Haunted Mansion

This is Part Two of a Four-Part Series. Click Here to Read Part One.

So I was now transferred over into, uh, WED. But I want you to know that when you're in animation, you grow up with cartoonists. And the gags that cartoonists played on each other went clear back to the '30s. And Walt allowed this, in fact, he thought, any of the gags that the guys came up with, we'd do.

Well, one of the greatest gags -- and the reason I'm telling you this gag is because these gags continued on with what we did here for Disneyland, you know ... a way of working. So one day, one evening while I was working on Peter Pan, I came in and there were two guys on their hands and knees and they were drilling a hole in the wall. And this is on overtime. And I said, "When are you going to work?" "We're drilling a hole in the wall." And I said, "Yeah, I can see that. What are you doing?"

Well, they lined it up with the hole in the animation desk in the other room where the light cord goes through ... And that was Milt Kahl's room. So they lined it up perfectly and what they did was they got a great big squeeze ball and a hose and they would stick the hose through the little hole and go pop with talcum powder and there would be talcum powder all over his crotch. So he would get up to go to the bathroom and "Geez! What's all this?" There's talcum powder all over his crotch. And then they would let it go for about a week then poof. And he would yell and scream when he found this talcum powder.

And so then one weekend, they collected flies. And they had a big funnel and they had jars of flies. They kept tapping this jar of flies and the flies would keep coming up from underneath the desk and he's yelling and screaming about the flies.

Well the final, the final thing was he was going to have lunch with Walt and that day wore a suit and tie and everything and he turned off his light to go have lunch with Walt and they shot him right in the crotch with hot water. And that ended the gag but he had to go over to the Rose room and have lunch with Walt with his pants completely wet.

But that was just -- I could go on forever about the gags that we played. So a sense of humor is something that did carry and kept us as cartoonists even when we were working on the Disney projects. And I'll give you an example. I'll give you two examples of things that took place.

Yale Gracey and I were asked to design all of the illusions for the Haunted Mansion and so we had this big, big room and we blacked out all of the windows. This was in the animation department. And we had skulls and skeletons and we had stuff all around the room ... gory heads. And one of the things that we had was a great big monster that we painted with all kinds of things on it and everything and a weird head. And we had a string attached to its head and when Walt would come in we'd let him ... we were just playing around with stuff. We didn't know what we were going to use it ... we'd take this gun and shoot the monster and the monster would blow up, the lid would come off and there was some black stuff underneath and the head would come off and swing around the room. My wife made a China silk ghost that you'd put over a small caged fan and when you turned it on, the ghost would fill up and start shaking and everything. And so we had all of this stuff.

Well, one day what happened was we get a call from the personnel department and they said, "The janitors have requested that you leave a light on." So Yale and I said, "Oh, all right, we'll leave a light on." And so what we did was we rigged the room. Right in the middle of the room we had an infrared beam and when you first came in the lights were kinda low but they were on. But when you broke the beam, the black lights came on, the real lights went off, the monster blew up and up comes the ghost. So we came to work the next day and the ghost was going all night long and the head was hanging in the center of the room and right in the middle of the floor was a broom. And we get a call from the personnel department, "They are NEVER coming back."

So this was it. No matter what you were doing there was this little craziness that kind of stayed with you when you were doing stuff.

I was working with ... we were working on the World's Fair and we were working on the Ford Pavilion. And Blaine (Gibson), the head sculptor, sculpted this very powerful woman. A BIG, powerful woman. And sent her over to the studio to have a fiberglass body made of her for the Primeval World sequence. And they sent her back and they had the rubber skin on her and they painted her and they had a raccoon skin wrapped around her. And Blaine said, "You know, Rolly, I'm not sure that skin color is the right value. Would you mind taking your shirt off, standing by her and having your picture taken with her? Because the Polaroid is black and white and we'll find out if the value matches." I said, "Hell, I'll do better than that," and I rolled up my pants, took my shoes off and wrapped her raccoon skin around me. And I had my picture taken with her ... And I had my picture taken with her ... And I had my picture taken with her. I basically attacked this woman and we had 8 or 10 of these black-and-white Polaroids of Rolly, you know, with the cave woman and we put them in this little file.

Well, a couple weeks later, Walt's over and Walt is asking Blaine about something and Blaine says, "Oh, I think I have that on file. I have a little Polaroid file and maybe it's in there." So he's going through it like this and Walt's looking over his shoulder. And all of a sudden you see Rolly attacking this cave woman and Walt says, "What's that?" And Blaine says, "Oh, I was just checking some skin values with Rolly." And Walt said, "Let me see them." And he takes them out and lays them out and Walt busted out laughing. Here's Walt laughing and checking out Rolly, you know, attack a cave woman.

Meanwhile, I've got indigestion. I headed across the room to where there was a 7-Up machine and got a 7-Up to calm my stomach down. And this friend of mine is standing by the machine, and he says, "Rolly, what's going on over there?" And I said, "Walt saw the pictures of me with the cave woman." And he said, "What did he say?" And I said, "He laughed." And he said, "Oh." And I turned around and Walt was standing right there and looked me straight in the eye and said, "That's right. He laughed." That shows you the crazy things that you could do or whatever that was a part of what you did for a living.

Continued ...

In the tiki, tiki, tiki, tiki room

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