OCTOBER 2009
THE STORY AND SONG FROM THE HAUNTED MANSION

The Story and Song from the Haunted Mansion was one of my favorite albums as a kid. I loved this thing. Initially when I got it I was disappointed that it wasn't the actual ride soundtrack, but then it didn't matter. It was still the Haunted Mansion, and I fell in love with Pete Renoudet's rendition. Paul Freese IS the ghost host, but Pete did such a great job at making it his own, and Robie Lester and Ron Howard as the kids going through the thing.

It wasn't until I started work here that I realized that the album was actually in production before the attraction opened. It was using an earlier version of the script. A lot of things stayed the same when the attraction opened, but there were some differences. One, being the raven that followed you through the mansion being a part of the story. The raven is still there, it's just not part of the story anymore. And the legendary hatbox ghost.

It's my opinion that the hatbox ghost has lived on in infamy because of this album. He was only there for a couple weeks if I'm not mistaken, but the album has been out forever. Obviously there have been a few people that have known that the hatbox ghost was there, but it wouldn't have lived on like it has in my opinion had it not been for this album, although there was a read along thing, too, that had an image of the hatbox ghost in there as well. The Story and Song from the Haunted Mansion had an eleven page book and all the paintings were done by Collin Campbell, a very renowned Imagineering artist.

I started here as the department clerk, and I was in charge of the master tapes and along with our master tapes were a lot of the original artwork for our albums and film and all that kind of stuff.

Going through one day in about 1988, I found this huge manila envelope. It's like four and half or five feet long. When I pulled it from the shelf I saw the Haunted Mansion album cover glued to the front and it was all of Collin Campbell's original paintings. On the boards, matted and in excellent condition. I thought, "This is just so cool!" I wanted to release that album again but in those early days I never had a thought that I'd be a producer yet alone have that kind of influence.

Over the years as I started getting into the restorations and doing these kinds of things, this was always an album that I wanted to get to, but it had to be done right. It had to include these paintings somehow. When I started the Archives series and tried to get the old albums, my plan was to include the Haunted Mansion storyteller in there at some point, and have a CD booklet that was reminiscent of what the album looked like, and that never happened. I was thinking about doing it at the Wonderland system (electronic on-demand kiosks), but with Wonderland there wouldn't have been a book, so I held off on doing that. It just went round and round and I didn't know what I was going to do.

We had to move out of the storage facility we were in before, we had moved around eighteen billion times and at one point somebody else was supposed to take care of moving the tapes out and stuff and we were being vacated. The building was being torn down and we got a frantic phone call from operations saying, "You've got to get your stuff out of here. They're ripping the roof off the building right now. So we raced over there and we started putting the master tapes in trucks and saving as much of the artwork as we could. At that point I just grabbed the Haunted Mansion artwork and over the last 17 or 18 years I've kept them protected. I've moved them with me and kept my eye on them. In our latest move I actually took the stuff home to make sure that nothing would happen to them.

Now the Haunted Mansion 40th anniversary comes up and Disneyland would like to have an exclusive and I'm going, "This is the perfect opportunity!" So I said, "All this artwork is here. This is an album that people have been asking for forever. It's probably one of our most famous albums that we've done, but we have to use the artwork."

CDs were originally released in the jewel cases and hard plastic and now environmentally friendly folks are pushing toward this digipak, the cardboard sleeves and things, so we had the artwork scanned in at extremely high resolution. So we've been able to put this whole thing together. The packaging that's in the digipak cardboard thing makes it really just a smaller version of the vinyl album.

With printing technology and image capture far more advanced than it was forty years ago, the images now, of these original paintings are far superior to where they were originally, so you can see more detail. It just turned out gorgeous.

Something that's really cool about the CD is that seeing that we had all these paintings and we had all these great scans, I wanted some way to include it on the disc. Mainly because even though all this artwork is included and the digipak looks like the old album, even the booklet's tipped exactly the same way it was in the old vinyl album, the pictures are about a quarter of the size they were on the vinyl. But this artwork is so beautiful that I wanted to find a better way to include it and I was thinking of just having some art files on the CD, but that evolved. My engineer said, "Why don't we do an enhanced CD? We'll design a gallery." So I sketched out what I would like the gallery to look like. Sort of like a tomb, so you pop the disc into your computer and an icon will show up which happens to be one of the faces from the wallpaper. When you click on it, and electronic gallery appears. I don't want to go into too much detail about it because part of the fun is discovering this and when the crypt opens up and seeing all this stuff, but you'll be able to access each of the pictures and you'll be able to print them out.

The audio was a bit of a challenge because they were trying something really ambitious. A lot of our storytellers at that time just had a narrator, and maybe a song or two would come in, but what they were doing here was creating an environment and there was background sound effects, there were ghosts going by, there were the two kids and sound effects and the narration... all of this stuff going on at the same time. In the late 1960s, there was no such thing as a multi-track like we known today. You couldn't layer these sounds. The only way to do it is to have one tape machine be your dialogue or narration, another one being your sound effects, and another one being your music and then playing them all at once and mixing them down to yet another machine that would be recording it, and doing it scene by scene.

I didn't notice so much as a kid but after I started working here and listening to it again I thought, "Wow, that's a rought edit there," and the EQ changes and, "Where'd that sound effect go?" The sound effect was going along and all of a sudden it just gets cut off. That's because of the technology at the time.

So my approach to restoring the audio was that some of the things were techniques of the time and I left those alone, but like I said, they were editing these scenes together. They were mixing a section and then they'd mix another section and then they'd edit these things together which is why they weren't always consistent with their levels, and when they physically cut them together with a razor blade and taped them together, things would jump or sounds would get cut off, dialogue would be louder in certain areas, so we went through and cleaned up all that. There were a couple of sound effects that got cut off that actually came from the Chilling, Thrilling Sounds of the Haunted House sound effects record. Last year or so I had restored that, so I had a clean master to put into this.

It was all just little tiny patches. Essentially, if a flaw or some of these quirks was something that I felt that the original producers would have done had the technology been available to them, I fixed it. Otherwise I just sort of cleaned things up and leaved things alone because I wanted to have the best presentation possible, but I wanted this to be the album that I grew up with, too.