The Age of Not Believing: Week Ten

 "The Age of Not Believing" is a movie review series tracing the history of Disney in the years following the death of Walt Disney. It covers three films a week in an effort to see all theatrical Disney films released between January 1967 and December 1973. The entire series can be found here.

June 20, 1973 - One Little Indian

That kid's face on the poster pretty well summarizes how appealing this movie is.

On February 27, 1973, members of the American Indian Movement occupied the town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in a bid to raise awareness of their cause and protest the ineffectual American government. It was, in a larger sense, the start of a new era in the United States for an awareness of ongoing discrimination against native peoples.

The Western, the traditional carrier of the Americans vs. Natives dramatic conflict, was dying out, and even if it hadn't been, the general perception of the Wounded Knee protests as a turning point would have made the form totally untenable, except in revisionist westerns.

As it is, Hollywood wouldn't even touch the subject until the early 90s wave of "enlightened" Westerns which either featured exclusively white on white violence (Tombstone) or extended the treacly branch of peace (Dances With Wolves). Disney themselves fanned the flames by producing Pocahontas in 1995, a star-crossed lovers fantasy which just so happened to be set against the backdrop of the European colonization of North America. This time the general American population protested loudly, while some Native groups gave the film a tentative thumbs up for its message of cross-racial cooperation.

Back in 1973, while all this was just beginning, Disney was producing a low budget Western called One Little Indian. Do you think they were using these political events to tap into the zeitgeist and produce a film of lasting meaning? Nope. This is a movie where a guy gets dragged by a camel crotch-first into a cactus.

Starting in medias res, One Little Indian is a well-shot and fast paced adventure that never colors outside the lines. The film is structured as a chase, with military defector James Garner being pursued by a villain who's so poorly sketched we're not even sure why the guy goes to such great lengths to catch his prey. But this is a Western and the driven, obsessive villain has been around since the earliest days of these "oaters".

The One Little Indian of the title, incidentally, isn't so much an Indian as a kid on the lam effecting a handy disguise. There's some vaguely defined objective to his quest - he has to get to a reservation where his mother awaits - but the film blows past this so quickly it never registers as a real end goal. Meanwhile, James Garner is set to be court-martialed for refusing to destroy an Indian village; he's captured and hung but the not-Indian boy manages to destroy the gibbet and save his life. Perhaps seeing an opportunity to cut twenty minutes out of the film, the commanding Army officer decides he's already been hung once and spares his life.

This, incidentally, did happen in real life often enough, but never to my knowledge with this result. Usually they'd go back and keep trying to hang the convicted until it worked.

The real star of the movie is Rosie the Camel, the tempestuous steed Garner chooses to escape with. In what appears to be an awkward attempt to append a Disney cute-crazy animal story to a mediocre Western, Rosie gets the bulk of the better scenes and even dies in the final reel. Although One Little Indian is fast moving and never unpleasant, this conceit just plain doesn't work. We don't care for the camel half as much as the

film thinks we do. Even the poster has the camel as the star, as if the idea of a camel in a Western is inherently hilarious. These are the sort of conceptually mediocre touches that consistently drag Disney product down. "Oh ho ho, look, a camel in a Western!" "Oh oh boy, Tim Allen has a spider on his head!"

Bernard McEveety is back in his final film, and to be fair he acquits himself much better than he did in Napoleon & Samantha. Many shots in One Little Indian have a pleasantly Fordian quality, and Jerry Goldsmith (!!!) turns out a decent score which classes the whole enterprise up a good deal.

About halfway through the picture, Garner runs across an isolated farm where Vera Miles and her daughter Jodie Foster are packing up to leave on the next stagecoach following the death of Miles' husband. For an extended sequence at the dinner table, the rest of the film melts away... the not-charming kid, Rosie the camel, the deserter subplot, the need to watch this Disney movie and the entire Age of Not Believing blog series vanishes and we see Garner and Miles, two good actors playing a scene with humanity and warmth. It's old-fashioned film values that work as well today as it did in 1973. It's the sort of simple pleasures that more Disney films could stand to have.

November 8, 1973 - Robin Hood

The early passages of this review concerning the context and development of Robin Hood is indebted to Andreas Deja on his blog Deja View, which is a treasure trove of animation history and theory. I'm honored to be able to present some of his observations and material in this new context.

Robin Hood is very much the inverse of The Aristocats. Aristocats is full of good material that never coalesces into a satisfying whole. Robin Hood is a mixed bag of the inspired and the mediocre which somehow becomes greater than the sum of its parts.

I really like Robin Hood, but I'm not really sure why. It's wildly inconsistent. The story is an absolute mess. Of all the Disney feature films, this one feels the most like a Saturday morning cartoon.

Yet posterity has largely reflected my inflated opinion of it. It's the only of the Disney 70s films to be still widely watched. If you asked people to start listing Disney movies they'd eventually hit Robin Hood, well behind the major 90s hits but still ahead of something like The Fox & the Hound or The Rescuers. It's well remembered and it's one of those Disney movies that gets a new video release every few years without having to be retired to the "Vault" to artificially inflate demand.

What's more, in speaking to others about this film, I got fairly near-unanimous agreement: it was generally well liked and mostly acknowledged for not being very good. So, we must ask: what is it about this particular film that manages to overcome its limitations - and the toxic reputation of Disney in the 70s - to work, generation after generation?

We'll get there, but first, I'd like to go back in time to discuss what made this movie what it is. To say Robin Hood was a troubled production may be a mild understatement: it was a mess.

In his episode of the early 80s Disney television show "Disney Family Album", Ken Anderson describes the genesis of the idea this way:

"I thought I'd put everything together. What did the animators most enjoy doing? They most enjoyed working in the manner we did on Song of the South. Where could I get animal creatures that were somewhat like Song of the South and in what kind of a picture? Sort of a charade - a burlesque of some well known fantasy story - like a Robin Hood - ah ha!"

A great deal of Anderson's early development work on Robin Hood is very interesting. Ken worked hard on getting a variety of shapes and forms into his characters - Robin is a small, scruffy fox who is virtually loomed over by the villainous Prince John. The Sheriff of Nottingham is fat but forward-heavy and tall whereas Lady Cluck is short and bottom-heavy wide. Nearly all of the Robin Hood characters have brilliantly iconic silhouettes - shapes that define and sell their personalities.

Ken's early design for Robin has a youthful appearance: a hat too large for his head, thin neck, and long nose (he also wears pants, which the final Robin does not, because what's better than a pantsless criminal?). This early model sheet has the cavalier attitude down pat - I especially like Robin shooting arrows with his feet. In a 1973 interview Milt Kahl casually revealed that they went through eight different models for Robin Hood in the film, and three different voices - Tommy Steele, Brian Cox, and the final choice of Brian Bedford. This early version is clearly the Tommy Steele version.

Now, as cute as these Robins are, to me the champion in the film Robin Hood is Milt Kahl, who animated Robin and Marian and had his fingers in a lot of other character designs and actions as well. Milt's early passes on Robin retained Ken's youthful fox, with an effect that reminds me a bit more of a character we'd see in An American Tail than in a Disney film from 1973. To his credit, Milt fought to push Robin in an older, more handsome direction - with a thicker neck, less pointed nose, and more mature body language. Milt also went to great lengths to retain the sense of an anatomy of a real fox, which he was relatively alone in the production for insisting on. Robin Hood carries the picture on his confident shoulders, which I'm not sure the jangly Tommy Steele version could have. Milt's perfectionism saved the picture.

Equally brilliant although less frequently seen onscreen is Kahl's Maid Marian. A worthy companion of Kahl's other great leading lady - Lady of Lady and the Tramp - Marian manages to be vivacious and romantic despite remaining 80% covered in a ludicrous outfit the entire run time (if you think it's easy to draw over-dressed characters, try it sometime). Kahl improved Anderson's interesting design - which fluctuated radically between a two-eared headdress and a typical princess cone hat - by adding a virginal veil framing her entire upper body, suggesting flowing feminine hair and simultaneously handing himself a nightmare technical job of having to animate loose material flowing and shifting weight. Despite being a floating face and hands inside a dress, Marian has the screen presence of a star. Robin's festive reds and greens contrast and compliment Marian's oranges, pinks and purples. The two have real screen chemistry and are the two most accomplished and interesting character designs to hail from the animation unit in the 70s.

 As a production, Robin Hood is just plain unfinished. In the opening sequence, the animation unit hearkens back to past glories of the Walt era with the traditional "storybook" open; but this turns out to be a ruse. The book that opens is the classic story of Robin Hood - not the story that will be told - and we zoom in, past the text, towards the ornamental rooster at the top of the page. The zoom ends with an abrupt cut to an animated image, strongly suggesting that a planned transitional effect where Allan-a-Dale would've come to life on the page during the zoom was budgeted out for time or money. That's in the first minute of the film, and it's a fairly accurate summary of what's coming.

Past Disney animated films had cut corners. In 1959, Walt wanted to shutter animation production entirely in the wake of the failure of Sleeping Beauty, and the 60s films are full of small scales and smaller ambitions. But Robin Hood has an unprecedented amount of stuff that's recycled, reused, or just plain old jettisoned. The most infamous of these is in the "Phony King of England" number, which has new animation here and there but is mostly made up of action reused from The Aristocats and Jungle Book. There's a small cottage industry made up just of YouTube videos showing splitscreens of these recycled shots, so there's no reason for me to go over them again here.

(Milt Kahl)

What's interesting to me isn't that these shots are retraced animation, it's the suggestion they supply that this sequence was not intended to appear in Robin Hood at all. Written by Johnny Mercer, an enormously talented songwriter with no Disney credits until this one, it's written in a way that suggests an imitation of Roger Miller's three effective folk songs fused with a hoedown sensibility that comes out of nowhere.

"Phony King of England" is funny and effective and it peps up the end of the second act very nicely, but the actual production of the number remains suspicious, especially in light of a discarded expanded (and greatly superior) ending presented on the Robin Hood DVD and Blu-Ray. Not presented on the discs but shown in episodes of Disney Family Album are snippets of animation for this sequence, so we know it at least entered production. At some point it was then removed for a streamlined ending which reprises the exact same "is he dead or isn't he" gag from the end of The Jungle Book and jumps directly to the wedding. To me, "Phony King" looks suspiciously like a late addition to bring the running time back up from this deletion and add a song for Phil Harris. Or, a less conventionally "Disney" film was pushed into a more conventionally successful shape with a low-stakes finale and crazy song.

Maybe one of the most intriguing things about Robin Hood is its complete refusal to play by the traditional beats of the Robin Hood legend. Robin doesn't even have a band of Merry Men in this one; he spends all of his time bumming around in the forest with Little John. There is no traditional quarter-staff fight over the stream; Robin and Little John begin as friends. Instead of a disguised criminal, Friar Tuck is an actual Friar with an actual church and congregation. Will Scarlet is nowhere to seen, having been cut with the rest of the merry men. The geography doesn't even make much sense: we see Prince John, presumably a fixture in London, traveling into Nottingham to collect taxes. Then a castle in Nottingham, housing Maid Marian, suddenly seems to belong to John, as if he's based out of Nottingham. Most versions make it clear that the Sheriff of Nottingham is the local governing official and so the castle presented in the film belongs to him; the Disney version treats the Sheriff as more of a police captain, ie the Sheriff in the traditional American old west style. The film plays less like a standard Robin Hood telling and more like somebody's half-remembered, half made up version of the story.

In a way, however, Disney's alterations go far in making the Robin Hood story less of a specific historical fantasy and much more of a fairy tale, their traditional genre. Nearly every previous screen version of Robin Hood eventually becomes a story of politics; Anglos versus Saxons, rural areas versus city areas, and noble born versus low born. The Disney version dispenses with all that and basically turns the story into a Western. Robin is the good, disguised avenger, like the Lone Ranger. Prince John could easily be a corrupt governor or a congressman. Allan-A-Dale is basically just Roger Miller, voice of the people and wandering folk singer, Bob Dylan surrogate. There's even a stage coach heist. Supposedly Woolie Reitherman disposed of the Merry Men because he wanted Robin Hood and Little John to be like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. In the process of making this alteration, the film was successfully deformed into an entirely different generic convention. This is why nobody balks at a hoedown in the middle of the movie: it's the same old trope in an unfamiliar setting.

Pretty much the one thing that was carried over intact from the traditional Robin Hood tales is the archery tournament, and in his one case Disney's Robin Hood is very, very close to the scene in the 1939 film, close enough to suggest that somebody remembered it well or had seen it recently. The procession of archers, the disguise, Lady Marian in the box, the splitting of the arrows, and Robin's capture and escape are represented faithfully, even if Errol Flynn did not have a chicken who can double as a line tackle against rhinoceros.

Even so, the Disney Robin Hood gets up to some pretty strange capers. Remembered from the 1939 film was Robin's disguise at the tournament; the fox Robin is practically a master of disguise. Making good use of the potential for crazy outfits and weird accents, the Disney animators turn him into a veritable Professor Moriarty of Sherwood. Ken Andersen's concept art for Robin's disguise as a stork is a visually wonderful contrast between a short Marian and absurdly tall stork; the final animated form simplifies this greatly. Elsewhere, the Disney animators introduce the traditional vaudeville comedy convention of the drag act to the myth. Robin Hood seems to appear in absurd disguises and with crazy voices more often than not. Singular to the Disney version, this hasn't caught on in any other telling of the outlaw myth.

Given all of the above, why does the darn thing work at all? What makes Robin Hood more easily digestible and more popular than any other Disney film of its decade?

That simplicity has drawbacks, but it has benefits too. With the situations entirely stock, the film narrows in on the animated performances like a laser beam. Despite the myriad charms of the film, I think the performances in Aristocats are pretty weak. It's hard to remember a single unique thing

about O'Malley, for example. Robin Hood has terrific heroes and three great, unique villains in a story and setting that's just so-so. Roger Miller's opening "Whistle Stop" tune sets just the right lazy mood: Robin Hood is, as ever, just an excuse to hang out with Robin in the forest. There's no danger because there's no stakes and the arrows always miss.

There's the fact that Robin Hood is easily the most approachable of the Disney films for very very young children. It's the first Disney film I can remember in complete detail. There's nothing really scary and the storytelling is easily comprehensible. Most other Disney films put kids through the emotional wringer, but Robin Hood is lazily companionable.

In the process of extracting a narrative skeleton from Robin Hood, Disney created something new: the idea of Robin Hood as a stock fantasy situation. Largely presented as a historical epic since the pioneering 1922 Doug Fairbanks movie, Disney's version paved the way for a million generic Robin Hood stories since. Muppet Babies Robin Hood. Backyardigans Robin Hood. Veggie Tales Robin Hood. Take your pick. This is why Disney's film feels like a Saturday Morning cartoon to us today; we grew up in the wake of this vastly simplified version of the tale.

Yet really the remarkable accomplishment here is that Disney made a film where talking animal characters have as much on-screen gravity as human characters. Marian is severely underused but she has the charm and magnetic screen image of a beautiful woman. Robin Hood himself was the first animated crush of many young women. This is a real accomplishment on the part of Milt Kahl, suggesting that animation had moved beyond requiring human characters to create audience sympathy. These animated animals are thoroughly human, and thus attractive. They're the first non-human animated characters to have..... sex appeal.

And once we hit on that, we come to the reason why, in the Age of Not Believing, Robin Hood must come last: in a sea of tepid comedies, unadventurous adventures, and tedious formula, Robin Hood is, against all odds, the one film to have a genuine artistic legacy: modern anthropomorphic art.

--

At this point I have to break the article with a bit of a warning. I'm going to venture down a path that a lot of Disney fans try their best to ignore: the real links connecting the Disney film Robin Hood to the modern-day Furry community. Indeed, just talking about the Furry community is unreasonably difficult, given the various ways in which salacious bad press has gathered around what's more or less just another nerd subset. For several years that was one of my social scenes, and although I did not then nor do I now easily identity as such, I still have many friends who are self-professed Furries. They're not deviants, they are warm, intelligent, interesting people.

The Reputation.

I'm going to try to do this as even-handedly and fearlessly as possible. If you've come this far with this blog series without giving up, you've faced much tougher challenges. This is only about 70% as tough as sitting through Boatniks, for example. Still, this is a crucial part of Disney history that most fans try to rush past, lest the beatific reputation of their company be tarnished. It's nothing to be ashamed of. It's a complex and interesting story.

It's worth pointing out, to begin with, that in 1973 there was still no truly commonly understood genre as "furry characters". Indeed, it's very hard to draw a firm line in the sand between Robin Hood and, say, Lady and the Tramp to say "this is where the idea originated". Robin Hood is still very much in the traditional "funny animal" style of Brer Rabbit or Donald Duck - human-like animal critters who could talk and wear clothes. Bugs Bunny is another early "funny animal" who is alarmingly close to the modern understanding of "furry", but then again even Bugs' early design and attitude is a rather obvious lift from another Disney film - the 1935 Tortoise and the Hare.

What can be said about Robin Hood is that its characters mostly do not resemble the strongly humanoid body types of modern "furry" characters, putting them more firmly in the "funny animal" category. Kahl fought to keep Robin's shape expressively foxlike: he has cute short legs and a long, gangling midsection that bounces expressively when he moves. Allan-a-Dale and Lady Cluck are extravagantly avian, and look and move nothing like people in animal suits. Just about the most

humanoid morphic element of any character in the film is its visual treatment of female characters: Robin and Little John don wigs in their gypsy disguises (nowhere else to we see any indication that female characters in this animal world have long hair in the human fashion). Little John also dons fake breasts. Later on we see Lady Cluck, who has an ample bosom, despite being a chicken. Putting boobs on birds may be an unlikely first, but this film went there.

It's interesting to visually compare the designs of Robin Hood with those of their nearest precedent, Song of the South. The animated character designs for Song of the South were done by Marc Davis, who had just come off several years working on Bambi trying to find the appropriate middle ground between animals and people. He went in a super cartoony direction with Song of the South, focusing on contrasting sizes and body types to create three comedy characters in a parable setting. His Brer Fox is basically a lanky guy in a funny hat with a fox head. Fast forward to the 1970s, and Davis is still more adept at anyone at using funny animals in unique ways, although this time it's in theme parks - at Country Bear Jamboree and America Sings. Of course, perhaps the link between Davis' approach and Robin Hood can be attributed to Ken Andersen who worked with Davis on Chanticleer, an aborted "first pass" at an animal-only fantasy at Disney.

Davis sketch - note "real" bear up top.

So it's fair to say that Robin Hood isn't really a "furry" movie in the strictest sense - it's still a funny animal movie, a tradition that runs through the 19th and 20th centuries very strongly. But it's absolutely a turning point, and not just because Lady Cluck had boobs or because Maid Marian was attractive. It's the first time that humanistic animal characters were used in a dramatic situation without undermining its effect.

Now, yes, I know, I've already characterized this film as low stakes and companionable, but at the very least we can say that we are concerned that Robin may not survive his leap into the moat in a way that we are not when, say, Goofy falls off a building. The animals of Robin Hood are both identifiably human and identifiably mortal. And they did set precedents. When Don Bluth left Disney in the late 70s he took the tricks developed in Robin Hood along with him. For Disney, Robin Hood was a one-off fluke and they went back to animating funny but anatomically correct animals in The Rescuers and Fox and the Hound, films much nearer the style of Bambi or Lady and the Tramp. Bluth, conversely, took the confident waggle and body shape Milt Kahl gave Robin and used it for the heroic Justin in The Secret of NIMH.

At that time Disney was still pretty much the only game in town and Robin Hood the only real example of a certain type of funny animal. In discussing their upcoming film An American Tail, Steven Spielberg told Bluth that he wanted it to be a film of humanoid animals, and the example he used was Robin Hood. Bluth begged the contrary - he wanted it to be a film like The Rescuers. Spielberg had to go see The Rescuers first, and then he agreed. It's a little known but telling anecdote from an era when Spielberg was trying very hard to position himself as "The Next Walt Disney".

Back to our main story here, The Secret of NIMH was a seminal event in the nascent furry community, as was the release of Animalympics in 1980. Hopelessly counter cultural to the end, it's hard to even find a timeline of events about the development of the Furry community, but a quick look at this useful article on the Furry Wiki shows that the community was still calling itself the "Funny Animal Fandom" in the mid 70s and wouldn't even develop the word "Furry" until the late 80s. This places it evenly paced with the development of other early nerd groups like Trekkers and comic fans in the mid-70s, and there's always been a lot of messy overlap between Furries, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, D&D, and, yes, Disney fans. We're all part of the same cultural stew.

How did furries organize enough to start developing 'zines by the late 70s and conventions by the early 80s? In the pre internet world how did enough people find each other with an interest that's always been sort of an awkward secret? Well, we can thank Disney for that too.

In the process of researching Walt Disney World I've spoken to enough people who were there and seen enough old photos of Funny Animal Fans at Disney to have gotten an idea of how this happened. First, some context. Back in the early seventies, what we now know as the Entertainment department wasn't as carefully monitored or controlled as it is now: practically anyone who could fit into one of those character suits was pressed into service at one time or another. The daily "parade", known as the Walt Disney Character Cavalcade, was presented throughout the 70s and basically consisted of whomever they could find to throw in an animal suit piling into various Main Street vehicles and heading down the street just doing whatever.  I've spoken to a woman who worked in the Tomorrowland Terrace who left twice a day to be Peter Pan in the parade; she'd run around the parade route, run into shops, whatever.

This means that anyone who was young, clean shaven, and enthusiastic could get a job at Disneyland or Walt Disney World and if if your particular dream was to wear an animal costume, then Disney needed you even more. It was a mecca for young men with a certain set of interests, literally the only place you could be paid to dress up as characters like...... Robin Hood. Furries are famous today for hand-making elaborate mascot outfits and this is the root of this part of the fan community. After all, getting a Starfleet Insignia shirt and Spock ears was no huge feat in the 70s, but where else could you actually be Goofy?

The Furry community coalesced from there, out of these pockets of like-minded individuals who found themselves doing the same thing for the same reason at Walt Disney World and Disneyland.  It's no big secret in Orlando that the city is a prominent Furry Community hub, and one of those reasons is because, them as now, people move across the country for an opportunity to get paid for wearing a Pluto suit.

(The other big component, lest I be accused of dispersing incomplete information, was Sci-Fi conventions. The mid-70s Star Trek cartoon prominently featured Lieutenant M'Ress, a shapely woman with a cat head and tail. The first "Funny Animal Fandom" APA, Vootie, showed on its cover a furry Mister Spock. Themed room parties held at Sci-Fi conventions developed into full-scale specialist events.)

This history is also Disney's history. Although Funny Animal Fans and, later, Furries, are a bigger thing than just Disney, it's rare for a corporate entity to be so heavily involved in the creation of a massive fan group. And Robin Hood is just the middle act of the evolving history of Disney's impact on Furries starting with the Silly Symphonies, on to Song of the South, then Jungle Book and Robin Hood, then The Disney Afternoon and The Lion King, to whatever the next touchstone will be. It's just one word and facet for a part of a basic art genre - anthropomorphic art - that's been around for millennia.

Looking on from the Disney community side of things, I will say this. One thing the Disney community often craves is validation. After all, Disney is often synonymous with "dumbed down", and cartoons with "juvenile". That's why you see Disney people drawing connections to fine art, or urban design - subjects which already have polite company's "seal of approval". To this way of thinking, insisting on the links between Disney fans and the Furry community is counter productive, given the reputation Furries have not just in the wider world, but in other nerd groups. But just like the views that see only infantile simplicity in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs or lowbrow carnivals in Disneyland, these views are reductionist and wrongheaded. Even years after the company's ascent to successful corporate conglomerate and cultural touchstone thanks to a wave of Disney films in the 90s, Disney's still kinda an embarrassing thing to like.

I suggest that it's time the early history of the furry community and the influence of Walt Disney Productions on the notion of what a "funny animal" was and what they could be in the 20th century be folded back into the Disney historical narrative. Once we accept that not all furries are crazed sexual deviants the links between Disney and Furry become less creepy and more fascinating. Could John Hench have foreseen the world of the "fursuiting" community his character costumes for Disneyland would help create when he first sat down at the drawing board in the sixties? Could Walt?

Robin Hood and Maid Marian and the film and world they inhabit still stand tall in the Furry pantheon for good reason - they're wonderfully realized characters. The links between the film and the Furry subculture flatter the film, not demean it. The Disney Animation staff made such compelling people out of those animals that even today they can stir interest and recognition in people who otherwise have no interest in anthropomorphic animals.

Hey, it's okay, you can admit it. We're all a little Furry for Robin Hood.

This concludes the main series of posts in The Age of Not Believing. The next post on this blog will be a look back at the entire series, with rankings of best and worst films. There will also be a bonus film review - Superdad. See you then!

Phil Harris, Andy Devine, and Robin.

Rubber Spider Revue

You know it wasn't all that long ago that you could walk into the Haunted Mansion, hop in a doombuggy, ride up through the library and past the self-playing piano and see this:

Boo.

HBG2 at the excellent Long-Forgotten blog has recently written on the Haunted Mansion's debt to popular culture Halloween traditions, or the lack thereof, and locates these spiders in a tradition of iconic Halloween images - like sheet ghosts, orange and black treat bags, etc.

I'm not exaggerating when I say that, at the time when the Haunted Mansion fangroup was still being organized on the internet, a time I was absolutely a part of, everybody hated this scene. It was dark, spare, unimaginative, and cheap, and - worse of all - put square into the middle of a ride known for lavish sets and effects. I took that picture in 2002 and it was for my old GrimGhosts.Com Haunted Mansion website, by the way, so I speak from experience here!

Well... I'm not so sure about all that. I've posited in the past that the Grand Staircase scene was a bold if failed attempt to create something basically impossible to represent, that it was Claude Coats at his most representative and basic, that the concept was interesting if the execution was not, etc. By and large these opinions have not infiltrated the fan community to any extent and most people will agree that the endless staircase / spooky eyes scene that exists in that spot in the Haunted Mansion now is a far better use of that space than what was basically a flat black wall, some string and a few rubber spiders on wires.

Or, to put put it simple: rubber spiders, nobody loved you.

But here's the thing, those guys may have just been stupid rubber spiders painted day-glo colors and jerked around in webs, but those rubber spiders deserve your respect, darn it. And I'm going to prove it. You may not agree with me in the end, but at least you'll be fully equipped to understand where that scene came from and make up your own mind about something that was, after all, despite its obvious faults, part of our Magic Kingdom heritage.

Now, I've searched high and low to find the origins of those rubber spiders. Ken Sundberg offers in his super comprehensive look at Snow White's Scary Adventures that the 1955 version of that attraction may have included one or more rubber arachnids in the original Ken Andersen dungeon sequence, but photographic evidence is not forthcoming and I have a better idea anyway. Although Mansionologists like myself tend to associate these rubber spiders with Claude Coats and his ideas about negative space in themed design, Marc Davis is actually the one to blame.

This is a segment from a beautiful Davis piece from 1963, drawn for his top-to-bottom re-imagining of the Jungle Cruise's "sunken city":


And the actual scene from a mid-60s Pana-Vue Slide:


You'll notice that although Davis' concept features Ganesha, the Hindu Remover of Obstacles, the final scene actually depicts Hanuman, the ape-headed disciple of Rama. Ganesha got moved to appear just before Davis' new Indian Elephant Bathing Pool scene and the alligators which previously appeared where those elephants now play were moved to this new scene. This whole little stretch of the river has been subject to dozens of iterations which may be tracked on Daveland's Jungle Cruise page more or less chronologically, but the point is that once Hanuman shows up in his rebuilt shrine, the giant spider makes his debut in Disney history. Marc Davis spearheaded all these changes.

Let's take a close look at that Jungle Cruise spider because it's the best look you'll ever get at her.


I say that this spider must date from 1963 for a variety of reasons. The first is that it's a custom mold and an excellent one at that; we're used to seeing the default "orange spider" around these days but painted differently it can look like a pretty creepy beastie. Even had there been rubber spiders in the 1955 Snow White ride, they likely would have been off the shelf spiders. By the mid 60s WED had a very robust model shop and had the time and money to make a serious and unique rubber spider, which is what they did. It's impossible to prove but to my eye it looks like the work of Adolfo Procopio, who was WED's resident wildlife expert for almost 40 years.


Now HBG2, resident Mansionologist at Long-Forgotten Haunted Mansion, tells me that this spider and its twin which lurked in the loading area of the Disneyland Haunted Mansion for almost 35 years, were basically props, ie, not animated in any way. But from the Disneyland Haunted Mansion to the Magic Kingdom Haunted Mansion it's only a leap of about two years, so follow me now and together we'll go on a...

THE HAUNTED MANSION!

We'll begin our Safari at the point we began this article, in the Haunted Mansion. It's fairly common knowledge these days that the Florida Haunted Mansion expanded on the Disneyland load area concept to make the "Grand Staircase" it's own scene (or maybe not: as we used to joke, the "Grand Staircase" was neither grand nor the staircase [it is and has always been a ramp]). For a few weeks in the test and adjust phase, the scene consisted of three webs: two with the familiar rubber spiders, and one with a skeleton caught in it. The skeleton was shortly removed but the vacant web stayed for almost 35 years.

Both of these spiders got upgraded to what Disney calls "animated figures" for the 1971 show, via a wire attached to a solenoid valve which would click open and closed, causing the spider to wiggle slightly. The resulting clicking sound was familiar enough to anybody ever got stuck in this part of the ride.

Here's the spiders. This first image I stole from Imagineering Disney because it's a different angle than the first and shows the spider clearly. The second I got off Disney Fans and was taken by Al Huffman in the mid 90's, showing the second of the two spiders and webs.


(I feel like I'm making a GrimGhosts.Com page again...)

Two things about these spiders. First, they looked okay under black-light, but their webs were pretty terrible. Just look at that first spider, whose web was very impressively sized, but just filled with broken strings, spit, and debris. Goodness knows how old that iteration of his web was - twenty years? Thirty years? Scroll up and look at that 60s Pana-Vue slide and you can't tell me that these webs weren't in awful shape. I think this accounts for the poor reputation of the scene: it just looked cheap.

The second issue is that the webs weren't painted so much as sprayed with the Mansion webbing effect, giving the scene a dusty, ethereal quality. Because the web was right near a wall and very large, it was lit up a bit too much, casting light on the wall and ruining the "boundless void" effect. Had the scene been suitably black, had the webs been well maintained and commonly replaced, and painted properly, this particular part of the Haunted Mansion may have needed nothing more than some new set dressing to update it.

Well. Okay, maybe not.

THE JUNGLE CRUISE!

Let's hop across the park and visit an attraction Marc Davis was heavily involved in c. 1969-1970: the expanded Walt Disney World Jungle Cruise. For this incarnation, Davis took his 1963 "sunken city" concept to new heights with an entire indoor sunken temple. The pivot point of the scene is a shrine to Hanuman, covered with gems and treasure and guarded by swaying cobras. This is pure gold Marc Davis intrigue, but he repeated the spiders too, to the left and right of the scene:


Also noteworthy: unlike the Disneyland original, these spiders also moved, in the same manner as the Haunted Mansion arachnids discussed above.

Both of these spiders actually look fantastic under show lighting conditions, with careful painting, properly built webs, and excellent staging. That first spider, which is to the right of the shrine, is rarely seen due to appearing extra-dim on daytime cruises but if you ride the Jungle Cruise at night and the skipper turns off all the lights on her boat as you head through the temple, you'll see and appreciate the proper appearance of this simple gag.

I've never much liked the second spider because she looks a little too flopsy and rubbery, but expand the image and you'll be able to clearly see the wire tied 'round her midsection leading behind the pillar to the solenoid that makes her wiggle. Classic Imagineering, people!

I think it's important to note that Davis still felt this simple tableau - I mean, is there anything simplier than sticking a rubber spider in a fake web? - merited inclusion in a ride which dramatically and sometimes totally reworked the basic stuff of the Disneyland original, and despite his gag having been already recycled twice in other attractions.

Twice? Actually... make that three times.

SNOW WHITE'S ADVENTURES!

Moving further eastward, we come across the 1971 Snow White's Adventures, probably the nearest WED ever got to designing a true, traditional spookhouse dark ride. A variety of people worked on these rides, including the "1955" crew for Fantasyland, amongst them Ken Andersen and Claude Coats, plus some later-generation Imagineers who had a hand in refurbishing the 1955 originals in the 1960s: Yale Gracey and Rolly Crump.

Hey, Yale, what'cha doing there?

See? The Rubber Spider conspiracy grows by the moment.

I'll stop here and quote Ken Sundberg's Snow White Adventures page now. He's talking about the 1955 original version of the attraction at Disneyland, referencing scene where the shadow of the Witch crosses your path through an arch. In that arch was a spider web, and a picture of the scene may be found in issue #13 of The E Ticket.

"Following immediately after the Dungeons scene, the vehicle faced a huge spider web in a dark archway. The silhouetted Shadow of the Wicked Witch emerged behind the web and moved across the wall. [...] In the late 1970's the foreground of the Shadow of the Wicked Witch scene was changed glowing in fire-orange, with a spider possibly flicking across the web as the vehicle passed the archway. The movement of the Witch's shadow was also changed; it didn't move across the wall anymore, but rocked up and down to the right, as if the Witch was dipping the apple in a cauldron."

Whoever it was who decided to add this little vingette to the Walt Disney World version of the ride, however, was undoubtedly doing so in the spirit of both the original and the generally increased interest in rubber spiders at WED in the late 60s:


Mike Lee took this picture of part of the original dungeon scene in the early 90s, shortly before the ride was removed. The skeleton would flap its jaw at you and warn you to "Go Back!" You'll notice that this spider's web is painted right on the wall behind it... because this spider was the only one to actually move. That's right, it would slowly lower towards the skeleton on a track. I remembered this vividly from my early visits to Walt Disney World and after the removal of this scene - this corner is where the witch can now be seen poisoning the apple - I couldn't remember which ride it was from and swore that the Haunted Mansion spiders used to move towards you on a track.

We lost this spider, probably the most impressive of them all, in 1994.

In 2007, both of the Haunted Mansion's spiders went away, leaving the two in the Jungle Cruise the only spiders left holding down the fort. The Magic Kingdom's 1971 rubber spider population has been decimated by 60%.

Over at Disneyland, the spider in their Haunted Mansion load area bowed out in 2003 and has not been seen since. In 2005, as part of a larger refurbishment effort, the 60s WED spider was removed from the Jungle Cruise. Some new spiders, in more realistic but less fun webs, appeared deeper in the Sunken City sequence. But these spiders look off-the-shelf and don't match the subject of our article here, the 60s version.

Overseas, Tokyo Disneyland's Haunted Mansion carries on the tradition of the giant rubber spiders, and I'm sure their spiders and webs looks very good, not just because they're Tokyo Disneyland but because they each have to be removed and replaced once a year for their Haunted Mansion Holiday Nightmare overlay. And in an ironic twist of fate, the same year that the original WED spider was removed from the Disneyland Jungle Cruise, in Hong Kong Disneyland the "Jungle River Cruise" ride opened, the saddest and most anemic of all the Jungle Cruises. But it features an astonishing number of these fake spiders... I counted at least six in one ride video and there's probably more. So overseas at least, rubber spiders continue to haunt the darkest corners of Disney rides.

It's sort of hard to feel bad for the fate of these singularly unconvincing rubber arachnids. I've made the best possible case for them here but let's not forget: It's a rubber spider. In a fake web. Some of you have probably made more impressive rubber spider displays in your Halloween decorations than all of WED could muster in the early 70s.

But the real fascination isn't what it is, it's how easy it was to find it. All of Imagineering and WED-era design especially has maddening consistencies, consistences which made the experience of going to The Magic Kingdom or Disneyland truly singular. Beyond the obvious scope and scale of the ambition, it had to do with the excellence of the staging, the care of the painting and sculpting, and yes, sometimes, the constant recycling of materials. Submarine Voyage's tropical fish obtained a new coat of paint and became salmon jumping in and out of the water on the Mine Train Trough Nature's Wonderland. The "Old Man in the Bayou" scene of Disneyland's Pirates of the Caribbean begets The Magic Kingdom's Beacon Joe, who makes return appearances at Tokyo and Disneyland Paris. Beacon Joe's face is a Blaine Gibson sculpture who appears elsewhere in Pirates of the Caribbean, along with several appearances in the Haunted Mansion and so on.. and on and on. These are the sort of fun games the true hardcore students of WED design can play.

So now I've clued you into a secret. Have fun playing the game and remember: it all started with a rubber spider.

Snow White's Adventures: The Original Version

I wrote this piece for Widen Your World, and a full page on that website is currently forthcoming with all sorts of neat pictures and diagrams and stuff, but in the interim I found this essay sufficiently interesting and sufficiently fun to write that I think it's worth posting the text here to stand on its' own. There's a lot of interest in and even more misinformation about Walt Disney World's original Snow White ride, and I hope that this article plugs a significant gap in many peoples' understanding of Fantasyland 1971.

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A facet of the increasingly intertwined histories of Disney’s two original Magic Kingdom parks oft overlooked by historians ameatur and otherwise, is of the number and scale of improvements made to the general characteristics of Disneyland in the Florida Project’s Phase One development which don’t begin and end with more space and a bigger castle. Indeed many existent Disneyland attractions were disassembled and reconceptualized from the ground up - a redesign of the Jungle Cruise which transformed it from a contested thing to a true Marc Davis attraction (to say that it jumped from being a classic to a masterpiece in the process is redundant), a greatly improved and expanded Haunted Mansion, a Tiki Room spread out large and allowed to blossom like a tropical flower, and a Submarine Voyage so dramatically altered while retaining many of the core elements that it didn’t even feel related. Those items which were adaptable were quickly shuttled over to Disneyland – Country Bear Jamboree, improved figures in the Indian Village, and whole stretches of the Jungle Cruise – and installed so seamlessly and so quickly that the innovations of the Florida property began to be forgotten. As more and more Floridian elements made the transcontinental journey (proving in the process that Disney’s Clone Wars are as old as there were things to clone), everything from figures to pieces of music to menu items originating in Florida became “Disneyland Originals”. So when the original park’s absorption of the final Magic Kingdom exclusives was complete in 1983 with the opening of the New Fantasyland, totally forgotten were the Florida originals which made such a thing possible.

It is in the spirit of this that I now motion to promote to full classic status in the realm of Florida Originals: Snow White’s Adventures - to stand alongside such innovate entertainments as Country Bear Jamboree, Space Mountain and The Hall of Presidents. It is perhaps the Magic Kingdom’s lost classic, too low profile to garner much more than a passing interest when it was open and too early to the party of Florida extinctions to be lamented when it closed, Snow White’s Adventures was the Florida Original by dint of being a complete reconception of the then fifteen year old Disneyland original to an extent only matched by Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride next door. WED literally reduced the attraction down to brass tacks and retained exactly two elements of the attraction, discarding all others and making perhaps the strangest adaptation of one of their own films ever.

A familiarization with the long forgotten Disneyland original is here in order, but this is perhaps beyond the scope of this article except in passing. Curious parties should be advised to proceed directly to Issue #13 of The E Ticket magazine, where the whole thing is related in extreme detail. This will hopefully be, for the rest of us, sufficiently illuminating:

SEQUENCE OF 1955 ATTRACTION:
Load Area
Entering Diamond Vault
Seven Dwarfs Mine
Enchanted Forest / Cottage of Seven Dwarfs
Witch’s Castle
Dungeon of Castle
Shadow of Witch
Witch at Cauldron
Haunted Forest
Witch inside Seven Dwarfs Cottage
Witch on Cliff with Boulder

SEQUENCE OF 1971 ATTRACTION:
Load Area / Enchanted Forest
Queen’s Mirror Room
Dungeon
Witch at Cauldron
Witch in Boat
Haunted Forest
Seven Dwarfs Cottage
More Haunted Forest
Seven Dwarfs Mine
Runaway Mine Cart
Diamond Vault / Witch with Giant Gem
Explosion Room

Aside from general repetitions like scenes of the transformed evil queen laboring over a cauldron culled from the 1937 Disney film, one striking difference is that the sequence of events in the attractions is essentially reversed. The turning point in the Disneyland attraction was where you leave the seven dwarfs mine (Dopey arrived with a sign warning you about the witch at this juncture) and safety behind; in Orlando the Mine was not only the last scene but the least safe, where the Witch popped out a total of three times at the riders (counting the brief scene before actually entering the mine), finally cornered them, and dropped a giant gemstone on them, apparently killing the riders and ending the ride in a room filled with strobing starbursts. Moreover the turning point where safety becomes danger in the 1955 attraction was visualized by approaching and then inevitably turning away from the Seven Dwarfs Cottage: this was the first repeat moment in Orlando, but in the 1971 version, it happens in the Load Area of the attraction, before the ride is even underway!

That Load area, by the way, was a tricky little thing, stylized in the manner of Sleeping Beauty, with the Seven Dwarfs Mine on the right where little ride vehicles exited, The Evil Queen’s Castle on the left where Snow White’s voice echoed from a wishing well, and in the center a little downscale “distant” Dwarf cottage and a shimmering plastic waterfall. That WED wanted to build a Sleeping Beauty ride here may explain the stylization of the load hall, but it doesn’t explain why such a pretty and brightly lit exterior was affixed to such a relentlessly grim attraction. The most beautiful and elaborate of all Fantasyland dark ride exteriors, if riders suspected that something more like It’s A Small World and less like The Haunted Mansion was within they could be excused. The only real hint is that those mine cart / bed / whatever shaped vehicles entered not the dwarf cottage but the evil queen’s castle and, as they entered, the Queen would part a set of curtains in an arched window and peer down on the carts as they entered. This sinister little detail was translated to Disneyland in their 1983 Snow White ride with much celebration, but as an original Florida onride effect its’ placement has the uncanny effect of telling any wary children onboard: “You’re totally screwed.”

The vehicles moved into the Queen’s castle and found themselves in her mirror room where the Queen, facing the magic mirror, arms extended in the air, visible in reflection would very loudly intone “Mirror, mirror, on the wall…”. At this point the voice became a piercing shriek as the figure turned and the raised arms became a lunging gesture towards the riders. The figure leaned forward and instead of the stately Queen, she was already transformed into the wretched witch figure, finishing her statement: “I am the fairest one of all!”.

This room held a number of interesting details, chief of which was the ride’s key transformation effect, so effective it has been duplicated in every Snow White ride since. The effect is simple, a two sided figure, the front being the witch and the back being the queen, which would rotate and tilt forward. Many dark rides through the years have included such a stunt, including dark ride designer Bill Tracy’s wicked gag of approaching the figure of a beautiful naked woman from the back which would rotate to reveal not a flash of breasts, but a rotting skeleton from the front. What makes the Snow White iteration of the gag brilliant and kind of graceful is that there are actually two figures, not just one. The second figure is a complete Queen figure located on the other side of the “mirror”, and that figure rotates at the same time and at the same speed as the half-Witch figure, which means that the riders literally have no clue about what’s going to happen until the witch is already revealed. This room also had a number of interesting and beautifully painted details, including a view of the night sky through a long slender window to the right of the Queen. And, of course, the Witch’s shrieked line “….I am the fairest one of all!” was loud… very loud. Loud enough that you could hear it repeating for most of the first half of the ride.

Immediately following was a short trip through the Witch’s dungeon, which more or less exists in similar form today. Included were two skeletons, some spooky bat eyes stolen from Disneyland’s Pirates of the Caribbean, and a menacingly swinging gate. Guests then came across the “Witch-At-Cauldron” scene, possibly the most famous image from the 1937 film, where she would announce “The sleeping apple!” and a shelf of potions above the riders’ heads would drop from above unexpectedly, creating a terrific crash of breaking glass (in auditory form). According to the Lanzens’ writeup on the 1955 Snow White, this scene and its’ traditional Dark Ride gag was present at Disneyland at this time as well, making this the second and last element of the Disneyland original repeated. Venturing outside into the spooky forest, riders found themselves at the moat level of the castle, where the witch would zip out of a dark dungeon-level opening on her boat, apple in hand. Along the left side on the floor were a number of logs-cum-crocodiles snapping at passerby.

What followed was a more or less accurate theme park version of Snow White’s famous flight through the woods, with large turning trees painted vibrant colors with light up faces along a winding track. It still exists in more or less unchanged form in the current Magic Kingdom ’94 show, except the colors have been muted and the faces of the trees made less unsettling. At the very back of the scene before the cars moved off to the left towards the dwarfs’ cottage was a small device where eyes painted on a flat surface and attached to a long pole are rotated on an axis to appear to rise from the darkness and up into the night air, much like the endless stream of skulls rising from the Haunted Mansion’s pipe organ.

The next scene, the Seven Dwarfs Cottage, most firmly asserted that this version of the attraction would not play by anything resembling “rules”. So far the attraction had been a steadily accumulating number of scenes meant to convey unease, but as the little carts approached the cottage, a warm yellow color so far unseen in the attraction was spilling from the windows and temporary relief seemed to be at hand. But as the “crash doors” opened, the most sinister moment in the entire attraction was revealed… a dark and abandoned cottage.

The Claude Coates influence was most evident in this scene. Coates retained the interior styling of Albert Hurter for the 1937 film where the cottage is ornately carved with little animal figures and heads, chair backs have eyes and silly open mouths, and even the dwarfs’ water pump is a gothic gargoyle head. Coates retained all these but turned them sinister by painting the eyes of all the furnishings bright blacklit white and arranged the props so they are all facing the audience. As a result not only is the cottage unexpectedly quiet and abandoned and blacklit blue, but all of those faces in the furnishing are staring at the audience with burning white eyes. This significantly one ups the disturbing interior finish of the Haunted Mansion with its’ skulls and demons literally in the woodworks. In the next scene, where the seven dwarfs ascend a staircase to investigate a sinisterly ajar upstairs door from which emanates a great black shadow of a ghost, the little owl heads carved on the end of each step are looking up towards the door. The dwarfs’ dialogue is no more reassuring:

Grumpy: “I warned her!”

Doc: “Trouble! I hear trouble!”

At this point, of course, the witch pops out at riders from an open window and it’s once again outside into the forest where the witch again appears from behind a tree trunk offering that poisoned apple. Then it’s off to a diamond mine.

Inside the mine is dark and confusing, with one forced perspective mine shaft leading off to oblivion as the timbers ominously creak and groan. At one point the witch appears above the track, pushing a timer off its’ support post in an effort to send it crashing down onto the carts. Just down the line, a mine cart loaded with glittering diamonds zips from around a corner and stops just short of crashing into the ride vehicle. At this point in the attraction, in the space of about 30 seconds, the Witch has literally made four attempts on your life and the real feeling of a pursuit is underway. Finally, the carts roll into the dwarfs’ diamond vault, where thousands of glittering gems emerge from the walls in painted blacklight splendor. Suddenly the Witch appears atop the door to the vault, pries a gigantic gem out of the rock and drops it towards the ride vehicle. “Goodbye, dearie!” And then it’s through a room where flashing cartoon starbursts cover the walls and back out into the Florida sun.

And so ends Snow White’s Adventures, perversely, the second and least famous Fantasyland attraction where riders are killed in traumatic fashion at the very end. Although the terror of the headlong plunge down a pitch black tunnel towards an oncoming train cannot be replicated by a scary blacklit witch dropping a big ridiculous gem on your noggin, the complete disorienting chaos of Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride was effectively present in Snow White’s Adventures as it was in all classic-era American dark rides, an endangered species if there ever was one. It wasn’t until the advent of Alien Encounter in 1994 that Disney presented an attraction where every scene was literally a threat to you, and even Alien Encounter had its’ share of wisecracks and nonsense to dull the edge. Since riders are expected to take on the role of Snow White during the ride they literally become stalked by the maniacal Queen, and there is very little rest between assaults until they are finally killed. Not even the Haunted Mansion proposes that kind of direct threat to riders, and Mr. Toad is done in by his own motor mania, making that attraction a kind of morality play. Future Snow White shows would relegate the role of Snow White to figures appearing in the ride, dulling the edge so that although such scenes may be scary, they are ultimately a passive trip past fairy tale tableaus. Accounting for Snow White, Mr. Toad’s pin up girl and hellish ending, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea’s terrifying giant squid, and nudity on Peter Pan mermaids, Fantasyland 1971 offered the highest number of attractions inappropriate for children than anywhere else on property! (If you want to go for the hat trick you have to jump ahead to 1987 when Magic Journeys played in the Mickey Mouse Revue theatre where the number of inappropriate attractions jumps from four to five because, as we know, Magic Journeys isn’t appropriate for anyone.)

Of course all this descriptive text and video can’t fully recreate the experience of riding any better than any other “virtual” Walt Disney World attraction, but a word relating to the sound of the attraction should be relayed here. Although not as sparse in manufactured sounds as, say, The Swiss Family Treehouse, Snow White’s Adventures is notable in being a Disney attraction of the “Golden Era” of WED with no unified soundtrack of the sort found in, say, Pirates of the Caribbean or If You Had Wings.

Indeed, one of the most characteristic things about the ride was its’ comparative quiet. While later versions of Snow White would feature clips of song from the original film, Snow White’s Adventures was spent mostly listening to the witch cackling echoing from elsewhere in the ride and hearing the Queen bellowing “Mirror, mirror, on the wall…” from the opening scene. There were atmospheric effects in the haunted forest scene, creaking timbers in the mine, and strange atonal music in the diamond vault climax and outside the dwarfs cottage (possibly related to the music for the Jungle Cruise), but otherwise the ride was spent wondering if that cackling witch was behind you, in front of you, or just right upon you, ready to jump out at the next moment. Even the layout of the scenes increased the terror of these ambushes, as increasingly the track twisted and turned as each new threat approached, forcing the riders to violently “jump away” from shrieking witches and out of control mine carts. And, of course, there is one of the wickedest layout tricks in any Disney attraction, where upon entering the Diamond Vault where that final witch will kill you, she is initially hidden behind an outcropping of rock which must move away due to changing perspective before she shrieks her final line and does you in.

In a way, it’s appropriate. Snow White is Walt Disney’s most frightening and Gothic film. Adults who dote on the comedy and romance often forget the terror of the Queen’s transformation into a witch and the Witch’s ghoulish screams: “She’ll be buried alive! Buried alive!”, not to mention the honest grief of Snow White in the glass coffin. From these vibrant horror and gothic traditions did Snow White’s Adventures draw its’ inspiration - Snow White’s terrified run through the forest, the Queen’s prisoners who starved to death inches away from food – there is no shortage of genuinely gruesome material pulled from the film legitimately, regardless of the liberties the ride takes with the source in the wide view.
Film historian Tim Lucas documents in his book on Mario Bava that in the 1930’s American horror films were suppressed in Italy by the Mussolini regime, but Snow White was allowed through, and left deep marks on a generation unaccustomed to such intense material. That Snow White’s forest run is repeated in two key fright films of Italian origin – Bava’s own Black Sunday of 1960 and his heir apparent, Dario Argento’s film of 1977, Suspiria, is notable.

The question then becomes, now that the original show is gone, where to direct interested parties looking to experience it. The 1983 Disneyland show cannibalized the Orlando scenes, sets and props to create a version of some real intensity but still significantly sanitized – Snow White now appears in the fiberglass person to be menaced, displacing the threat, and the show is overall a chronological recount of the Snow White story with the good and bad more fully represented rather than the bizarre riff on certain thematic material in the Orlando show. The Mickey Mouse Revue dwarf animatronics arrived to provide the show with an upbeat “Silly Song” opening, and many of the decorative molds and props created for the 1971 dwarf cottage interior show up as well – pointedly, many of the most disturbing looking ones are placed in such a way that they don’t appear to stare at the riders with the blank horror they’re designed to.

The ’83 show then proceeds to cherry-pick through the rest of the Florida show as it pleases, lifting the best shock moments – the mirror transformation, the emergence on the boat – in every detail and distributes them in pretty much logical order throughout the show. This is not to denigrate the Baxter version in any way – it is a beautiful ride (if too cramped perhaps for its own good, but therein lies its’ wonderful danger) and let’s not forget that Baxter installed the ’71 show and knew its’ tricks. Retained from the ’55 version is one of the best moments in any Disney fright ride, where the witch irrationally throws open the door of the dwarfs’ cottage with a great metallic creak to menace riders with an apple, a moment disturbing enough to be worthy of the Orlando show. And it is this version of the ride which has become the “template ride”, repeated verbatim at Disneyland Paris with an expanded ending scene which actually makes good on the promise of “Happily ever after”. Yet perhaps because this author is such a contrarian, she finds the abrupt Disneyland Anaheim ending most appropriate – the show has been such a relentless trek through a catalogue of horrors that it is most logical that it end with just a mural announcing a promised but not percieved happy ending – the ride is still called Snow White’s Scary Adventures, after all, and the evil Queen still peeks out of her tower to glare down at you no matter how many times you watch her get struck by lightning. This is, among other noteworthy things, the only version where one can observe the original speed and ferocity of the Orlando shock effects – the Witch still rockets out of the gloom on her boat shrieking, a nightmare image.

Then, perhaps, it will be wise to look at the Magic Kingdom Florida’s 1994 renovation of the show, a true mixed bag. On one hand this version is absolutely the most pictorially beautiful – every scene is alive in the brightest tones and has some wonderful effects. Yet every witch is still accounted for but does not frighten anymore: where once she came shooting out of darkness she now stands bolted in place, making too many scenes like tableaus and dulling their edge. Snow White is similarly ineffectual and the lack of real motion in the figures makes the whole affair seem more like a wax museum. It is, in short, the safest of all Snow Whites, yet one can get a flavor of what was once present in those rooms: the layout is mostly unaltered. It is essentially the version of the show nearest to being a children’s attraction, further removed than even the 1983 show from the version from which it takes most of its’ scenic elements and ideas.

A third version exists, an alternate 1983 show which still plays near the original 1971 Mickey Mouse Revue at Tokyo Disneyland. It is the best version of the show still in operation, a kind of “mega version” of the 1971 show – more sensibly paced but with a less crazy ending. It has a perfectly recreated 1971 load area followed by the largest and best Mirror transformation scene of all the versions –the Witch even continues to pivot, well overshooting facing the cars as she turns, just like the original Orlando version. The Disneyland expanded dungeon follows, then a very expansive version of the haunted forest where the Claude Coates floating eyes are even given their own little part of the scene. The Disneyland “silly song” sequence in the cottage disappointingly follows, but thereafter is a very faithful version of the Orlando mine, complete with ominous creaking, although there is no witch in the mine and the mine cart only threatens to roll towards the riders. There is a strangely flaccid version of the scene outside the Dwarfs’ cottage from the 1955/83 show where the Witch does not open the door to startle riders, then the 1983 version’s cliff scene and out the exit doors in appropriately abrupt style. Of course all this sadly makes mincemeat of the beauty of the 1971 show’s carefully constructed façade, where there is no lie: riders begin their journey in the Queen’s castle, end it in the Seven Dwarfs Mine, and if one where to punch through the back wall behind that little downscale cottage in the center they’d be in the dark and scary haunted forest with yet another Dwarf Cottage – full scale and scary inside and out – at the back of the room.

In the balance of evidence it increasingly seems that Snow White’s Adventures 1971 was a lightning-strikes-once sort of creature, way above and beyond what most guests or even Disney themselves wanted. The show’s building blocks were all reutilized for later, safer Snow White ventures but eventually the original threat was, inevitably, disbanded. After years of posting signs, printing warnings in guidebooks, adding and then removing the word “Scary” on the marquee, Disney was unable to clue people in as to what awaited inside. Guests and their children, unlikely to appreciate the irony that the scariest and darkest ride in the park was sitting right next to the castle just inside the land supposedly most intended for children (this misconception is so gross I hardly feel the need to comment on it, but it is there), were reacting badly and finally the much safer version replaced the 1971 ride in 1994. But there was never and still hasn’t ever been anything quite like it in the realm of Disney theme design – all too often eschewing traditional modes of the great American amusement park. The “Spook Train” has been rolling through amusement parks like Kennywood and Coney Island, true sites of national heritage, since the late 1920’s and the Snow White’s Adventures and Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride attractions of 1971 are Disney’s two most remarkable contributions to the genre. It is in this capacity that I elect it as a true Walt Disney World classic, a crazy mistake in the grand scheme of things, but a subversive and influential one.