History Rewritten! Mind-Blowing New Artwork of the Black Prince and the Flying Dutchman

.
What's this? Another new post? Yes, it's so. The Mansion gods won't let poor old Long-Forgotten rest in peace. LF cannot and must not ignore bombshellery of this caliber. Truth be told, it would be hard to imagine something that fits our profile more precisely, i. e. "ruminations and revelations concerning the art and history of the Haunted Mansion."

Kind of a clunky title, though.

We all know that Marc Davis (and presumably the other Imagineers with him) originally planned changing portraits that ran through several panels, often as many as six. We just looked at one in the previous post. Most famously in this regard, it's common knowledge among Mansioneers that April-December was originally going to be April-June-September-December.

We also know (or thought we knew) that this idea was abandoned when they settled on the ride's current format. They realized that they only had time for a simple, back-and-forth transition from one picture to another, we are told. Anything longer would hold up the crowd, so the multi-panel portraits were chopped back to two panels. We also know that some of Marc's changing portraits never had more than two panels to begin with, and we know that one of those was the Black Prince.













Where and how would this Black Prince have been used? The DL projectors for the changing portraits used only two slides, but the one created for the foyer in the Orlando Mansion (and used until 2007) featured six slides, allowing "Master Gracey" to slowly decay before our very eyes. Was this version of the Black Prince produced as an alternative to "Gracey" in Florida? or were they at some point planning on using six-slide projectors in Anaheim too? We don't know, but for what it's worth, I suspect the latter. Presently you'll see why.


Who Knew? Part Two

Yep, that's not all, folks, The Van Eaton catalog has a second set of sunburned photos of production slides. Like the Black Prince set, the original slides are reproductions of Ed Kohn paintings. This time it's the Flying Dutchman. That set too is full of surprises.

Unlike the Black Prince, in the case of the Dutchman we have known for a long time that the two-phase changing portrait seen in the ride is an abbreviation of an originally six-panel concept. Before 2005, we were looking at these Kohn paintings, alternating endlessly with each other:


















The giveaway is the missing lightning. In Marc's #6 the lightning and fireballs of #5 have made their way up inside the foremost ghost. Kohn does have plasma rivulets inside the ghosts, and he's kept the "St. Elmo's Fire" phenomenon too, but the distinctive lightning-and-fireball effect in Davis's foremost ghost has been reduced in Kohn to mere globules of the same general phenomenon you find in the other ghosts. That makes sense since he eliminated Davis's lightning strikes in #4 and #5.

The multi-panel Black Prince and multi-panel Flying Dutchman may provide evidence that there were indeed plans to use six-slide projectors at Disneyland at one point and that the Imagineers must have thought there was time during the show flow for that kind of presentation, far later in the game than previously thought. I find that more believable than that this striking Flying Dutchman series was generated as simply an alternative choice for the WDW foyer, along with the Black Prince. It's just too show-stoppingly dramatic and fascinating and too specific a story statement for the Orlando foyer.