Square people kept wondering when we were going to open it up. Of course, we said the problem was we were looking for more ghosts. We had 999 and we needed one more. The real delay was figuring out how to move people through there.

Yale Gracey had dreamed up some wonderful illusions, based on the premise that you’d move people through in groups. You see something happen with a start and an end to the illusion, then you’d move on to another one. But by moving to the DoomBuggies, there was no beginning and no end, so you couldn’t do that. It changed the whole philosophy of the ride.

LP: Do you have a favorite effect in the Haunted Mansion? A favorite room maybe?

X.: Well, I liked the Banquet scene. I can tell you something I didn’t like, going through the attic with things popping out everywhere.

LP: Well, they changed that a few years ago. They took out half of those popping ghosts, and put in a wedding march song and phantom piano player. What do you think about that?

X.: Well, that is better. When Buddy and I did the music for this, the graveyard for instance, we had a cacophony of sound, because each little vignette had it’s own little music bit in it. But it didn’t work, so finally Buddy had to put a general sound throughout. We got the Grim Grinning Ghosts theme working through the whole ride so we could concentrate on the things like the busts singing.

LP: I remember the days when there wasn’t as much music or narration. It scared me silly. Every time I went through the chamber of doors, by the time I got to Madame Leota I was really scared.

X.: We had originally thought that we’d have the raven as the Narrator. We’d introduce him at the beginning and go through the ride with him looking down. Right now when you come to the end and the narrator’s voice says “Ah there you are....” and you can just see this silhouette of the raven. But it didn’t pay off. I wanted to have him in every scene. But it just didn’t work. A lot of these things you have sketched out just don’t pay off. The Hitch Hiking Ghosts at the end were an afterthought. But that worked out okay. It was a good gimmick

LP: You know they’re selling Beanie Babies of the Grim Grinning Ghosts. Their eyes and teeth glow in the dark.

X.: {Laughs} Oh really.

LP: The Haunted Mansion at Disneyland has been open for 30 years now, what would you like to see happening over the next 30 years. Would you do anything different?

X.: Oh well... probably little adjustments here and there. Most of the things work well. The thing that I wished we had then was to have the sound isolated in each vehicle. What you’re hearing in your car can also be heard in the car behind. In the Chamber of Doors all the doors animating didn’t quite come off right. We could do something there.

I’m curious to see this new movie The Haunting. There was a film, the original The Haunting, I guess. We looked at that to get some ideas for effects. The doors breathing was one of them. We could do it better today. But there is always the timing of the cars going through. I think the Ballroom scene works well. Even though we had the dancers dancing backwards, the gals leading the guys. We had one good effect as you headed toward the attic.

We had threads hanging down. They’d brush on your face. It was a keen effect.

LP: How long did that last?

X.: Not very long. Because as soon as kids would go through the second time they knew what it was and grabbed it. I’m sad that you can’t have things like that. Like in the Ballroom scene, the big glass mirror there, the kids spit on it. They should have an air curtain there, where it would spit right back in their face.

LP: I’ve heard a lot about the imagineer’s tombstones. I have a picture of you with your tombstone. Do you still have it?

X.: Yeah it’s out back. Do you want to see it? [At this point we stepped outside to see the tombstone. He had placed it off to the side of his lawn, in a hedge behind the diving board of his pool.]

They took the tombstones out when they needed more space for the queue. They asked, do you want your tombstone? I said sure. I got mine and brought it home.

LP: Do you remember how the tombstones came to be.

X.: Well, I came up with all the little captions on them. I would imagine there is a list of all them around somewhere. I don’t have it though.

LP: That has always been one of my curiosities to find out what my Grandfather’s [Former Imagineer Vic Greene] tombstone said.

Do you feel like you have a part of the Walt Disney Legacy?

X.: I do. I think it is one the happiest things in my life. When I go to the big cartoon studio in the sky, I can say I was part of this. For instance, I went down to the park for this 30th Anniversary event. My friends wondered why. I said I wrote the script and wrote the song for the attraction. They said, oh I thought you were just a Mickey Mouse drawer. But I also did writing. It was a whole part of my life they weren’t aware of.

One last quick story. One time when I was down on Balboa Island there were some kids out on the bay rowing around. Guess what I heard them singing. “Yo Ho, Yo Ho... A Pirates Life For Me.”

-- Interview and photographs by John Frost
-- posted 8/10/99