Last week, I blogged about More Cute Stories: Volume 1, an audio memoir of Rolly Crump, one of the Imagineers who help build Disneyland and maintain it in its early years. I've had a chance to listen to it since then and it is fantastic. — Read the rest

The always, always, always fantastic Passport to Dreams Old and New blog traces the history of the Snow White rides at the Disney parks around the world, with an emphasis on the horror motifs in the original film and how they made their way into the rides, only to be removed (and re-added) at various times throughout the years. — Read the rest

The always-unmissable Long Forgotten blog has an astounding post on the Disneyland Haunted Mansion that almost was, when the design team of Rolly Crump and Yale Gracey were in charge of the team. Crump was an enormous fan of Jean Cocteau's 1946 surrealist film La belle et la bête and he and Gracey created some of the most memorable effects that grace the Mansion today. — Read the rest

Walt Disney World's Enchanted Tiki Room has shut down after sprinklers extinguished a fire in its attic last night. It's hard to contain my schadenfreude here: the Disney World version of the Tiki Room (the watershed in audio-animatronics and lineal ancestor of all contemporary themepark robots) was gutted in 1998 and replaced with an indescribably awful, unfunny update featuring the Lion King's Zazu and Aladdin's Iago. — Read the rest

Designer Kevin Kidney continues to blog the limited edition merchandise he and Jody Daily have been commissioned to create for Disneyland's 55th birthday this Saturday (which is also my 39th birthday!). Today, this lovely paper sculpture mosaic: "We made every attempt to pack in all our favorites from the Park's fledgling years, from the Moonliner Rocket to the Hall of Chemistry, Fort Wilderness to the Silver Banjo. — Read the rest

Kirby sez,

Ricky at Inside the Magic has a video of Disney's Haunted Halloween Parade at Tokyo Disneyland.

All of the floats have Haunted Mansion themes – even obscure stuff like the Rolly Crump designed overstuffed easy chair with the face worked into the design.

The Extinct Attractions Club makes fan-documentaries about classic and extinct theme-park attractions and sells them on DVD:

America Sings
historical DVD featuring interviews with Alice Davis, Marc Davis, and Jeff
Burke. (History of America Sings with interviews and a look at Carousel
of Progress)

The Haunted Mansion Story Vol.

A Laughing Place message-board poster ran into Marty Sklar, the head of Disney Imagineering, at Disneyland's Tiki Room, and had a conversation about the upcoming Tiki Room refurb:

We talked briefly about The Tiki Room, about John Hench and Rolly Crump, and he confirmed the rehab, the roof being in particularly bad shape, and that the birds need a pretty extensive rehab.