Now, this should have been the Haunted Mansion movie.
I just finished reading "Ghost Dog," the debut novel by former Walt Disney Imagineering President Bob Weis. Perfect for young readers, "Ghost Dog" [$24.99 - The Old Mill Press] might be the best adaptation yet of a Disney Parks attraction to another medium. Inspired by - and at times set in - Disneyland's Haunted Mansion, "Ghost Dog" uses that inspiration to better effect than either of Disney's previous attempts to bring the Mansion to the screen.
Yes, this is a novel and not a movie or even a screenplay. But Weis' text consistently provokes mental visualizations that you can't help but imagine up on a screen. The story starts in 1969, the year the Mansion debuted at Walt's original theme park. We are following 12-year-old Herbert, who perhaps not-at-all coincidentally is the same age as Weis was in 1969.
Herbert's dog has just died, and his parents bring him to Disneyland to distract him from his grief. At the end of the night, the family gets into a soft opening of the Haunted Mansion, where our title character really does follow Herbert home.
It's the first magical act in a book that starts grounded in familiar YA storytelling. A 40-year Imagineer who helped craft stories from Disney's Hollywood Studios to Shanghai Disneyland, Weis finds a groove as the story moves onto his narrative turf. One ghost soon brings others, who take the Mary Poppins role as catalysts to jolt the family out of their suburban stupor.
Herbert finds a new companion, who helps him tackle the mystery of the Ghost Dog - an investigation that eventually leads the young duo to Walt Disney Imagineering headquarters in Glendale, California. Weis drafts into the story a mysterious Imagineer named "Marc Grimsley." (You get bonus points for sussing out all the real-life Imagineers name-checked in that one.) And soon, the family, the friend, the Imagineer - and some ghosts - are off on a road trip to New Orleans to settle this whole mess - just in time for Hurricane Camille to strike.
Weis also recently published "Dream Chasing," a memoir of his career at WDI. I reviewed that one earlier this month for my Orange County Register column. In case you missed it, here is that link. In "Ghost Dog," Weis demonstrates that the storytelling skills he honed working on theme park attractions and non-fiction memoirs translate to fictional book-writing, too.
Like a great attraction designer, Weis manages the narrative chaos he has created for us and ultimately delivers the swinging wake that Haunted Mansion fans expect. I laughed out loud when Weis, through Grimsley, calls out a grammatical flub in Madame Leota's famous seance:
'Serpents and spiders, tail of a rat, call in the spirits, wherever they're at.''Whenever they are, grammatically speaking,' Grimsley corrected.
'It rhymes, Grimsley!'
Grimsley is my pick as the potential franchise character here - a shifty Imagineer who finds actual magic rather than using engineering skill to create his attractions.
So why doesn't Disney turn first to WDI when it wants to adapt Imagineers' work to film, TV and other media? After all, these are the multi-media storytelling experts. Marvel's Kevin Feige blurbed the book on its back cover, so here's hoping that "Ghost Dog" might show the team at Disney Studios what former and current Imagineers can do, not just in providing the inspiration for a movie, but in writing one, as well.
Which leads me to the sentence that I have been waiting 24 years of running this website to write: Do not assume that you must commission an outsider to do a theme park insider's job.
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Camille actually missed New Orleans. Hurricane Betsy in 1965 was by far the worst to hit the city before Katrina. I highly recommend Andy Horowitz's book, Katrina: A History, 1915-2015.