Disney has tried twice to turn one of the best Disneyland attractions, The Haunted Mansion, into a successful film. While I would argue that the first Haunted Mansion movie isn’t as bad as most people think, and the more recent Haunted Mansion movie is actually really good, it can’t be overlooked that financially both movies were failures. So, maybe the solution is to bring the Haunted Mansion to TV, and more specifically, into the world of animation.
I recently had a chance to sit down with director Shannon Tindle, and we spent most of our time discussing his new film, Ultraman: Rising (which is excellent). However, I also had to talk to him about a project he never made, an animated series based on Haunted Mansion.
As CinemaBlend’s theme park expert, I found a kindred spirit in Tindle. He told me about his love for one of Walt Disney’s original Nine Old Men animators, Mark Davis, who became one of the primary designers of the Disneyland and Disney World attraction, and how he tried to fine-tune his pitch in more ways than one to get Disney to bite. He explained…
I'm a huge fan. I love Mark Davis. I love his work and his transition from one of the Nine Old Men in animation to working at WED. So yeah, it was one of those things where I was on an overall at Disney and I said, 'I've got an idea for Haunted Mansion.' And so we developed it first as an ongoing series, then we pivoted and said, what if we did it as a mini-series? The teaser is out there somewhere. The teaser is out there. I would love to make it.
While news of the Haunted Mansion series has been out there, there's a lot we don't know about exactly what it would have been. We know the series would have focused on a young girl dealing with the grief of a lost loved one, but beyond that, details are slim.
Tindle did give me a little taste of some of the ideas he was playing with, though. His Haunted Mansion would have drawn together multiple characters from throughout Disney’s history into a sort of cinematic universe. He even told me how he planned to include one classic Disney character…
And I will say this one idea that I had for it was you go to all these wild, haunted locations, and I went to a parking lot at a mall, and you see these ghostly lights come through the fog. And the little girl, who's the main character, is like, 'Oh my gosh, what kind of spirit am I going to encounter here?' And it's Herbie the Love Bug, and that was my explanation for Herbie, is Herbie’s haunted. Lou Romano did great paintings for it, and so like that just gives you an idea. I wanted to pull in. I was like ‘Disney has all these great characters, let's use them.’ But you know, it was not to be. Hey, maybe, they'll come back to the table with that. I'd love to do it.
Considering that Herbie the Love Bug was part of an earlier Disney cinematic universe, including him in a Haunted Mansion series that would have drawn in other Disney characters over time as well would have been perfect. And the idea that the reason Herbie is a sentient VW is because he's haunted is
Officially Disney passed on the idea before it made it past the pitch reel stage. However, Tindle says here that if Disney were to change their mind, he’d happily go back and get to work on it. I for one would love to see this animated series come to life.
