Happy Halloween!

For my annual pumpkin carving, I decided to honor the other Disney building that's filled with blue ghosts and perpetually beset by thunderstorms.  It is the Haunted Mansion's 50th anniversary year after all!

This is actually the biggest and probably the most difficult pumpkin carving I've ever done.  The pumpkin is huge (easily a foot across), and I had to improvise the carving pattern from a design not intended for pumpkin carving (it would have left "floating" sections that are obviously impossible).

This took me about an hour and a half to complete, including the time it took to hollow out the pumpkin.  I'm pretty proud of the results!

Freshly carved

Lit up at night!

A Mansion Connection?

While browsing the Disneyland Opera House's display in honor of the Haunted Mansion's 50th anniversary, I noticed a certain piece of concept art.  At first it didn't stand out among the more famous pieces, like the bright red painting of the Hallway of Changing Portraits.  However, after reading Long Forgotten's writeup of the exhibit, I realized that the scene it depicted was familiar-- but not from the Mansion.

This was VERY high up on the wall, with a LOT of light glare, so this took quite a bit of digital manipulation to get clear and in proportion!

This artwork by Ken Anderson, as you can see, depicts a line of guests staring at their reflections in a large square mirror on a wood-paneled wall.  Long Forgotten's interpretation is that it is showcasing a proposed effect where "people see their own reflections in a large mirror and are presumably horrified by how pale and ghostly they look".  The informational plaque accompanying this image in the gallery suggests that it is artwork for an early version of the Hitchhiking Ghosts gag that eventually served as the Mansion's finale, but I can't help but notice a significant difference. 

In the Haunted Mansion, guests see themselves in the mirror WITH the ghosts, but, as Long Forgotten pointed out, here the guests are seeing themselves AS the ghosts.

Hmm, where have I seen that before?

DCA

Paris.  Screenshot from here

Tokyo.  Screenshot from here

At DCA and Paris, the wall even has wood paneling!

Now, obviously it's no secret that Tower of Terror borrowed a LOT from the Haunted Mansion.  The fact that the hallway scene runs on the Pepper's Ghost effect Disney perfected with Mansion's ballroom scene is just barely scratching the surface--I even suspect that the reason all the non-Tokyo versions use blue as the "ghostly" color is that it's carried over from Mansion (the source television show is black and white, after all; they could have colored the ghosts any way they wanted)!

I can't help but notice the context in which the mirror scene was added to the Tower of Terror as well.  Imagineers suddenly faced the challenge of finding an effect to replace Florida's 5th dimension sequence in a more compact space that still served as the "things are getting spooky" transition.  It's easy to imagine them looking back in their archives to gather inspiration from the original Ghost-Infested Disney Building.

Of course, it's just as likely it's all a coincidence.  However, it's still an interesting look at how Tower draws on traditional ghostly effects and scenes, to the point that one of its most familiar sequences more or less shows up in an artwork created over 50 years before.