Now, this It should be a haunted house movie.
I just finished reading Ghost Dog , the debut novel by Bob Weiss, the former president of Walt Disney Imagineering. Great for young readers, “Ghost Dog” [$24.99 – The Old Mill Press] This may be the best adaptation of a Disneyland attraction into another medium. Inspired by, and sometimes set in, the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland, “Ghost Dogs” uses this inspiration to better effect than any of Disney's previous attempts to bring a haunted house to the screen.
Yes, this is a novel, not a movie or even a screenplay. But Weiss's writing always inspires the kind of mental imagery you can't help but imagine on screen. The story begins in 1969, the year the mansion debuted at Walt's original theme park. It's probably no coincidence that we're following 12-year-old Herbert, who was the same age as Wes in 1969.
Herbert's dog had just died and his parents took him to Disneyland to distract him from his grief. At the end of the night, the family enters the soft opening of the haunted house, and our protagonist literally follows Herbert home.
This is the first magical show in a book to be based on familiar teen storytelling. Weiss, an Imagineer with 40 years of experience helping create stories from Disney's Hollywood Studios to Shanghai Disneyland, finds his groove when stories shift to his narrative turf. Soon one ghost brings others, who use Mary Poppins characters as catalysts to awaken the family from their suburban coma.
Herbert finds a new companion to help him solve the mystery of the ghost dog – an investigation that eventually leads the young duo to the Walt Disney Imagineering headquarters in Glendale, California. Weiss added a mysterious visionary named “Mark Grimsley” into the story. (Bonus points if you can find out the names of all the real-life Imagineers.) Soon, family, friends, Imagineers — and a few ghosts — are on the road to New Orleans Travel to solve this problem. It was a mess—just in time for Hurricane Camille to hit.
If you're not familiar with weather history, that was the worst hurricane to hit the city until Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
Weiss also recently published Chasing the Dream, a memoir of his career at WDI. I commented on this in an Orange County Register column earlier this month. In case you missed it, This is the link. In “Ghost Dogs,” Weiss shows that the storytelling skills he honed on theme park attractions and nonfiction memoirs can also translate to fiction writing.
Like a great attraction designer, Wes manages the narrative chaos he creates for us and ultimately delivers the swinging coda that haunted house fans have come to expect. I laughed out loud when Wes pointed out, via Grimsley, a grammatical error in Madame Leota's famous séance:
“Snakes and spiders, mice's tails, summon spirits wherever they may be.”
'Whenever they yesgrammatically speaking,” Grimsley corrected.
“That rhymes, Grimsley!”
I chose Grimsley as a potential franchise character – a cunning visionary who discovers true magic rather than using engineering skills to create his attractions.
So, when Disney wanted to adapt Imagineers' works for film, television, and other media, why didn't it turn to WDI first? After all, they are multimedia storytelling experts. Marvel's Kevin Feige left the book vague on its back cover, so here's hoping Ghost Dog shows the team at Disney Studios what former and current Imagineers can do and not only inspires movies , and in terms of writing the movie, brilliantly.
Which brings me to something I've been waiting to write for the 24 years I've been running this site: Don't think you have to entrust an outsider to do the work of a theme park insider.
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