The Case for the Florida Pirates

If you're looking for the ultimate journey through Pirates of the Caribbean - the history, the attractions, the films, all of it - check out my new book Scoundrels, Villains & Knaves. You'll never think of the classic ride the same way again.

This is going to be a hard one to discuss, although it really shouldn't be. Pirates of the Caribbean, in Florida, is one of those rides - the first, in fact - which received a markedly inferior remake the second time around and much of the commentary surrounding the ride itself has been clouded by people falling all over themselves to damn the attraction for not being the first version. In the process of commenting on such cases the reviewers have taken so little time to assess that second version that some of the interesting things done with the attraction for her second incarnation are lost - valuable insights, especially in the case of Pirates of the Caribbean, as this was the original creative team trying to weed out some of the compromises they had been forced to take due to the original ride's turbulent gestation.

We then our going to take up this subject in some detail, a true breakdown of the second incarnation of the Pirates of the Caribbean attraction, to better understand and expose her variations, reimaginings, successes and failures.

I would be remiss to not begin with an acknowledgment that in a way the deck was stacked to begin with in the case of the Florida Pirates, because by all rights the ride shouldn't exist at all. Had Walt Disney lived four or even five years longer Walt Disney World would have no doubt opened with Marc Davis' Thunder Mesa attraction complex, an insanely ambitious attempt to rework the Pirates of the Caribbean magic in a new idiom. Had this happened, perhaps Pirates of the Caribbean would never have migrated 'cross the Mississippi, or perhaps would have eventually done so in a far different form.

There is an additional problem with the notion of remaking Pirates of the Caribbean, and that is that the original attraction is the best ride ever built. There's just no mincing words here, human hands have never built something better. Everything you can hope to aspire to in themed design is in that ride, and riding it is a nuanced and staggering experience. Still, many of those things that make it what it is are also things that were out of the designer's control. Build a cellar for a wax museum? We'll make it a boat ride. Design a ride that's too big for the cellar? Put it elsewhere.... get Claude Coates to design something for the cellar. Then Disney got X Atencio in to write dialouge for scenes that were really just disconnected pirate business. Why again are all the pirates dead at the start of the ride? Well - what if you're sent back in time? ....It was a graceful, if desperate, fix.

Since these elements and more were things that the original design team were obligated to do rather than decided to do - call it the growing pains of the creative process - they would be less than inclined to repeat them in future variations, and exploring some of this is the purpose of this essay. Because the Florida Pirate Ride (all the sets have that stenciled on their backside) isn't just a cut down remake, it's really a wholly different creature. It may not be a masterpiece in the way that the Disneyland version is, but it is a valuable companion piece if we come to it with open eyes. After all, every East Coast kid grew up with the Florida Pirates and liked it just fine, even without a Blue Bayou and a longer drop. And many many more people experience for the first time Walt Disney's final creative triumph in the form of her Florida cousin each year, which ought to give one pause.

Indeed if it's possible to blot from your mind the mastery of the original attraction, the Florida version is still a fantastic ride. The modes and meanings of some of the story beats are however markedly different than deserve some further explication than they are generally afforded.

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Overall Structure
The single biggest factor in determining the eventual shape of the Florida Pirate ride was its placement in a Caribbean Plaza in Adventureland instead of a New Orleans Square somewhere else.

It is commonly repeated that WED wanted something more exotic than a New Orleans setting for the East Coast version of Pirates of the Caribbean and as such did not repeat the Big Easy themeing. This may be true but I think there is a more pragmatic answer. Although it's not as if New Orleans is closer to California than it is to Florida, San Juan (where the fortress that would provide a model for Florida's facade stood) and the real Caribbean are a lot closer to Central Florida than New Orleans is, and if Disney had felt it were worth repeating the New Orleans Square they most likely would have considered it. The reason New Orleans Square was out is because so much of it's essential makeup had already been repeated in the Magic Kingdom park in Liberty Square. There was, of course, the Haunted Mansion, but even many of the New Orleans shops had been faithfully inserted in Florida. The One-of-a-Kind Shop became Old World Antiques, Le Gourmet became the Yankee Trader, and even the Silver shop was included. So it wasn't simply a matter of not wanting to replicate a New Orleans setting for the Florida Pirate ride due to regional tastes; any New Orleans area anchoring the ride would require a total reimagining from the ground up anyway due to what Disney had already installed in the park they were working with.

And besides, although New Orleans Square and the Blue Bayou were beautiful, they were quite different from the final setting of the attraction that was eventually built. Instead of waxen pirates lurking in shadowy New Orleans alleys as was the initial plan, this ride really took place in the Caribbean, necessitating some supernatural location jumps in the original version. Why include the supernatural element at all and just start the riders off in the town the pirates are attacking? This has some real sense to it and this is indeed what was done.


Now I've already spoken before about the myriad charms of Caribbean Plaza, which is a masterful and romantic extension of the aesthetic of the ride, but the area gets too little credit for how brilliantly it ties together the attraction experience. Although it is an amazing conjuring trick to transport spectators magically from the port of New Orleans to a Caribbean island, in Caribbean Plaza it really does feel as though the courtyards, bridges, and verandas seen in the ride are lurking just behind the facades one sees at street level - as though it really did happen here. This means that the ride itself informs the pedestrian space and the pedestrian space informs the ride, a dynamic hardly ever achieved in themed design in such a dynamic way in the particular context of a ride that cannot be seen from that pedestrian space; ie one which is enclosed by four walls. In doing this, the setting and chronology of the original attraction is radically altered in such a way to iron out a lot of the post-design script doctoring and focus the attraction on the central event: the raid on the town.

The logic of the Florida attraction goes like this: as one approaches Caribbean Plaza and the Castillo del Morro, cannonfire can be heard coming from the Castillo. Entering through a sun splashed plaza, inside the Castillo everything has been abandoned although we can hear the Spanish soldiers elsewhere in the fort preparing from an incoming pirate assault. We can also, by the way, hear the pirates themselves, who seem as though they may always be just around the next corner. This dialogue still plays in the queue, although poor maintainence and the new Overture music drowns much of it out. "Captain! Los Piratas! They are attacking the village!" "Sound the alarm!" still floats down those stone corridors, albeit dimly now.

Arriving at the central Pirate's Cove area where the ships for the Castillo are built, spectators are loaded into escape boats which launch into a secret exit hidden in the hillside the fortress is built into (this idea is garnered from real Spanish fortresses). Just as the boats slip into darkness we pass the Moonlight Bay scene, where the threatening pirate ship may be dimly seen out in the water.

After a quick but exciting trip through the caves, where it seems some pirates had long ago buried treasure, we emerge safely out of the fortress but in the midst of a heated battle between the pirates and the Spanish soldiers. Slipping through the town under the cover of night we see the pirates sack and burn the village, finally escaping only after the pirates find the town's treasure vault.

Ghosts on the Open Sea
That is the ride experience of Pirates of the Caribbean as it opened in 1973 in Florida, and one must admit, compared to the all-over-the-place nature of the Disneyland version, where an inland Bayou somehow connects to oceanside underground pirate lairs and then on to a Caribbean Island, even if magically, the Florida show is a tidy package. But even in cleaning up the logic of the attraction, certain side effects of the original structure remain.

The above synopsis, for example, does not account for all the ghostly and menacing activity in those caves, a touch which makes perfect poetic and harmonic sense in California where the attraction seems as full of myth and mystery and superstition about the sea as any passage of Moby Dick. The famous Dead Man's Cove scene, although restaged by Davis in a more concise form, is not as haunting or as cinematic as its original version in Disneyland where the boats hug the shoreline of the grim scene rather than simply approach and then move away from it.

But since these skeletons are obviously "dead", ie inanimate, their inclusion does not violate the more realistic linear outline of the Florida presentation, even if the ghostly disembodied voice intoning "dead men tell no tales" does. Still, following this with the nicely restaged but even more overtly supernatural Hurricane Lagoon and talking skull scenes does push the attraction into confusing territory. This is where confusion surrounding the intention of the original designers to include or exclude a time travel storyline in the Florida ride gets murky, because in Disneyland the occurrence of these elements are earmarks of a developing open sea ghost story. I have no explanation as to their inclusion in Florida, because the attraction is already operating under the logic that the Pirates are attacking now.

What immediately followed in the 1973 ride was the ride's absolute poorest choice, which was to recycle Atencio's dialouge from the Disneyland version which achieved the magical transformation of time and place thanks to the "cursed treasure". These are the original dialouge lines:

"Ohh... perhaps ye knows too much. Ye 'ave seen the cursed treasure. You know where it be hidden! Now proceed at yer own risk. These be the last friendly words ye hear! You may not survive to pass this way again..."
"Dead men tell no tales.."
"No fear have ye of evil curses, says you? Ah, properly warned ye be, says I! Who knows when that evil curse will strike the greedy beholders of this bewitch'ed treasure!"
"Dead men tell no tales..."

Obviously intended to help the riders make sense of all this, in the Florida version these lines still played at the bottom of the downramp, now confusingly reduced in length to allow both voices to be heard in the abbreviated runoff area:

"Perhaps ye knows too much. Ye 'ave seen the cursed treasure. You know where it be hidden!"
"Dead men tell no tales.."
"No fear have ye of evil curses, says you? Ah, properly warned ye be, says I!"
"Dead men tell no tales..."

Instead of informing, these reduced versions are neither here nor there in content or context, confusingly referring to cursed treasure which we have not seen on the ride. The empty treasure chest at Dead Man's Cove clearly indicates that somebody has already gotten to the jewels and killed their own or another crew in the process. The whole scene is further muddled by the lack of the entire pirate underground lair presented at Disneyland: in that original context, "Dead men tell no tales!" clearly is a warning that the dead will not give up their secrets so easily.

In Florida, and I speak confidently here because this is how I interpreted the statement for years only having the Florida ride's context to work from, "Dead men tell no tales" seems to imply that the crew that buried the treasure were murdered to conceal the location of the treasure instead of the subterranean scuttle at a later date that Davis' scenic designs are meant to render. Because all we see to link the ghostly pronouncement to the evidence left behind is a beach strewn with bodies, "Dead men tell no tales" becomes a Disney version of Robert Louis Stevenson's "Fifteen men on a Dead Man's Chest!"

No treasure left here....

Again, this does not seem to be the intention, and helps to draw out the suspicion that the "ghost" scenes were simply repeated for their fame and simplicity rather than for any reason of having a good reason to be in this radically altered version of the ride. Much like the stretching room scenes in the Haunted Mansion, which had to be radically re-engineered to be included in the Florida show since their practical purpose was no longer of value, these scenes simply were included because it wouldn't be Pirates of the Caribbean without them. However, sadly, it does leave a gaping hole in the logic of the story. Just what the heck happened to us on our way out of the fort?!

Through the Town
Now nobody discusses it much because of the Disneyland-centric nature of discourse about the attraction, but once through the problematic grotto scenes, the massive town scene - the reason for the ride to exist, let's admit it - is significantly better designed in Florida. Although to the untrained eye they're exactly the same, certain design eccentricities about the Anaheim show have been corrected , eccentricities which perhaps nobody saw fit to correct in the indecision about what to do with the Pirate show. The layout of the scenes in the town were originally designed to squish together into the basement dug for the walk-through version of the attraction in 1963, and although all the structural steel would be torn out and the basement re-dug to accommodate the expanded show, nobody seemed to alter the layout of the town scenes much beyond placing them outside the berm. I'm not sure I would have thought to do much either, but the cramped quarters downstairs under New Orleans Square did result in some odd placement which someone in WED recognized and adjusted for the 1973 show.

On page 29 of Jason's Surrell's book on the ride, a blueprint of the attraction can be observed which is meant to fit snugly into that basement (if you need further proof, go back to page 24 of the same book and compare the shape of that layout rendering of the walk through Pirate show to the shape of the blueprint in question). This is exactly the shape the final ride in Disneyland follows, and it has some oddities dictated by available space. For example, as the boats leave Bombardment Bay they tightly hug a tower of the fortress under assault as the boats proceed into the Well scene. But as soon as the boats turn, they're immediately into the Auction scene, and some of the action of the Well scene is seen from a slightly strange three-quarters view as a result, including Carlos' house with his wife in the window. In Florida, the track and layout is altered so that the Well scene is arranged facing the boats from left to right instead of skewing away from the boats as in Disneyland. Similarly, the scene is paced out better because instead of viewing the scene from a remove caused by the curving nature of the track, in Florida the boats approach the scene, move alongside it, and then exit the scene. Marc Davis or somebody else has placed a handsome two-towered building between the Well scene and Auction scene, replacing a simple wall with a small boat as the visual divider between the two scenes.

These changes anticipate the shape of the alterations for the Florida show, which is overall slower paced with greater space between those scenes which have remained. Every scene in the Disneyland show is atop the next; although the boats no longer move at the proper speed in California and so we spend longer than WED intended in each scene, there is less breathing space between one scene and the next. By placing that two-towered building between the restaged well scene and the Auction scene in Florida, our attention is allowed to momentarily wander, to move from the Well scene's dialogue to that big building, or maybe across the way to a dimly illuminated balcony complete with flickering lanterns and some chairs. When we enter the Auction scene, we see it first from afar, become oriented, then move in close. It provides a better showcase for each scene.

Another beat that the California show is poorer without but which was invented for Florida is the quiet moment between the Chase scene and the Fire scene. The reason it's there is a somewhat practical one; it is at this point in the Florida show that the boats' spur line, a side track under and behind the sets onto which empty boats may be pulled to be sent to the Maintainence Bay, branches off the Main Track. In California this happens in the Bombardment scene, but the extra moment passing the spur line entrance in Florida once again allows the attention to wander after the last turntable gag in the Chase scene (fat woman chasing the terrified pirate), and something wonderful happens. The ride suddenly gets very quiet and we may notice the moonlight illuminated tree, Yale Gracey's cloud projections cutting across the sky, and then focus on Old Bill with his rum talking to the cats. Old Bill is a Walt Disney World original designed by Davis for this quiet scene, and the way the attraction gets very dim and quiet right before moving onto its' loudest and most raucous section in the Burning City shows real sensitivity to highlighting the internal rhythms and paces of the show.

Later on, Old Bill ended up in Disneyland too, but his placement almost directly across from the last turntable in the Chase scene meant that this wonderful moment was lost; Old Bill is just another figure on your way through the ride. It isn't a total tragedy; the spaces between these scenes in Florida in a way make up for the quiet, contemplative mood of the start and end of the Disneyland show which has been sacrificed in the streamlined Florida version. That all of the complex textures and tonalities of the original attraction could not be carried over is unfortunate, but the greatly improved pacing of the town scenes does provide some measure of balance in an otherwise greatly reduced attraction.

Out the Door
One of the biggest problems with the Florida show was actually its most unique feature: Marc Davis' redesigned ending, replacing the climatic shootout in the munitions storehouse. Now the Disneyland final scene doesn't make much sense and neither did the Walt Disney World treasure scene, but at Disneyland the whole experience is aided by following the inconclusive shootout scene with a ride back up the waterfall and back to the Bayou, whereas Walt Disney World's version immediately dumped out into an unload area and guests rode a speedramp back up to ground level.


It's not as if the Treasure scene was poorly done; the gags were very funny if strange (a pirate rubbing his bare feet in strands of pearls, for example) and some of the immediacy of the shootout was retained by having the pirates firing their pistols wildly in the air, rolling around like Mexican Banditos having taken off with the loot. But unlike at Disneyland, these pirates weren't shooting at each other - they weren't shooting at anything, and the threat of being hit by a stray bullet was less about being between two groups of pirates who are increasingly poor shots than just being beaned by a stray lead pellet. Thus the threat of the scene was gone. And although everyone enjoyed looking through the trestled arch into the treasure room, one nagging problem remained - the whole town was still burning up around the Pirates visible in the background, so perhaps, like at Disneyland, their victory would be short lived. In fact, since there is no time travel and thus no way to escape the fire, the threat of the pirates is not resolved by simply getting off the boats and up a speedramp. So ironically while the Florida version of the ride did provide a resolution to the pirates story, it still was less of an satisfactory ending than its' original form.

Marc Davis often spoke of his dislike of the upramp scene at Disneyland and saw to it that all subsequent forms of the ride that he would be involved in excluded it. But perhaps it is telling that when given the opportunity to remake the original ride for Tokyo Disneyland he cut, shuffled, condensed - and did not bother to include his 1973 Treasure Room scene, but did replicate the Walt Disney World unload area, complete with another trip up a speedramp back to the daylight.


I think however that Davis' instincts were right, here, in one other capacity, which may not seem like much but which indeed colors ones perceptions of the ride to come greatly. Unlike at Disneyland, where the first sight one is greeted with upon entering the attraction is people waiting to disembark, by unloading passengers downstairs at Florida and getting them on a speedramp up out of the building, the boats return to the Load Area ominously empty!

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In the final analysis it's sort of a fool's errand to try to say that the Florida show is comparable to the California show since it obviously is not, even if some of the design choices do show an increased sophistication on the part of WED. For example, the decision to create a highly themed queue in Florida is likely a practical one: if the length of the overall ride is to be greatly reduced, then the exterior of the attraction and the waiting area must be used to set up the story.

But this design restriction opened up a whole new world of themed design possibilities by forcing WED to invent the themed queue, and the Pirates of the Caribbean queue in Florida is still one of the best and most brilliant. Even today Disneyland suffers somewhat from the fact that most of her queues were constructed prior to this central moment in themed design: much of the time the queue takes place in tightly packed, carnival-style switchbacks outside the exterior of the attraction. This was, of course, the rule at the Magic Kingdom in Florida as well: anybody who ever waited in line for 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea or Jungle Cruise prior to their slight increase of themed diversions in the early 1990s will likely remember how maddening and deadening those experiences were. On the same note, WED clearly immediately grasped the import of the richly themed queue and created one so brilliant for the 1975 Space Mountain that even today the act of getting to and from the ride is 70% of that attraction's appeal.

There are some minor exceptions here - waiting areas for shows such as The Hall of Presidents and the Enchanted Tiki Room (either coast) were quite elaborate as early as the 1960's, perhaps because designers thought that if the audience were standing in one place waiting for the show to begin they would require more opulent surroundings. And of course there were themed boarding areas which contained part of the expected queue line, as anybody who remembers Adventure Thru Inner Space or If You Had Wings will recall. But the notion of the wait in line being an experience and of itself was new and in a way it may be WED's greatest design breakthrough of the 1970's. So while the ride may leave something to be desired, the fact that it is prefaced by something so central a moment in themed design means that perhaps the Florida Pirate Ride deserves more respect than she gets. After all, richly themed queue experiences like The Tower of Terror, Indiana Jones Adventure or Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey would be impossible without this supposedly "bastardized" version.

And I detect one more improvement in the Florida ride, which is the approach to the ride itself. In the 1967 version, the ride is hidden behind three sets of very plain doors and we take it more or less on faith that Pirates of the Caribbean is indeed back there. The Florida ride, however, looks and feels as massive and intricate as it will prove to be from the outside, a real call to arms to rush into the fortress and begin.


Then again those three doors and that sign hint that maybe the most extraordinary of adventures can lurk behind the most ordinary of doors; that we may, in effect, find any number of enchanted worlds by stumbling through an unmarked door down an alley or drifting to a lifeless and haunted part of a bayou. The California exterior hints at the mysticism and mysterioso qualities of that ride, the supernatural and haunted element which haunts us, too. The Florida ride is a call to adventure on a grand scale, but maybe in pulling all the kinks out of the ride, in a way, WED has taken a slinky and straightened it, made it no longer as fun. I think well above any missing figures or scenes or drops or restaurants, the most damning thing you can say about the Florida Pirate Ride is that WED has plucked the heart out of their mystery, made it somehow more like lesser rides. The 1973 version of the ride may have some admirable qualities, but it lacks the 1967 version's aspect of seeming to be like a dream - something that maybe you totally imagined. The literal minded 1973 ride lacks this quality and is innumerably poorer without it.

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Pictures: Daveland.Com, Disney and More, Disney Pix, Pana Vue Slides, etc...

Take Your New Disney Friends Home!

Disney and Kodak have such an extensive and long term relationship that it often seems hard to separate the two. When Disneyland opened in 1955, Kodak was there on Main Street. A longstanding story has it that Main Street's pavement is red due to color testing experiments using Kodachrome - since the film stock tended to go more towards the red spectrum than blue, Disneyland's pavements were red, making Main Street photograph better (Disney tells this story on their guided tours, and like most of the information told there, one should take it with a grain of salt). Kodak even sponsored the 1959 "Grand Re-Opening of Disneyland". The ties between the two companies go back a long time.

Thus it's sort of hard to remember that there was a gap in Kodak's sponsorship of film and camera products and services at Disneyland, one that lasted right up until the opening of EPCOT Center with her big and expensive Imagination pavilion. When Walt Disney World opened in 1971, GAF was the film sponsor of choice on Main Street. GAF dropped out around 1976 or 1977, and there was a time when Disneyland and Walt Disney World actually had no film sponsor - those "Your Complete Guide to Walt Disney World" booklets actually had no little "Compliments of.." blurb in their lower left corner and the back page of the guide, traditionally a venue for the film sponsor's advertisement, highlighted upcoming Disney films. By late 1977, Polariod had stepped in, and they remained sponsors for five years until the opening of EPCOT Center in 1982.

Polaroid had much cooler stuff to offer than GAF - many Disney World people fondly remember the "Borrow a Polaroid Camera, Free.*" ads on the back of their late 70's and early 80's "Your Complete Guide to Walt Disney World", and Polaroid offered old-timey photo opportunities with instant results on Main Street, Caribbean Plaza, and the Walt Disney World Village (the Great Southern Craft Company probably opened in 1977 with the entry of Polaroid and existed mainly for its "Lilly Langtry Photo Studio", covered here on this blog).

But GAF - which stands for Great American Film, I kid you not (you'll have to decide for yourself whether it was or not) - had their own wacky offerings in their Walt Disney World sponsorship days, from the GAF Photo Trail (more here) to GAF Photo Tips. Well call me old fashioned, but my favorite thing about GAF at Walt Disney World was.... awkward advertisements.

Here's one from the back of a 1972 Walt Disney World guide, the earliest such guide I've been able to locate (these early slimmer guides featured a GAF advert on the very back page as well as the worst map of the Magic Kingdom imaginable):

You can click on these things for a more legible version. I love the text: "The scenic delights of Walt Disney World deserve the finest in photography. To insure natural quality pictures you can be proud of, we recommend the full line of GAF quality photo products." Call it my love of the Atari 2600 coming out, but I love and obsess over household items that have artificial wood grain applied to them. It's not so much a camp appreciation as it is a fascination with an era when products were still meant to be handsome showpieces, pieces of furniture as well as functional entertainment. At least I think that was the idea.

Here's one from a 1974 guide. Some kid traced over Mickey with a pencil. Maybe it was Andreas Deja. Probably not.


Look at all those handsome products... you used to be able to buy those Pana-Vue Slides everywhere at Walt Disney World in little strips like you see here, each themed to an area or even specific attraction. They were usually beautifully done promotional images, much better than any camera or photographer (then or now) could capture. And look - there's the GAF View-Master in its signature cardboard bucket; the blue projector is even included. Does anyone even make View-Master projectors anymore? And as we'll shortly see, the "Bring Your New Disney Friends Home To Meet Your Old Friends", an awkwardly worded corporate pitch if ever there was one, emerged as something like GAF's "message" to Walt Disney World vacation goers in the mid 1970's.

Our final example is from 1975, the year of the bicentennial, America on Parade, free showings at the Hall of Presidents, and more:


It may be the most handsome of them all.

Now the real reason I'm showing you all this is actually just to justify posting this little gem, which I've seen in numerous issues of Walt Disney World Vacationland and struck me as one of the strangest and funniest things from the early years of Walt Disney World:

I'm not sure if it's Billy's impossible, jellylike anatomy, his father (in a green business suit!!!!) looming in from the edges of the frame, or Billy's absurd bucktoothed smile and his exclamation of "OBOY!", but this cartoon just kills me every time. I start looking at Billy's arms in panel two and I simply can't contain myself. And while it's true that View-Masters have given me and the rest of the word many wonderful things over the years, this may be my favorite.

So there you have it, a totally basic overview of the absurd joys of GAF in the early days of Walt Disney World. They may not have given you Figment, but they did provide "Donald and Mickey Meet Billy's Friends", just another strange strange artifact from the Vacation Kingdom of the World's formative years.

History and the Haunted Mansion

I really didn't mean to start writing about that most over-covered of all Disney attractions again, honest. Just when I think I've written or seen or read or heard everything there is to write / see / read about the Haunted Mansion, new stuff crops up. This seems sort of impossible - I wish new information about, say, Country Bear Jamboree or Tom Sawyer Island cropped up every few months - but suffice to say my brain has gone back to mulling over that dusty old house on the hill.

Much like the ride itself, what follows will be a little here, a little there - all over the place really. But the Spooky House still fascinates and amazes while the luster of other attractions rubs thin, and every time I think I've brilliantly laid the old gal down to rest with my incisive observations she comes rocketing back up like a spooky rubber mask on a pneumatic lift. It's a welcome if inevitable return.

Those of you who have been following Chalet Foxxy (Passport to Dreams Old & New) since her inception may remember that one the the first questions I ever raised about the Haunted Mansion is why the heck it's in Liberty Square, an apparent skeleton in the closet of an otherwise masterfully realized park. I can put some meat on those bones now, but not yet - let's first discuss something nobody's talked about yet in relationship to the Haunted Mansion - historical reality on Main Street, USA.

Practically every Disney fan has a copy of Imagineering: a Behind the Dreams Look at Making the Magic Real, a now fifteen-year-old (!!) chestnut of the Disney Fan Library. As a result the fact that Disneyland's Haunted House was originally planned for Main Street is pretty well known now, along with Harper Goff's cool little drawing of a dilapidated old house behind Shady Rest cemetery. What isn't much discussed is why it was there and what that meant.

Harper Goff's original concepts for Main Street were not so rosy as what Disney finally built in 1955 - his Main Street was as much frontier as settled, with dirt roads, clapboard sidewalks, and such. Goff's view was as such not so upbeat as the midwestern boom town of Disneyland in 1955, and he may have included ideas floating around for a haunted house in his concept sketches in reaction to the economic realities of the time of his and Walt Disney's youth.


What I'm talking about here is what is formally known as the Long Depression, a succession of financial crises which began following the end of the American Civil War and lasted pretty much up until the turn of the century. The actual duration of these depressions is somewhat controversial. The depression began in 1873 following a series of worldwide wars and stock market crashes which led to many countries withdrawing currency from circulation. The United States took herself off the Gold Standard for six years, ending in 1879. Great Britian remained in severe depression for nearly two decades, which rubbed that nation of her financial strength. And although the United States entered a ten year boom period in the 1880's due to the railroad expansion and other corporate interests, the market again plummeted in 1893, thanks to failing banks and railroads. Just like today, mortgages could not be met, and many houses were left to rot. Over the course of the next few generations, as time and fashion passed these houses by, local legend took over and the popular American conception of the haunted house as a crumbling Victorian gingerbread mansion took hold.

(Right: U.S. Grant carrying the weight of the Long Depression on his back)

This is a fairly serious part of the Victorian period to take into consideration, and even if the economy did recover for another ten years until the next economic collapse (1907), allowing a neat little window of American economic and scientific and cultural dominance into which Main Street, USA neatly fits, Goff's idea of placing the Haunted Mansion right on Main Street - in a sense, bracketing the wealth and prosperity and success of the era with a reminder that it, like all economic bubbles, would not last - is a genuinely intriguing notion.

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One of the reasons the Haunted Mansion holds our fascination today is that, unlike so many other rides, its' imagery is always evocative and seems to move with a precise but interior logic that is essentially unknowable. It cuts through our defenses and lodges itself somewhere deep in the unconcious where the damage can really be done. The most effective and unsettling image in the attraction is the grandfather clock with 13 hours, its hands spinning wildly out of control. Across the face of the clock, a shadow falls - a ghoulish clawed hand. Why a hand? To match the hands on the clock face? Is the hand about to descend on us to snatch us out of our cars? The logic is opaque, but the density of this image makes it one of the few times the attraction seems to be authentically moving with the logic of a nightmare, a play in light and dark of the subconscious.

The question of time allows us to open the door on another question which is perhaps instructive about the darker recesses of this attraction. When I was younger and more literal-minded, the question of what I called the "continuity flaws" of the attraction bothered me to no end - when you're in the stretching gallery, for example, lightning flashes outside the windows, but later, in the Music Room, there's nothing but ominous clouds and moonlight. Later, at the conservatory, there's a foggy landscape, in the ballroom we have lightening again, then in the graveyard there's thick fog, rolling clouds and twinkling stars. All of these weather patterns, of course, are even stranger depending on the weather patterns outside the show building - in the real world - when you enter, but this further complication is usually swallowed up by the trancelike state inside the attraction, where it is perpetually night.

The logical answer to this question, of course, is that all of these scenes were developed independent of one another and linked in an order that most made sense, the atmospheric effects of lightning flashing through windows is only dependent on what will enliven the scene and give the proper atmosphere. I'm not interested in the logical answer here however, but the poetic one, for no attraction is like the Haunted Mansion in seeming to be a genuinely expressive freeflowing harmony of light, sound and motion. I think we can see the Haunted Mansion in terms of its 1969 promotional image, especially that old LP, The Story and Song From the Haunted Mansion, and her threadbare plot of teenagers spending a night in an old dark house.

Are we spending a night in the Haunted Mansion? Undoubtably, but I think the key here is that things may not be happening in quite the proper sequence or in quite the proper chronology - it's a stay in a Haunted Mansion with only the most exciting parts left in, just like how the Jungle Cruise packs 2 - 3 weeks of travel downriver into a 10 minute ride. These highlights have been arranged to provide the most visually coherent flow which somewhat sacrifices logical coherence. This is why the Ghost Host narration is the keynote which ties it all together.

Which brings me to yet another point, which is that some of the most hypnotic scenes, those which really play on the imagination, didn't quite turn out how the original WED team planned - but their unresolved quality is what makes them so haunting and memorable. There is the Endless Hallway, which originally played host to a traveling sound effect that didn't quite play as anticipated at Disneyland during testing. A floating candlebrum prop was pulled from the seance circle scene and placed in the hallway to give riders something to look at, and the scene remains that way to this day (in Florida a second scene was devised to set-up this now famous tableau). For years the Attic scene was all setup and no punchline, which burned it quite indelibly into the imaginations of riders and of WDI, who fussed for years trying to inject things into the scene that just weren't there (Florida's Mansion opened with a more gruesome skull-faced bride who was later replaced, possibly in an effort to make the bride figure seem more like the point of the scene). Years later, WDI built a whole Haunted Mansion around the idea of the ghost bride - Phantom Manor.

--

"The bourgeois interior of the 1860's to the 1890's - with gigantic sideboards distended with carvings, the sunless corners where potted palms sit, the balcony embattled behind its' balustrade, and the long corridors with their singing gas flames - fittingly houses only the corpse." - Walter Benjamin

Those unfinished but imagination-firing scenes are a consequence of the attraction's painfully long gestation period, which ranged from before the opening of Disneyland until 1969, a space of some fourteen or fifteen years. Another consequence is that the facade of the Haunted Mansion in California was finished well in advance of its' interior attraction, and the result is that the interior of the Haunted Mansion is fairly unlike what one would expect. While the Disneyland version is an Antebellum mansion, with the possible exception of the entrance room which does have a very authentic Old South look to it, the bulk of the house while on the ride is a fairly generic Victorian mashup which is never really specifically Southern. No ghost in the ride is heard to speak with a southern accent and somewhat violent interpretative methods are required to see any of the ghosts as specifically southern - are the dancing ladies in the Ballroom, for example, Southern Belles on account of wearing large dresses or the ghosts in the portraits southern Gents on account of being duelists? Both large dresses and duels were quite common in the United States during certain periods, in both the north and south.

Now it's worth unpacking a few vocabulary terms here to start getting to the root of all this.

Antebellum is Latin for "before the War" and is used practicially exclusively in the United States to refer to the culture, fashions, and architecture of pre-American Civil War South. This usually refers to the period from 1787 to 1860 when the southern states were primarily agrarian.

Now Victorian of course denotes the period of architecture and culture which prevaled during the time of Queen Victoria of England, who ruled from 1839 to 1901.


Now there is an overlap there, an overlap of about twenty years, where a mansion constructed in the south could be said to be both Victorian and Antebellum, and indeed many of the most famous and still surviving examples of Antebellum architecture were built in the 1840's, solidly in the reign of Victoria. However, many of these were built to resemble even earlier houses - the Orton Plantation house in North Carolina, for example, has been standing since 1735, well before the United States even existed as a separate entity.

But the important point is that the actual historically Antebellum houses are quite different in interior appearance from what we characterize as Victorian - they are quite bright and open, made for large entertaining, built to impress. Victorian styles - with their dark woods, wallpapers, dark corners, and excessive textures, patterns, and knickknacks - do not invite company. Americans tend to think of Victorian houses and styles when thinking of haunted houses and ghosts for reasons I have outlined above, and the interior of Disney's mansion was designed to shout "haunted" from the outset. As a result there is a historical discontinuity between the inside and he outside of the house, which to my eye suggests that the original Mansion was quite probably heavily renovated by the late owners to its' current state. Such renovations were quite common and it's easy to forget that even the Executive Mansion in Washington DC was renovated in the style by Chester Arthur and his contemporaries (right, photo by Matthew Brady)

Still, to this author's eye the Haunted Mansion belongs more comfortably in a northern setting, which is probably why the people who actually designed the ride (rather than the exterior which was executed by a different team) placed it in a specifically northern looking house just two years later. Early concept art for the Florida version shows a stately Georgian home, but Claude Coats' brilliant gothic facade significantly ups the ante by seeming to place the Haunted Mansion in a house where the ride within could actually take place. There is an exterior conservatory to house the famous "coffin escape" scene and a tall belfry for the Ghost Host to hang himself from.

Now the house looks very gothic, and there was indeed a big Gothic revival smack in the middle of the Victorian period, but the house has other traces to me. To begin with the Victorians did not build private residences in the Gothic Revival style, but the heavy brickwork and castlelike contours of some of the house does recall the European influence in the colonies. On page 37 of his Haunted Mansion book, as official a source from WDI as can be readily found, Jason Surrell pinpoints "lower Hudson River Valley" as the supposed place of origin of the house, and indeed there are many historic homes made of brick and stone to be found there. The estate of Lyndhurt, in Tarrytown, New York, is both geographically correct and even more gothic in appearance than the Haunted Mansion itself.

But the Gothic revival houses were meant to recall castles, and although the house itself as well as the crypts surrounding it match the house quite well, certain elements do seem to be later additions. The conservatory, for example, looks built on rather than "original", and the green metal which it is constructed out of also traces terraces and wrought iron works which seem to be a Victorian addition to a brick gothic mansion. There are too traces of a renovation here, and perhaps the implication isn't so fanciful as it may seem.. folklore, superstition and tradition strongly link ghostly activity to renovations of houses, which either perturb or placate spirits - bodies concealed in walls has been a gothic tradition for generations, and early scripts for the Disneyland Mansion even include a grisly detail of a Disney workman bricked up in a wall.

Now we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that the Disney Haunted Mansion is a fanciful version of history, not an accurate one, and the 1440 date on one of the tombs outside the Florida version makes mince of all these efforts to nail down the house to a specific period. These likely reflect at best subconscious, unintended echoes of history and heritage in the Haunted Mansion, but they do point out the complex and beautiful web of influences and inferences and history and folklore which the Magic Kingdom and Disneyland are spun from, a real tapestry of American popular culture.

--

One of the most charming aspects of the Disney Haunted Houses is that in addition to the experience of the show itself, Disney keeps alive aspects of the oral tradition which led to those old houses being labeled haunted in the first place. Everybody in their home town had a house that everyone "knew" was haunted, with tales of murders and romantic liasons to back it all up, and this is reflected on the Riverboat attractions - the most famous of that genre of Disney attraction which primarily serves to orient the viewer with and show off the main pedestrian space (Swiss Family Treehouses and Peoplemovers are other examples of this genre). In these prerecorded narrations the pilot invariably talks about the Mansion being haunted and being a place one should avoid, which does neatly acknowledge the way that such places "become" haunted houses in the real world.


An additional texture informs the Florida version, where the pilot of the boat confidentially informs us that the house was built on sacred indian burial ground and therefore cursed. This does seem to be an odd aside, until one does a bit of geographic investigation. There is indeed a show scene of an Indian burial ground along the riverboat, and it's actually the last scene of the left side of the boat before the Haunted Mansion. It may be a design coincidence, but the Haunted Mansion is located directly south of the Burial Ground show scene... they may be plains Indians alongside the river burying their dead, but there does seem to be a certain interior logic to this!

--

"Rap on a table; it's time to respond!
Send us a message from somewhere beyond!"

And finally we return to where we came in, and I'm going to make good on my promise to revisit my old question of why the Haunted Mansion is in Liberty Square. But first let's take a peek at what I wrote over three years ago on the topic:

"A question which will probably haunt Walt Disney World for the duration of its existence is the rather baffling placement of the Haunted Mansion in Liberty Square. Frankly, it simply smacks of desperation. Here was WED Enterprises, fresh off a triple victory lap with the opening of Pirates of the Caribbean, New Tomorrowland, and The Haunted Mansion, stuck in a room and told to re-re-invent the wheel they had just spent the past 15 year perfecting. Liberty Square, or at least the idea of a Liberty Square, would rise from the dead and would be joined with the Rivers of America and Frontierland to create a vision of American progress and spirit. Wouldn’t it make sense to put The Haunted Mansion there? Yet the selection of Liberty Square seems almost arbitrary, after having ruled out Tomorrowland, Fantasyland, and Adventureland right off the bat. [...] And so Liberty Square it was. The building was shoved out onto the Rivers of America as far as it could go, to isolate it and make its’ appearance in colonial America less suspect. It could almost be a part of Fantasyland. Claude Coates designed a brilliant colonial-Gothic façade and it was all systems go. Let’s just hope they don’t think about it too hard."

I've come to believe, suffice to say, that there is a higher logic to the choice beyond "it didn't fit anywhere else", albeit one that requires a bit of unpacking and extension. Disney themselves make a very eloquent case for it in Walt Disney World: the First Decade:

"Not far from the Hall of Presidents is a residence designed to scare up some early American fantasy and folklore... [in a] ...architectural style perhaps best described as early Edgar Allan Poe. On nights when the moon in a ghostly galleon and the sky is a cloudy sea, one might well imagine Ichabod Crane riding this way on his fateful journey through Sleepy Hollow."

Now that's lovely prose but if we go back to all of my carbon dating of exterior and interiors in the sections above, we find a major shift in the American social and political scene which neatly coincides with the reign of Queen Victoria and the War Between the States and which seems to have pointed echoes with the "text" of the Haunted Mansion itself: Spiritualism.

Spiritualism was an unorganized movement which straddled the line between faith and science and had great popular appeal in the mid-19th century. It had been in the air for a long time but the starting shot was fired in New York in 1848, when two sisters - Kate and Maggie Fox (left) - began to communicate with the spirit of a dead peddler buried in the cellar of their house using a series of coded knocks which seemed to emanate from different parts of the house. Very soon, the notion of being able to communicate with spirits spread throughout most of the Western world and parlor seances involving levitating and spinning tables and knocks and taps became fairly popular and commonplace.

Now I don't want to get too far afield from the Haunted Mansion here and I don't want to ignite a controversy about the Spiritualists either, but I do think that a few points here about Spiritualism are worth recounting.

First is the astonishing capacity of the Spiritualists themselves to seem to materialize spirits at will; as the practice continued the medium would often sit in a "spirit cabinet" from which the ghostly revenants would emerge. In his book Passing Strange, Joseph Citro (admittedly an author more concerned with a good story than with citations) recounts an increasingly bizarre investigation by lawyer and politician Henry Steel Olcott in rural Vermont of two brothers who managed, over the course of ten days, to materialize hundreds of visions, and Olcott was quite unable to determine how the uneducated brothers could possibly have been able to fake such a performance. Olcott later helped found Theosophy, so he clearly put very real stock in what he saw.

But it's also important to point out that the above case is a unique one in that much of Spiritualism has been debunked. The Fox sisters later recanted and confessed that their knocks were accomplished with the cracking of joints and apples tied on strings; an attempt to revoke the confession the next year failed, they were discredited both in Spiritualist and Scientific circles, and the sisters died in poverty as Spiritualism continued on without them. The most famous debunker of spiritualism was Harry Houdini, who traveled extensively and revealed the parlor seances as what they often were: well worn stage tricks.

So Spiritualism was a strange mix of the unexplainable strange and the verifiable banal, and it reached its' greatest popularity after the American Civil War, with so many recently dead in a war where 25,000 men may have lost their lives in a single day. It look place in the flickering gaslight of the Victorian era, and the shadow it casts over the Haunted Mansion is a long one, especially in the seance room, where doombuggies encircle the table and the spirits are summoned. Knocking is heard, tarot cards are spread, and instruments float through the room - all earmarks of a Spiritualist seance. Indeed, at Disneyland, Madame Leota is even given a spirit cabinet that sits quietly behind her chair, half open, as if to let all the ghosts out.

The spirit cabinet is in the background on the left. It was

originally installed to hide a projector.

But does the shadow of spiritualism slip past the Mansion itself? I believe it does, because possibly the most famous maybe-a-Spiritualist in the United States was Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln's actual faith is much contested - he never joined a church despite being one of the most eloquent men in history to regularly refer to God and the Bible, and many of his rivals made quite a bit of a show of Lincoln's lack of denominational commitment. What is known however is that following the death of his second son, Willie, Abraham and Mrs. Lincoln held at least one documented seance, and there is of course the famous story of Lincoln having foreseen his own death in a dream.

The strange interpolation of Lincoln and spiritualism continues to this day, with those famous stories of Lincoln's ghost in the White House. There is much speculation that Lincoln's son Robert destroyed or hid documents relating to his father's role in spiritual sittings and / or his assassination; one colorful story says he sealed the documents away in the monumental pillars of Washington's Pension Building during construction (currently the National Building Museum). It's not hard to find claims that Lincoln was psychic; on a whim I pulled a Hans Holzer book off my bookshelf and in it we can find: "...on the whole Lincoln apparently did not need any mediums, for he himself had the gift of clairvoyance, and this talent stayed with him all his life." (Ghosts, BD&L, page 100). At the right in a photograph of Mary Todd Lincoln supposedly with the ghost of her husband and son Willie taken in the 1880's.

And so there is the not so obvious Hall of Presidents connection, even moreso in the original show, which could be more easily interpreted as "Abe Lincoln and Friends". There is something strangely appropriate, after all, that Liberty Square's two attractions are based around the concept of seeing the dead come back to life, either to frighten or inspire, and both do elicit a similar hypnotic wonder. And there is something poetic there, a strange line that seems to run from the Haunted Mansion direct to the image of Lincoln, framed in a window, whispering "I know there is a God, and that he hates injustice and slavery. I see the storm coming and I know His hand is in it." It's a line that traces along paths laid by folklore, legend, history and fantasy. It is the sort of poetic, not literal, connection that perhaps is best actualized in a three-dimensional setting.

I've long claimed that the metaland of Liberty Square-Frontierland at the Magic Kingdom is a perfect creation that packs as much about America as you can possibly desire into one compact district: history, entertainment, food, vaudeville, capital, water, land, agriculture, settlement, industry... it's all there somewhere. And maybe mysticism and religion and a strange point where they meet is too.

...And that's why the Haunted Mansion must be in Liberty Square.

Passport to Dreams Old & New Haunted Mansion Archive:
"Thoughts on the Haunted Mansion" - who is responsible for the ride's balance of tone?
"Two By Yale Gracey" - Gracey's cloud and fog effects used in Mansion and Pirates
"Park Mysteries #5" - the 'original' bride?
"In Doorless Chambers: Part One" - planning & original conception of the ride
"In Doorless Chambers: Part Two" - technical details, influences on the ride
"In Doorless Chambers: Part Three" - artistic value of the ride

Snapshot: Great Southern Craft Company

Let's take a quick trip back in time to visit one of the Village's many distinct shops: the Great Southern Craft Company. You can picture the scene: a peaceful blue spring morning in Lake Buena Vista. Near the Captain's Tower, flowers are arrayed on steps leading to the reflection pond. The only sound is that of the lagoon's waves gently lapping the dock from a passing boater.


Around the side of the Cane, Rattan, Wicker & Suns shop, sandwiched between it and the Toledo Arts spanish antiques store, is the shopper's mecca for anybody at Walt Disney World who needed to buy a basket - the Southern Craft Company itself.

A brief word about the Craft Company. It opened in 1977 or early 1978, and replaced one of the Village's earliest disappearances, along with the Collonadde des Artes: Von Otto's Antiques. In contrast to the Magic Kingdom's antique shop, Von Otto's store was neither as artfully cluttered nor as interesting, but the name of his shop was printed on a coffee grinder (!). Nobody knows what happened to Von Otto or his antiques, but the Craft Company did stay in business for almost twenty years.


Those familiar with the Downtown Disney Marketplace today may have trouble placing this structure on account of her shaded veranda; this space is currently occupied by the Marketplace Guest Relations. Disney cut off the veranda in the mid 1990's, when she was removing all of the Village's original breezeways, terraces and porches. One of the decorative medterranian statues which once littered the Village is visible in front of the Craft Company.


As you can see, nobody had anything on the Southern Craft Company for clutter. A 1981 Village guidemap boasts of the Craft Company's "assortment of kits and supplies for quilting, macrame, latch hook and needlepoint; leathersmith and silversmith; a variety of other handmade crafts; plus Lillie Langtry's old-fashioned photo studio". And yes, that's right, for many years Village guests could get their old-timey photo taken here, just like in the hospitality house on Main Street. Except instead of a Polariod 8 1/2 x 11 camera, Lillie Langtry used a real antique camera and setting.

a 1980 brochure - enlarge for details!

In the late 1980's or early 1990's, the Southern Craft Company moved a few yards West, occupying the space which originally housed 2R's - Read'n & Rite'n, on the endcap of that building. Here is a picture taken in that second location, where once again baskets and stained glass are on display, this time in a more open and bright environment with a memorable skylight and central wooden crossbeams. Lillie Langtry failed to make the migration.


By the mid-1990's, the Southern Craft Company was gone and the space housed a number of temporary tenants, including Discover, one of those "conservation" themed stores that were popular in the 1990's.


In 1996, Basin, a London-based specialty soap company, moved into this second Craft Company location and has remained for the last 14 years. The skylight and central wooden crossbeams from which baskets once hung can still be observed today.

Mr. Franklin's Travels

Sometimes in the course of gathering up information about a certain ride or show, I end up with an excess of information with no good way to organize it, unless it be in the form of a collection of trivia bullet points. This sort of stuff generally goes unpublished here, inevitably relegated to "hey, did you know" sorts of moments I can have with friends while in the parks discussing such matters. The following case involving a certain Mr. Ben Franklin is one such example wherein I discovered something quite by accident but which I had no real good way of presenting online. however, thanks to a few serendipitous discoveries, I can make a case for relating the story of Mr. Franklin.

For those who aren't fully up to speed on the design and creation of WED's 1971 "One Nation Under God" Hall of Presidents attraction, the bulk of the show comprised a 70mm, five-screen film detailing the difficulties the United States Constitution faced, from her ratification through the nullification crisis and the Civil War. This story was told employing an astonishing number of original paintings created by WED artists led by John De Cuir, a Hollywood art designer whose most famous - and last - credit was Ghostbusters. De Cuir led a team of a dozen artists who worked daily for two years to create almost one hundred pieces of art which reflected historical reality and the dominant artistic temperament of the day. The signing of the Constitution was seen in European style burnished realistic tones, Washington putting down the Whiskey Rebellion in the style of New England folk art, Lincoln's brooding soliloquy in the flowing style of Winslow Homer, and the 20th century's progress in the style of modern art. That more of these remarkable pieces are not used in the new version of the show is the absolute only complaint I can make against it.

These paintings were as much the show as the presidents, the WED placed many of them in the waiting area for the show - not the originals, mind you, but photographic reproductions mounted on plywood and framed. Some of these made their way into other areas of the Magic Kingdom as well - City Hall on Main Street still has a version of the WED painting of the driving of the golden spike to complete the transcontinental railroad, and the Penny Arcade on Main Street had a few others.

All of these images were removed from the Hall of Presidents rotunda in 2000, to make way for the display of presidential portraits and artifacts which it currently houses. Three framed pictures do remain however, two of Abraham Lincoln at the Lincoln/Douglas debates, and another of Ben Franklin, in the exit hallway for the show.


This picture is unique in two ways. One, it is an actual painting executed on wood, which can clearly be seen in my flash photo above. Secondly, it is not the picture used in the original two Hall of Presidents shows, which was executed in a far more polished style and did originally hang in the Hall of Presidents rotunda. This painting came from somewhere else. Now one of the strange things about Walt Disney World is how certain props seem to hang around forever, appearing and disappearing and showing up in new places unexpectedly. This Ben Franklin portrait is one such example.

This is an image scanned out of a 1973 Walt Disney World guidebook.


If you look carefully above the fireplace in what is now the George & Martha Washington Room inside the Liberty Tree Tavern, you can see a framed portrait of Ben Franklin, and I am 99% certain that it is the exact same portrait that hangs in the Hall of Presidents today. When the Liberty Tree Tavern's interior was redone in the 1990's to give each of its' rooms a specific theme, for whatever reason this painting was selected to migrate across the street to the Hall of Presidents, where it remains to this day.

Now why this particular portrait was selected to be saved is somewhat mysterious. Liberty Tree Tavern does have a Ben Franklin room and you can go look yourself at the two portraits of the famed statesman which hang in it, both of which are photographic reproductions of commonly seen portraits of the man. I do, however, have it on reasonably good authority that this portrait of Ben Franklin is a Marc Davis original. I can't confirm it but we do know that Davis would, on occasion, contribute original art to the theme parks, such as the famous "pirate wench" in Disneyland's Pirates of the Caribbean and also supposedly the original stretching portraits in the Disneyland Haunted Mansion. I would not be surprised if, in 1971, those portraits of the performers in the Country Bear Jamboree lobby were painted by Davis as well. So we're not out of the realm of established fact here.

Whether it is a Davis original or not, be sure to stop by the Franklin portrait on your next jaunt through the Hall of Presidents. I don't think I need to mention that even if it is an authentic Davis piece, which many of us will never be able to see in our lives, don't paw all over it - it's amazing that it hasn't been more abused than it is, being in direct reach of guests. Pay your respects to a real survivor, a real remnant of a theme park that opened in a very different state some 40 years ago.