Stopher - thanks for the pics and info. Having never been to any parks but the ones in Florida, its always odd for me to see the Haunted Mansion as anything but the Gothic Manor on the Hudson. Someday I'll get to
Disneyland to see the original. The others, well...
I'm assuming you're partial to the original, but how different (aside from the outside) are the attractions on the inside? Or did Disney copy clone one to the other?
I am definitely partial to the original, however, WDW is pretty cool too.
For starters - at DL, you actually enter the Mansion's facade sits in some lovely grounds, with a wrought iron fence crescenting around it, creating a nice front and side yard. There is a gateway with a path leading directly up to the steps, and then curving off to the side for the queue when it's needed. Some times you are fortunate enough to be able to skip the queue and walk up the steps directly onto the porch and enter the manor - most times you aren't and you have to go off to the side of the house and endure a lot of switchbacks. The house itself butts right up next to the train, tracks, but there is a large berm (hiding the tunnel they built when they made the showbuilding for the house) and the berm has lots of big old trees and some of the gravestones like at WDW - though today most have been removed. There is also a mausoleum there, with inscriptions carved (like you see at the exit to WDW's manor). The front and side of the house are both quite similar, though a bit different. You do then go up onto the porch and wrap around to the front where you then enter the house. You don't actually go through the front door - but a door off to the side. Of course at WDW you walk around beyond the front of the house, and enter into doors below the actual facade on the lower level.
The upper level porch is filled with various decorative items - wicker chairs, tables, plants etc. At nightime there is often a candle passing from one window to another on that upper level. I've read about this same kind of thing happening at the MK house too, but I've never personally seen it.
Inside the house then - at DL you enter a square foyer - where the sliding doors to the Stretching Room are on two sides of the square (the other two sides being the exterior walls). There's no fireplace like at WDW, nor any portraits in this space - just the beautiful old chandlier. It's here, like at WDW, where you first encounter the Ghost Host.
Upon exiting the Stretching Room, you then walk out into the Portrait Corridor, which has the changing portraits hanging on the walls on one side, and large windows with lightning effects on the other side. They added this part in to the WDW version a couple of years back - although you go through the corridor at WDW AFTER you enter your Doom Buggy.
You continue walking down the corridor straight towards 2 of the "follow you" busts - and then turn a corner. (It's at this point that you've now walked underneath the train tracks and are "outside the berm" in the massive show building). You then proceed a short ways, and enter your Doom Buggy.
At the MK - your Doom Buggy passes by the "library" - this scene does not exist at DL at all - though they DID add in a small library section to the ballroom scene a few years back - basically up on the landing there are two archways covered with curtains... at DL those curtains are now drawn back and you see a library of sorts behind them.
Ah the MK - they also added in the
AWESOME endless stairway scene - which does not exist at DL at all. There isn't room to add it in, either. Thankfully they took away those horrible large fake spiders to make way for this tremendous addition.
From there then - the show is pretty much identical until you get to the end. After the mirror scene however, and you are about to disembark - at DL - instead of just walking out to the exit - there is an up-speedramp that will take you back up to the ground level so that you can exit the attraction.
One interesting thing to note - since they did create a 2nd set of the various sets for WDW at the same time... when you leave the attic, and then your Doom Buggy turns to proceed down backwards - the exterior of the house that was created keeps in the theming for DL's plantation house - and does not match the more Gothic Hudson River Valley house of the MK at all. That was a big flub on the original imagineers' part.
When they were designing Tokyo DL - they basically just took a direct lift of the Florida attraction. Thematically it too is a Hudson River Valley house.
In designing Paris, they went a totally different route. There it is called Phantom Manor, and actually has more of a gory, scary feel to it than any other version. The French are enamored of the American old west, or at least that's what the imagineers have said, and having so many old castles and "haunted" places throughout Europe, they decided to put it into Frontierland and make it more of an old-west feel. It really looks like a cross of an old Nevada school house and the Psycho house from Hitchcock's film. They originally hired Vincent Price to be the Ghost Host, but shortly after the park opened they dropped his narration and went with a French actor's voice instead, speaking in French. That one deviates from the story the most, actually leaving the house and taking the Doom Buggys into a graveyard filled not with Grim, Grinning Ghosts, but rather zombies and ghouls.
From what I've been able to read and see of the Hong Kong version - it will be yet another departure, based on a character who travels the world and has collected quite a large assortment of "oddities and mysteries" - which kind of brings the attraction back full-circle to one of the original imagineers' concepts for the "House of the Wierd". Claude Coats was big on strange, odd and interesting stuff - ultimately after Walt died his odd concepts lost out to Marc Davis' more comic scary stylings.
) My parents haven't been there since like 86 (been throwing my dad some info, since he is the only one who didn't have the deaf ear
) My sister is a know it all ( who know's nothing about WDW
) I know the vacation IMO will be crap, but to them will be awesome
