This New Haunted Mansion Ride Change Surprised Us

Disneyland reopened the Haunted Mansion as the Haunted Mansion Holiday last month as part of the kickoff of Disneyland Halloween. This version of the attraction, themed to The Nightmare Before Christmas, will run through the Halloween and Holiday seasons.

While riding the attraction on the first day it was open for the season, we spotted an unexpected change to the finale Audio-Animatronics figure. The figure immediately looked more fluid, and so we reached out to Disneyland to get more context on this change.

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Disneyland Haunted Mansion Holiday Audio-Animatronics Change

We have learned that Disneyland has revamped the Oogie Boogie figure seen at the end of the attraction this year! We were not expecting to see an update like this, as the overlay usually returns each year without any major changes. However, the improvements were very seamless and make this finale scene of the ride even better!

When we reached out to Disneyland for comment, they confirmed that the figure is not new, but it was rebuilt using the structure of the original, as they added new parts that give it updated functions.

In an Instagram video shared by Walt Disney Imagineering about the changes made to the figure, Senior Manager and Show Programmer Avi shared, “We adjusted his overall posing and silhouette and design to kind of give us a better line of action and get bigger belly laughs and things out of the character.”

Once they went in and made sure all the technical components underneath the figure are not colliding with one another, they did some work on “polishing up that animation and making sure that from the Doom Buggy's perspective, that he feels like he's really talking specifically to you,” as Associate Show Programmer Jordan explained.

In the video, they talked about the rigidity of the previous version of the figure and how it was all kind of “position A or position B” beforehand, whereas this new version is analog, which means finer control over the smaller and more precise movements.

Supposedly, the original Oogie Boogie animatronic was the recycled Big Al character from Disneyland's Country Bears Jamboree attraction.

Here's another closer look at the figure.

You can see before and after footage of the figure in our reel below.

 

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Disneyland also swaps the gingerbread house in the ballroom scene every year. This year, the house pays homage to the raven seen in the traditional version of the attraction and also has touches themed to Halloween Town from The Nightmare Before Christmas film.

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Last year, they shared these stats about the gingerbread house. We can assume this year the house took a similar amount of time to create. Disney shared that the Disneyland Resort culinary teams, technology teams, Disneyland Live Entertainment, and the Disneyland Bakery spent over 150 hours building and programming the animation and lighting. This didn't even include all of the time spent baking the pieces to bring them all together.

You can see the video talking about the Oogie Boogie changes from Walt Disney Imagineering below.

 

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