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News New Haunted Mansion Grounds Expansion, Retail Shop Coming to Disneyland Resort in 2024
- Thread starter DCBaker
- Start date
Mickey's Pal
Well-Known Member
Bummed. Mansion is my all time favorite ride out of any theme park ride. Have not been on it since 2008. Went to Disneyland in August 22 and it was closed for the change over to Holiday. I missed it by a week. I am going back in February and was hoping to get to ride it but alas I miss out a again. Sucks man.
TrainsOfDisney
Well-Known Member
Not sure, I’m guessing fortune telling / tarot cards are on the list along with gun violence, a woman murdering many husbands, malnourished dog, drunkenness, etc.
If we can’t have scary trees in Snow White, I’m not sure why we can scary trees in the graveyard either.
mickEblu
Well-Known Member
The only thing that I’m concerned with being on the chopping block is the hanging man. The facade is too iconic for them to touch but I guarantee someone at some meeting brought up how it’s too reminiscent of plantation homes.
Professortango1
Well-Known Member
Fortune Telling and Tarot are very much accepted right now. As is true crime. If it was violence against women, you might have a point, but its a woman killing her husbands which doesn't ruffle feathers as much.
The only thing that would be in danger would be the suicide.
mickEblu
Well-Known Member
I think the hanging man is safe and was lucky to survive the last few years. I feel like as a country we’re moving out of the overly sensitive place we were from 2020 until recently and more importantly I think Disney realizes they need to ease up on the political correctness. But I could be wrong. Maybe it was already green lit during the above mentioned sensitive time and they were just waiting for the long closure.
LittleBuford
Well-Known Member
I’m not sure why people frame the (potential) removal of the hanging man in terms of political correctness. Let’s face it: all of us, regardless of where we stand ideologically, would find it utterly bizarre if Disney today created an attraction that featured the hanging body of someone who’d killed themselves. It just isn’t something you expect to see in a park designed for families, and the only reason it’s accepted today is that it’s always been there. Do any Disney animated films, no matter how dark, depict suicide?
It’s telling in this regard that the more recent (but still quite old by this point) Paris version replaces the hanging man with a ghost holding a noose. That’s also a grim and morbid thing to see, but somehow on the right side of family-friendly.
It’s telling in this regard that the more recent (but still quite old by this point) Paris version replaces the hanging man with a ghost holding a noose. That’s also a grim and morbid thing to see, but somehow on the right side of family-friendly.
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Mickey's Pal
Well-Known Member
It is something I would totally expect in a Haunted House ride.
LittleBuford
Well-Known Member
Fair enough. I personally don’t mind it, but I do find it a very strange thing to have in a park that’s meant to be child-friendly. Depictions of suicide aren’t typically what one associates with a Disney theme park.
Consumer
Well-Known Member
Children are tougher than you think. The hanging man isn’t graphic or explicit, and the child does not understand that it’s suicide, they just know it’s a scary skeleton that appears for 2 seconds. It’s really not a big deal.
Ne'er-Do-Well Cad
Well-Known Member
Disneyland/WDW didn’t used to be quite so preschooler-friendly/focused. And frankly I’d like the parks to return/move toward being more sophisticated/challenging. So I’m cool with the unsettling hanging that kicks off the Haunted Mansion.
I miss the Alien Encounter/Tower of Terror era, to say nothing of the (before my time) Tahitian Terrace hula dancers/pooped pirate/Satchmo performing on the Mark Twain era.
I miss the Alien Encounter/Tower of Terror era, to say nothing of the (before my time) Tahitian Terrace hula dancers/pooped pirate/Satchmo performing on the Mark Twain era.
Phroobar
Well-Known Member
I wish they would bring back rock bands to Tomorrowland instead of the toddler stuff they do now. They should have put Alien Encounter in the Pizza Planet building like they planned to do in the 90s.
LittleBuford
Well-Known Member
It's really nothing to do with making everything all cutesy for little kids. There are plenty of things they put in the parks back in the day that seem out of keeping with today's standards, yet it makes sense why they were deemed acceptable in their own period. The hanging man, by contrast, has always seemed anomalous to me, even by the standards of when he was first installed. If he weren’t already there, I would struggle to believe that Disney would ever have included suicide imagery in any of their attractions.
Again, and to be clear, I'm not saying he bothers me personally, or that he should be removed. But I can understand why some would deem a graphic (if brief) depiction of suicide inappropriate for a family attraction. Such a concern seems eminently traditional to me rather than motivated by newfangled "political correctness".
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Consumer
Well-Known Member
Maybe it's just me, but is suicide really any worse than anything else depicted on the Haunted Mansion? Frankly a beheading is far more disturbing than a hanging skeleton and there's like 10 depictions of decapitations in the ride.
PiratesMansion
Well-Known Member
If you think about it, it's kinda stupid that people can't recognize that Clark Kent is Superman because he wears glasses, but we accept it because it's always been that way. Mr. Toad wouldn't go to hell in a brand new ride that opens today, nor would the Stretching Room end in the way it does, but they are iconic parts of the experience that would lessen their attractions if they were removed. Sometimes things get to stay just because they're old. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GrandfatherClause
But I find this talk about "the needs of families" somewhat insidious. Yes, the parks are for and on some level should cater to families, but much like everything else Disney, the parks started as a place for everyone and over time the demographics of who the park serves (or purports to serve) have narrowed. So somewhere along the line the masses decided, culturally, that because Disney films are basically used as glorified babysitters by big chunks of the population, that it must also be true that everything at Disney parks must be acceptable for the world's most sensitive three year old. You see this born out everywhere: Rides used to be designed for everyone to experience, and if they were scary, well, being scared is part of life, and facing fears is part of growing up: now rides are designed for people who either want no thrills/intensity of any kind or maximum thrills with little in between. Adults used to write speeches about how Disneyland was a spectacular example of urban design and planning; now adults who like Disney parks are something of a societal joke to a certain subset of people, because WHY would ANYONE that's OLD like something that's OBVIOUSLY meant for kids?!?!?!!!111
Something that Disney has helped perpetuate, because nobody in the company now has any conviction for the parks or sense of what they are or why they work, so the idiot masses have won out.
In the old days, the Imagineers trusted the rider to be able to role play as specific characters, even if that resulted in peril (see: Snow White's Adventures, Mr. Toad, etc). Now, on newer rides, we passively wave at Anna and Elsa, with the idea that just seeing these characters, even for a moment, is thrill enough, with no other effort or merit to the experience required. If it's good enough for the three year old, it's great for everyone, right? The masses have decided that that's what they wanted, and so that's what they've received.
Now I can't blame Disney for providing that sort of experience given that demand for it clearly exists, but there should be balance, and acceptance of the fact that different demographics have different needs and want different things. I think it's also clear that what is or is not family friendly is a bit dubious to begin with, but it has certainly narrowed over time. It just gets annoying to see it happen again and again, especially because there is demonstrably a huge market for the parks among adults, and there always has been. The parks should be able to cater to adults beyond just building bars or Star Wars Fanboi Wish Fulfillment: The Land, and they used to be better at it than they currently are. We need not encourage them to dumb down the parks more in service of some imagined overly sensitive audience member, given that they are already inclined to do so without us giving them more ideas.
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Animaniac93-98
Well-Known Member
The loading area is the worst thing about Disneyland's Haunted Mansion.
Maybe it worked better when it was darker, but I think it's telling no other version of the ride attempted the black void.
Now it just looks like a big empty room and ruins the idea that you're in an actual house.
PiratesMansion
Well-Known Member
I have no doubt that that's part of the reason for the change, but it might honestly have been staging too. I did the ride prior to the refresh, and honestly the set dressing above the stretching room was a bit too busy compared to the HM version of the scene and difficult to tell exactly what you were looking at unless you were standing in the right place in the room. It might well have been changed simply to make the scene cleaner and easier to read.
I'm not convinced that Phantom inviting you to hang yourself is that much better or more "family friendly" than actually seeing a hung corpse.
I think there's a nuance in the hanging man's placement that is not being accounted for here. It's a hanged man in a Haunted House, where part of the thread, whether depicted directly or not, is that you may not make it out alive. And indeed, that's basically the whole story (such that there is one) in the HM: will we make it out of this house alive? What are these ghosts' intentions towards us? Both of these are central guiding questions of the experience. So seeing death depicted in such a manner in a Haunted House isn't terribly out of step with ANY HH attraction and, more credibly than anything else, adds tension to the HM experience. Tension that, again, is inherently part of ANY HAUNTED HOUSE ATTRACTION THAT FUNCTIONS EFFECTIVELY. The sign out front told us so. This isn't Peter Pan's Flight, it's the Haunted Mansion. Scary or unsettling things are likely to be encountered.
So again, nuance. Something can be a family attraction and be more intense than IASW. Context is everything, and that context explains why said scene wouldn't be put in any other attraction, but continues to remain inside HM with little to no negative impact.
(Also, it's like a three second long scene that not everyone even knows they need to look up to see. It's fine.)
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LittleBuford
Well-Known Member
I think you’re reading much more into my words than what I mean. I’m not asking for the parks to be dumbed down, sanitised, or infantilised. Nor am I blind to the fact that historical standards are different from our own. My sole point is that the depiction of suicide feels very off-brand to me, even—and perhaps especially—by the standards of classic Disney. Every other anachronism—from the natives of the Jungle Cruise to the old auction scene of Pirates—makes sense to me as a product of its own time, but I can’t help but feel incredulous that a man hanging himself was ever green-lighted for any Disney attraction.
PiratesMansion
Well-Known Member
Except that, trouble is, more often than not, when a problematic (or "problematic", as the case may be) element of the parks has been identified and changed, infantilization has been the result. So in effect, if you are rooting for such a change, you are endorsing the infantilization of the parks.
I think the suicide depiction is a product of generalized societal differences. Watch enough older films, Looney Tunes, etc. and you'll see that society used to be much cavalier about suicide, and more inclined to treat it as situation that could be mined for comedy. Obviously societal understanding has changed, but I think that accounts for the scene's inclusion and very much makes it a product of its time. It would not have been done the same way had the ride been built new today.
That said, I bristle at the notion that just because things don't precisely meet our present level of morality that we should immediately change them. That's a losing battle, and one that's likely to level the parks of anything interesting sooner than it would make everyone happy about the park's perceived level of morality in its attractions.