Memento Mori

I like the Haunted Mansion. I don't know why though. The ride is not particularly scary; at times the ride is even campy.  There is even a disjointed feel to the ride as it veers between attempts to be scary and goofy surreal.  The prelude to the ride blends them both.

 A stretching room with no doors or windows should be scary, zeroing in on people’s claustrophobia but it is also paired with whimsical stretching portraits that take away from true fright. After the lights go out, a scream pierces the air and if you look up you will see a hanging skeleton. Now that should be scary and it was for me when I was five and I had to be taken out of the ride. Yet that was when I was five and that was a different era altogether.  Of course I ended up missing the real part of the ride at that time.

From there it is the disappointing herding of the crowd into a new line where we await our Doom Buggy. From there it is the slow ride through the various disjointed scenes. The ballroom scene is still very cool. Most of the scenes are benign, with the bride who has a habit of taking a hatchet to her new husbands being the closest attempt to be scary. After that we are off to the the conclusion, classic song and all, with a send off by the hitchhiking ghosts and the little bride.

There are reasons for the dual nature of the ride that I believe stem from having two different designers with different notions of what the ride should be. Yet despite this lack of unity of vision, somehow the ride has remained fixed in the minds of Americans as a classic. I like it; I go to it all the time. A lot of it is nostalgia fueled and I believe that is why it persists. Not so much as a ride but as a tradition, a rite of passage for every little kid.

There is a store devoted to the ride call Memento Mori and of course I go in it and browse the various items. And for whatever reason I am always drawn to glassware as the go to souvenir item. I think this attraction to souvenir glassware comes from my yearning for the collectible Empire Strikes Back glasses from Burger King when I was a kid. I just had to have those glasses. Currently I am trying to find wine glasses for the various attractions, which is goofy, but what I am doing. Because, as everyone knows, nothing says classy, like drinking fine wine from a Be Our Guest wine glass purchased in the Beauty and the Beast area.  So far the Memento Mori has the only other wine glass in the magic kingdom that I have found.

The glass has the house crest on it, which now adorns all the available plates, etc. I am sure I will get it soon and sip my pinot noirs from it, vaguely knowing that I am ridiculous, but still feeling as joyful as when I was little boy drinking soda from my glass featuring Lando.