First, that number at the top could more accurately read 1a/1b. Both this and the other attraction in the top two have swapped spots repeatedly, and it can depend on my mood or what I'm trying to emphasize in that argument. With that in mind, I'm writing both from the standpoint of justifying why they could be both No. 1 and No. 2. Second. . .
I'll go ahead and admit that for me, personally, Haunted Mansion is my favorite theme park attraction in the world. This list is largely a ranking of my favorites, though not just a ranking of my favorites. If this ends up in the top spot, I love it because it is the best attraction ever built at Walt Disney World. If it ends up in the second spot, it's for reasons I'll handle at the bottom, but personally I love it no less.
No attraction has built as legendary a cult status as the Haunted Mansion. In the early days of social media on the Internet, there weren't major sites dedicated just to Pirates of the Caribbean or Jungle Cruise or Great Movie Ride or even Horizons, but there was doombuggies.com. It has inspired multiple books just picking apart its history, its design, and what makes it tick; certainly more than any other attraction. That's not even including all the comics, novels, fanfiction, video games, and other works of fiction inspired by it. It has a massive, devoted following that stands a testament to its quality as an experience; whether or not you understand why, you're required to acknowledge that.
That obsession comes for good reason. Mansion is an atmospheric, thematic, efficient, detailed delight, and everything it did in 1971 it continues to accomplish in 2021.
In fact, there has been so much already written about the Haunted Mansion, I'm not sure what to even cover. I cannot say anything you can't find someone else having already said; probably lots of someone else's. I have a blog post to write, though, so here are the things that I think make Mansion so great.
Mansion succeeds on a few different levels, such as being an incredibly reliable ride system that nearly never goes down, not having a height restriction, and being one more omnimover for the list to keep the line moving. However, there are four key pillars to the Haunted Mansion experience that make it such an enduring piece of design, each largely (though not exclusively) attributable to a legendary Imagineer.
What needs to be acknowledged is that the pillars do not support a clean product. In fact, the Mansion is an absolute mess. It is the result of a long development process, and disagreements of vision from a team building a major attraction without their leader for the first time. By the time it was finally built, there was an absolutely obscene number of ideas prepared for the ride. The team shoved as many of them inside as they could, and arranged them together in the most logical way possible.
That last point is significant, because Mansion also gets here without bothering to worry about logical sense, even distribution of elements, or a story. It just exists. You go in, and you see it. You tour a house. That is it, that's all that happens.
This all sounds like criticism, and you probably expect me to say something like, "it's amazing Haunted Mansion succeeds despite all this." On the contrary, I believe Haunted Mansion succeeds exactly because of all these. All those ideas, all those differing visions, all that time, and the complete disregard for the weight of a plot were a volatile cocktail, and the results were either going to be an absolute disaster or an impossible-to-repeat success. Mansion is one of those meals or pieces of art or experiments or moments in a game where you throw caution to the wind and end up with something perfect almost without knowing how you ended up with something perfect. It's the half court shot at the buzzer you couldn't make again if you tried.
The first of those pillars is magic. Not the magic of the Magic Kingdom, but the actual tangible magic like you'd see on stage. Penn Jillette talks about honest magic, where the audience knows they are being tricked by something deceptively simple as being the purest, most entertaining form of the craft, and that's what Mansion is.
The foundation of this pillar is Yale Gracey. Originally a layout artist for the animation studio, Yale was a master illusionist, and imbued the Mansion with an endless array of stage magic. He designed portraits that would subtly change as the viewer looked at them, creating an aging man for the Mansion foyer, and portraits with recessed eyes that would follow you for the first show scene of the ride.
In the library, marble busts watch you as you pass, moving along impossibly. You know this is a trick, you know it's simple, but you don't know how. Actually, you probably do know, because any fan of theme parks understands those busts are actually concave imprints in the wall lit from behind, creating that effect, but you didn't know the first time you rode.
The entire ride has these touches. A talking head inside a crystal ball is created by a Styrofoam wig holder with a face projected on it (repeated again for singing statues in the graveyard). Heads pop up from behind furniture and tombstones by slowly building up pressure.
Yale's most famous trick, and the real show stopper -- TWICE! -- in the Mansion, though, is Pepper's Ghost. Dating all the way back the 1500s, Pepper's Ghost is a simple effect where an object out of the audience's sight is light up, and appears on a reflect surface within their sight, creating a ghostly image. Think of when a light hits a receipt on your dashboard at night (or when something bright hits your visor in Metroid Prime). Though older than him, the name comes for scientist John Henry Pepper, whose display of the trick at an exhibition made it popular in magic shows in the 1800s. Yale's rendition of the effect in the ballroom is the largest example in the world, and truly makes the Mansion work. He then gave it an encore, putting a ghost into your ride vehicle as you finished the ride for perhaps the most iconic moment of an attraction full of them.
The very first major show element, even, is a magic trick: the famous stretch rooms. The stretch room is a preshow that doesn't even need to exist from an exposition standpoint. It does not tell you the story or unfold what you're doing. All it does is set forth the expectation that the unusual is happening, and immediately instill in you a sense of unease. Also, it's incredibly cool. Despite its complete unimportance to the narrative -- you could just have the guests walk straight to the ride -- it has incredible importance to the Haunted Mansion and that's emblematic of what makes the ride great: all the little details that don't have to be there, but are, anyway (and we'll talk about that more a little later).
Created in Disneyland to disguise an elevator, but kept in Florida because of how successful it was, the stretch rooms are meant to disorient you and make you wonder what exactly is happening even while you are pretty sure you know what exactly is happening. Three different moving sections and a series of vertical lines create an optical illusion, making it not so apparent the room is stretching, but if you look at the ceiling or the portraits (we'll get back to those) obviously something is happening. For most of its history, there were no stretching sound effects, either.
Further, in the original design, the cast member in the room would call your attention away from the closing wall. With your gaze affixed on the room growing larger and larger, it doesn't cross your mind to look and realize the entrance has disappeared until the Ghost Host brings it up with, "this room has no windows and no doors." When the lights go out, a door is now open (it used to open while the lights were off rather than after), but it's not going to the same place; it's awfully hard to tell when it opened, or if it's actually the same way you came in. The Rise of the Resistance transport long before the First Order existed. One final magic trick helps distract you from that: a simple theater scrim masquerading as the ceiling temporarily disappears to reveal our Host's untimely demise.
Speaking of those portraits, we'll move on to our next pillar: humor. Mansion is undeniably frightening, but it softens that blow with bits of comedy here and there. Primarily at the end of the attraction, with an absolute cacophony (caCOFFINy?) of absurd looking ghosts and amusing scenes. Those Pepper's Ghosts in our buggies are cartoonish and memorable. An opera singer takes the attraction out as, "the fat lady sings." An old ghost with an ear horn tries desperately to hear a mummy singing with his mouth wrapped shut. As a ghostly band hits high notes, owls overhead dramatically stretch their necks into the air. Great Caesar's Ghost sits at a table, unaware of Marc Anthony and Cleopatra swinging overhead drunk together on a chandelier.
In one of my favorite gags, you enter a room where a séance is clearly happening, with a large chair and a crystal ball. As you come around, you realize there is no one in the chair, which starts to make things confusing. Finally, as you come fully around the circle, you realize the séance is being conducted from inside the crystal ball by a ghost head trapped inside. The use of expectation subversion is gold both for comedy and for destabilizing your comfort with the building and its happenings.
This pillar was primarily founded by Marc Davis, who we have now discussed plenty. As the animator of many of the site gags in Disney feature animations, all the way back to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Davis was brought into WED Enterprises a few years after the opening of Disneyland to start injecting his unique style and humor into the parks. A perfect distillation of his own approach can be found to this day in an attraction he led on his own, Country Bear Jamboree, though it can also be found all over the Walt Disney World Jungle Cruise and Pirates of the Caribbean.
His stretching portraits were some of the earliest designs for the Mansion. Each is essentially a three-act play. It starts with what seems like a normal -- if very serious -- portrait, then transitions to something comedic, then finally ends up with the surprise reveal of how exactly these people met their end. It is a positively perfect expression of Davis's sensibilities, and his touch of cartoonishness to the design of Mansion gives it a little bit of disarming humor to its otherwise spooky tone.
Most readers know where we go next, then. More than maybe any attraction outside of The Living Seas and Tower of Terror, the Mansion is absolutely dripping with atmosphere. It picks from a genre of storytelling -- the ghost story -- which lends itself to tone and aesthetic, so it has a leg up just by its chosen setting. It leans all in, though, with dark corridors, obsessive Victorian detail, wonderful sound effects, and incredibly perfect lighting. The feeling of claustrophobia, of foreboding, and of being in a decrepit house you should not have come into is found around every corner. As you exit, a small, solitary bride hauntingly asks you to hurry back; the scene doesn't bother with an explanation, but is positively haunting.
This pillar we attribute mostly to Claude Coats, and the dispute between he and Davis on what the Mansion was supposed to be. Davis wanted a comedy romp, but Claude made his name as a background artist starting all the way back on Mickey Mouse shorts in the 30s. If you want to really see his style at work, go watch The Old Mill. He was a master at creating feeling through layered colors, and that made his approach one of ambience and conveyed emotion in attractions. Starting with the initial construction of Disneyland, he felt attractions were best as three-dimensional spaces heavy on detail and lighting in order to convey a sense of being in a different place.
Coats wanted the Mansion to be dark and atmospheric, while Davis wanted it to be light and funny. In the end, the Mansion ends up leaning heavily on the former as it opens, and heavily on the latter as it closes, and the juxtaposition -- as with every Mansion accident -- ends up working perfectly. You begin the attraction with Claude's incredible atmosphere putting you on edge, then follows up with making the ghosts completely disarming and cartoonish as a subversion of your expectations. If you tried it 100 more times it might feel disjointed and imbalanced, but here it works to perfection.
Our final pillar is details. The Mansion is such a fully-realized space because of how many small details there are in every single show scene to make it just burst with character. Perhaps the best example is the clock hallway, an entire show scene that is just a clock in a hallway, but it is a true icon piece. Like something out of a nightmare that is both wacky and dangerous, the clock rapidly changes time, with literal fingers in place of figurative hands, and 13 hours on its face. As you pass by, the menacing shadow of a clawed hand passes by in one of the most unsettling moments of the tour.
This paragraph now will be a list of a bunch of detail from the Haunted Mansion that have no need to exist, but have become instantly recognizable pieces of the theme park goer's visual vocabulary because they do exist. Faces in wood paneling, purple wallpaper, and furniture. Ornately-carved metal bats. Door handles designed to look like angry snakes. A lone candelabra floating in the middle of an endless hallway. A blacklit orchestra hovering in the empty darkness. A ghost playing a pipe organ as skulls rise from it, while a pair of ghosts overhead are locked in a forever duel.
Everywhere you look in the Haunted Mansion, something is imbued with more detail than is needed, and often this detail is nightmarishly weird, like something Tim Burton would create. To be completely fair, the detail of the Mansion owes itself to more than just one man. Gracey imbued detail into all his effects, Davis into all his characters, and Coats into all his backgrounds. Leota Toombs added detail through her model construction, and applying her face to both -- and voice to one -- Madame Leota of the seance circle and the aforementioned tiny bride. Alice Davis designed costumes that evoked different eras for the ghosts, and lit up in the black light while still being translucent. X Attencio wrote a show that allowed those details to be the star, rather than an overbearing plot.
However, what I'm most speaking of here are the weird, unique designs that make the Mansion what it is from a design perfective. All these little, strange elements that don't need to be there but were crafted by someone with the mind to make everything you look at seem just slightly not right. That mind was Rolly Crump, the foundation of our fourth pillar. Rolly's time in the Mansion's long production cycle was spent just designing a ton of bizarre stuff. At one point, it would all have been in a New Orleans Square location at the exit of their Haunted Mansion called The Museum of the Weird. That never came into fruition, but he long, torturous development cycle of the attraction allowed Rolly to create enough disquieting stuff to fill a house with. So they did.
Let's not forget the narration of Paul Frees. His Ghost Host is a voice that sticks with you, and is instantly recognizable. His alliteration, deep tenor, and grim humor ties the attraction together and gives it an extra layer of character on top of what it already had.
It should also bear pointing out that Mansion has created such a legacy, so many fans, and so many works that it is essentially its own monumentally successful IP, but it started as a theme park attraction. It did not borrow from another movie or show or book or anything else and join that IP, it created it from nothingness. Its theme song -- which deserves a post of its own -- which can at points be sinister and haunting and at others zestful and fun has far outgrown simply being the background music of a theme park attraction, and instead is just a piece of culture from the past five decades. This may not necessarily on its own make the Mansion more fun than a ride that's based on a wildly popular movie, but in terms of recognizing the achievement of its creators -- something this list is absolutely striving to do -- creating an entire popular property just through the creation of a theme park ride absolutely has to happen.
And for the third (or second, depending on where this actually published?) time in the top four, we're also going to recognize the work of the cast. The Maids and Butlers of the Haunted Mansion wear detailed, eye-popping costumes that fit perfectly with that Crump style, and embody a character that fits perfectly with the Coats atmosphere. They add a pulse to the house that only serves to make it more iconic as they eerily tell you to come inside, step to the dead center of the room, and watch your step.
Perhaps the only thing that could possibly keep this from being called the greatest Walt Disney World attraction of all time would be the fact that it opened elsewhere first. That is not to say it's a copied attraction, like Pirates of the Caribbean or even Peter Pan's Flight. The mansion was very specifically built twice, simultaneously, in 1969; it's just that one of those version was in a park that wouldn't open for two more years.
It may be hard to tell, but in the photo at right, you can see the Haunted Mansion show building in the top left essentially complete while the rest of the Magic Kingdom barely exists. "it's a small world" is just a frame, and the castle is only foundations. It was ready long before everything else at Walt Disney World. That extra time and space for the Florida version meant a longer ride, putting its library and portrait gallery after the lapbars lower, its Little Leota before, and adding detail to its staircase ascent. It is absolutely neither the second version nor the lesser version.
It just happened to be the second to load its riders. This list is not about the idea of Haunted Mansion divorced from its home property -- a list I absolutely believe it should top -- but a list very specifically about the history of Walt Disney World.
All of that said, we are splitting hairs at this point. If you are reading this with a two at the top or a one at the top, know that a different publishing date could have resulted in a completely different number. Haunted Mansion's legacy is one of being the first attraction built for Walt Disney World, for creating a massive fanbase, for being the first WDW attraction to perfect the atmospheric dark ride, and for surviving 50 years and being just as fun as it was the day it opened.
Its legacy is one of being arguably the greatest attraction ever built, and one of the defining pieces of art in the industry.
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