Early plans for the Tower of Terror involved Mel Brooks. Now that sounds like the Twilight Zone...

It all started with Mel Brooks…

A Disney dream team started the process. Involved with the earliest blueprints were Imagineer Marty Sklar, Michael Eisner, and director Mel Brooks. Why was Brooks there? That’s an odd piece of Disney folklore and Hollywood history.

Eisner’s previous career as an agent and studio boss had given him access to some of the most talented players in Hollywood. He’d developed a strong relationship with Brooks when the latter read a screenplay provided to him by one of his former assistant directors. Brooks loved this dramatic story and asked Eisner, the head of Paramount Pictures at the time, to provide the resources to make the film.

Eisner was extremely confused at this request. The world knows Brooks for his goofy comedies. The feature film he wanted to make was totally humorless. Eisner justified his reputation as a believer in talent by gambling $5 million on the project. He believed in Brooks as a content creator so much that he agreed to bankroll the film.

The title became a darling of critics and eventually earned back more than five times its budget. More importantly, it tied for the most Academy Awards nominations that year and had the film won Best Picture, Mel Brooks would have been the guy thanking the Academy. Some cynics speculate that it’s this reason why voters were reticent to laud the film. It was called The Elephant Man, and it earned eight Academy Awards nominations but won none of them, one of the worst shutouts in Oscar history.

Yes, Mel Brooks is the uncredited executive producer of The Elephant Man. Think of it as the Blazing Saddles sequel you never got.

The point is that Brooks and Eisner had a strong working relationship and healthy respect for one another. Once Eisner had established his movie studio theme park premise, he needed something to distinguish it. The CEO knew all too well that Universal Studios Florida would arrive in 1990, only a year after Disney-MGM Studios. If their attractions were better, Walt Disney World would seem damaged. The more pressing matter for Eisner on a personal level was that his legacy would be in question. His ego on this subject was a contributing factor in many of his decisions as head of Disney.

Before his career collapse, Eisner prioritized Disney-MGM Studios. It was his theme park baby. He asked Brooks to come and brainstorm with the best Imagineers still on the payroll. From the beginning, Eisner wasn’t averse to a tie-in to an intellectual property outside the Disney collective. For all its storied cinematic classics, horror wasn’t really the company’s thing. That’s something that has changed a bit since the 1980s, but it was an accurate summation at the time.

Brooks loved the idea of one of his iconic tales becoming a signature attraction at Walt Disney World. He pointed out that he had a natural fit. Young Frankenstein satisfied Disney’s goal of a gothic horror tale. It was also silly enough that it could remain child friendly. At the time, Eisner wasn’t married to the idea that Disney-MGM Studios had to cater to children. He was also savvy enough to acknowledge that burning that bridge needlessly would look like a massive miscalculation to company outsiders. History indicates that Eisner wasn’t averse to picking fights for the wrong reasons. He didn’t actively seek them out, though.

Frankie say relax, Disney say good-bye

The world knows Peter Boyle primarily as the sardonic dad on Everybody Loves Raymond and for one kickass appearance as a fatalistic psychic on The X-Files. Decades before that, he played the Monster in Young Frankenstein, a thankless role in a film so popular that it’s still occasionally screened in North American cineplexes today. In an alternate universe, Boyle’s a much bigger star due to the Disney Bump, the career boost actors receive for major roles in films that anchor Disney theme park attractions.

That’s what would have happened if Castle Young Frankenstein had become a reality. Why didn’t it? Finances and egos, mostly.

Brooks worked hand in hand with Disney Imagineers to build a viable blueprint for this attraction. All parties agreed that it would stand out visually within the park, similar to other castles at the various Disney gates. This castle would have a moat that guests could only cross by a drawbridge. A Bavarian village would reside nearby. Here, the villagers would warn guests of the impending danger at the castle. Simultaneously, they would sell snacks and theme park merchandise. Hey, if someone’s about to go to their doom, why not clean out their wallets first? They won’t need money where they’re going.

Eisner adored the idea of a functional imaginary village residing at Disney-MGM Studios. That’s the type of splashy headline he sought throughout his career as corporate CEO. He only had one well-founded reservation. He just wasn’t sure Young Frankenstein resonated enough as an intellectual property. He may have underestimated the film in this regard. It earned $86.3 million in 1974, when the average movie ticket cost $1.89 (and audiences presumably had to walk 10 miles uphill in the snow to see it). That’s the equivalent of $385 million today. Young Frankenstein sold more tickets in 1974 than The Secret Life of Pets or The Jungle Book sold in 2016.

Eisner feared something beyond the lasting popularity of Young Frankenstein, though. He also worried about having to pay for the rights to this project. Had Young Frankenstein been a Disney project, Peter Boyle would have become a Disneybounding icon, I’m sure.

Continued in "Disney Demystified (Volume 1)"!

That time a pirate almost escaped from Pirates of the Caribbean and took up residence in Disneyland's Haunted Mansion...

Half-architect, half-animator, 100% Imagineer

The “foolish mortal” responsible for the original conception and overall design of Haunted Mansion was Disney animator and writer Ken Anderson. Like so many of the employees who worked side by side with Walt Disney himself, Anderson was a renaissance man at the company. He had a hand in classics such as Cinderella, Jungle Book, and Aristocats, all of feature his contributions. He also sketched drawings that would become the unofficial blueprints for eventual rides and attractions at Disneyland.

Most notable of those is Haunted Mansion, which Walt Disney personally assigned to Anderson in 1957. Disney wanted the attraction prioritized because he felt the park was lacking without it. In many ways, Anderson was perfect as the driving force behind the Haunted Mansion. He wasn’t an animator by intention but rather an architect who wound up working at Walt Disney Studio starting in 1934. Over time, he perfected his craft as an illustrator and content creator.

By the time Walt Disney tapped him on the shoulder and suggested he draw mock-ups for the ride and surrounding area, Anderson possessed a combination of architectural understanding of building design and an animator’s knowledge of how to tell a story through visuals. The dutiful employee had only recently transferred to Walt Disney Imagineering (WED) from the Animation Department, so he had one foot in both phases of business development. Equal parts showman and pragmatist, Anderson began accumulating spirits for the Disneyland’s very own haunted house.

The two towers (well, mansions)

Anderson’s attention to detail was on full display when he selected a property as a guideline for his artistic renderings. He chose a building that was already over 150 years old, the Shipley-Lydecker House in Baltimore, Maryland, as his odd inspiration for an antebellum New Orleans plantation-style mansion. While he explicitly modeled the look from it, he adopted some of the style from the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California. It was symbolically fitting as the residence of the widow of gun-making legend William Wirt Winchester. Sarah Winchester herself claimed that the ghosts of all the people killed with Winchester weapons haunted her home, so the duo’s residence fit the broad-strokes outline Anderson had for Haunted Mansion.

He visited the Winchester Mystery House, which remains in operation today as a tourist attraction, and took meticulous notes about not just the house itself but also the operation of the business. These notes influenced many of his architectural decisions, as his intention was to create an attraction that could host a lot of people in a single day. In order to achieve that goal, he wanted Haunted Mansion to set new standards in the genre. The Winchester Mystery House includes a treasure trove of obscure arcana and oddities such as doors to nowhere, stairs whose path is a circle, and a séance room. All of these ideas eventually wound up as features in Haunted Mansion.

Captain Gore vs. the Blood Family in the voice of Walt Disney

Anderson’s ideas were profound, and the seeds of them still percolate through many of the harrowing moments of the Doom Buggy experience, such as the moment in the ride when you exit the attic through the window. If you pay careful attention, you’ll notice that the shingles are different from the Haunted Mansion building itself. The explanation is that you’re reliving the horror of a character and story invented in 1957. Here’s how that’s possible.

The original backstory for the Haunted Mansion involved a happy fiancée named Priscilla whose wedding day bliss ended the moment that she unearthed the truth about her soon-to-be husband. After he warned his young betrothed to stay out of the attic, she couldn’t resist opening Pandora’s Box and entered the top floor of their decadent mansion. Hidden there were the vestiges of his days as a dread pirate fittingly named Captain Gore. Since the man had taken on a new identity to hide his treacherous past, he couldn’t risk the locals discovering that he was a murderous letch. When the sea captain realized his betrothed had found out about his past life, he threw her out the window, and she died in the fall.

To drive home the heartbreaking reversal of fortune, Anderson drew pictures of a dead woman in a wedding dress. This theme evolved into the driving force of the entire story of Haunted Mansion as an attraction. The idea is that after her death, Priscilla haunted Captain Gore until he could no longer take it. He committed suicide by hanging himself in the rafters, which explains the dead body above you at the start of the ride. You know Gore better as the Ghost Host. The concept is that the relationship between Priscilla and Captain Gore was so passionate that in death their spirits attract others.

Continued in "Disney Demystified (Volume 1)"!