#not tower
Ah, this. One of the worst McDonald’s I’ve ever ate at. The themeing was solid but the food sucked. I can’t recall the dessert window ever being open, and the food never tasted quite right, like it wasn’t a “real” McDonald’s but instead some weird knockoff. They never had actual happy meal toys either, even when the current happy meal promotion was Disney themed. Instead, every time I had the misfortune of eating there as a kid, they had plastic finger-skateboards that weren’t even Disney or DCA themed. It was weird. Really weird.
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A fascinating but frustrating aspect of writing about parks lore is that, even internally, lore is never solid or consistent.
Which is just a fancy intro to the fact that I just read a 1977 Haunted Mansion Standard Operating Procedure manual that spelled Leota’s name as Liotta. Like, Ray Liotta.
So, I didn’t notice this specific detail until I was working on a Haunted Mansion-inspired scale model room (as one does), but once I did, it sure made me appreciate the loads of details in that classic even more.
In the changing portrait hall at Anaheim, the majority of the paintings, when in their correct orientation, are facing or otherwise “weighted” in the direction of guests’ movement.
Guests move from the right to the left. Cat Lady is leaning to our left (her right). Aging Man, April December, and Medusa all look to our left when we’re facing the wall, and the ship points left. The effect, arguably, is that the paintings’ gazes are “following” you as you walk past. Alternately, it just gives the hall a “flow” that facilitates moving the crowd toward the loading area. The knight on horseback is the only painting unequivocally facing back towards the stretching rooms when it’s correctly oriented.
I suspect this might also tie in to a common “mistake” that supposedly plagued the WDW Mansion, which I now think may not necessarily have been a mistake after all. The Floridian version of the Aging Man notoriously has spent about half of his existence being “flipped the wrong way”–facing right. But which way do the guests move after viewing this version of the portrait? Toward the RIGHT side of the room, into the stretching rooms. I suspect that, at some point, somebody in charge of Florida’s show intentionally flipped him so that he faced the direction of the stretching rooms.
Or maybe not. In a ride as intricately detailed but haphazardly developed and altered as Mansion, perhaps the question is always, “Is this detail actually intentional, or is it your imagination?”
