Disney Goes to Hell

What the hell? Disney has visited H-E-double-hockey-sticks more than a few times in animation, film, and even in theme parks, with varying degrees of horror and humor.

The first visit occurred in 1929's Silly Symphony short, Hell's Bells, in which the Prince of Darkness amuses himself with his menagerie of demonic animals.

The mythical three-headed guard dog Cerberus makes an appearance (although in this depiction, he's more silly than Satanous!)

The closest we get to genuine horror in this outing is this "udderly" bizarre dragon-cow, that gives liquid-fire instead of milk. Satan laps up a heaping bowl full.

Satan came back for more in 1934's The Goddess of Spring, where he erupts out of the ground to disrupt a pastoral scene and demand the Goddess join him as queen of his underground kingdom, Hades.

Even though this is no cause to celebrate for the imprisoned Goddess, the imp-like demons of the underworld throw her a reception party, with organ music and a fire-dance.

We get a dog's-eye-view of the not-so-sweet Hereafter in Pluto's Judgement Day (1935), when Pluto visits an afterlife dominated by cats looking for a little rough justice.

A loaded jury finds Pluto guilty of being mean to cats.

His sentence is being burned alive by the angry mob...

Of course, this visit to the hot-end of the Hereafter was all just a dream brought on by Pluto's guilty conscience, not unlike the brief glimpse of hellfire that greedy Uncle Scrooge tastes at the climax of Mickey's Christmas Carol (1983).

Although it's not on any park map, Disneyland guests have been able pass though Hell since day one, thanks to the final room of Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, where the guests (as Mr. Toad's surrogate) are killed after colliding with a train and sent straight to Hell.

The event is not based on any scene from the ride's namesake film, The Wind in the Willows. Rather, it pays tribute to a classic dark-ride tradition of sending riders to the hot and steamy underworld. (Artist Kevin Kidney even created some artwork related to this portion of the ride that was subsequently banned!)

In 1979, Hell begins where everything ends... inside The Black Hole. The surprise climax to Disney's belated response to Star Wars sends evil scientist Dr. Hans Reinhardt to an alternate reality complete with ironic punishment (he is trapped inside the shell of his deadly robot sidekick Maximilian) that could only be interpreted as Hell itself.

We see Reinhardt's eyes peering out in despair from within his new robotic sarcophagus, in a shot reminiscent of 1961's The Pit and the Pendulum...

...before pulling back to reveal the full scale of the horrific landscape.

But Disney's most disturbing depiction of Hell has to be in 1981's The Devil and Max Devlin, in which a crooked landlord played by Elliot Gould goes to Hell after getting hit by a bus. He arrives free-falling amid other unlucky souls...

And we even get to experience a first-person, Max's-eye-view of the frightening plunge. Now there's a potential theme park ride... Soaring Over Satan?

The air is filled with the tortured cries of the damned as we watch Max land amid fiery lakes and rocky crags. And some of the mountain faces... have faces!

Satan and his minions have been reimagined as gruesome executives sitting around a conference table, with the Devil seated as Chairman. They rattle off a list of Max's sins, starting with cheating on a fourth-grade spelling test, and working their way on up from there.

When Max threatens to take soul-saving action that would deny him eternal membership to Club Hell, a demonic "Soul Manager" played by an unrecognizable Bill Cosby recites a litany of torments awaiting him for not complying.

"...Eternal damnation is yours! You’ll know the pain and horror of limbs being torn from their sockets! YOUR limbs! YOUR sockets! You’ll feel pain you never imagined in life. Flesh you’ll smell, burning! YOUR flesh! Rotting forever!"

Ouch!

Cardboard Monster Finger Puppet Book 1970s

UPDATE: Found!


I'm used to wading back into the dark, dusty corners of the haunted closet to dig up forgotten relics from the past, but allow me now to turn the tables and appeal to the collective wisdom of the Internet to help me identify a lost artifact from my own haunted childhood.

It was a book of some kind (coloring book? activity book? sticker book?) with maybe a dozen or so full-color, cut-out, monster finger puppets on the cardboard back cover. It would have come out in the late 1970s, possibly ordered through the Scholastic Book Club. No idea what it was called, who the author or artist was, or who published it.

I'd totally given up finding this book, until a piece of evidence materialized... the equivalent of finding a bloody footprint at a long abandoned crime scene. A photo of one of the elusive monster puppets turned up in a recent post at Plastic Pumpkins. Unfortunately, Plastic Pumpkins blogmaster Steven was in the same boat as me, having only vague memories of the book.

As the detectives say, anything you can remember might be useful. I know its tempting to set aside everything you're doing to work exclusively on this for me, but also allow yourself some personal time to check out Plastic Pumpkins, which is loaded with scans from kids' magazines, roadside attraction ephemera, thrift store treasures, and one of my favorites, The International Language of Wieners.

An early Halloween treat...

Since I seem to be The Last Man On Earth possessing a copy of spooky anthology Baleful Beasts and Eerie Creatures, a scanner, and an Internet connection, I thought I'd update one of my earliest posts on favorite short story The Patchwork Monkey (Beverly Butler, 1976) with scans of the complete text.

Happy reading.

Bringers of Wonder (Space 1999)

I first happened upon Space 1999 as a grade-schooler in the late 70s, when it appeared in syndicated reruns Saturday afternoons. This high-concept science fiction series, equal parts space adventure and interpersonal drama, followed the exploits of Commander John Koenig (Martin Landau), Dr. Helena Russell (Barbara Bain) and crew, trapped on a space station based on a Moon forever wandering the galaxy after being knocked out of orbit.

Despite its frequently cerebral tone and serious themes, Space 1999 wasn't immune to Monster-of-the-Weekism, presenting some truly frightening extraterrestrial terrors, most notably the 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea meets Alien abomination from a Season 1 episode called Dragon's Domain.

This man-eating tentacled terror even appeared on the Space 1999 lunchbox.

But for me, the real scares came in a two-part Season 2 episode titled Bringers of Wonder. Space 1999 never had a Halloween episode, but if it did, this would be it. The show is crawling with monsters, including a ship full of alien visitors who show up at their front door in costume (as normal human beings) and are using a trick in order to get "treats" (nuclear energy to revive their degenerating bodies.)

The unexpected visitors arrive on a faster-than-lightspeed craft staffed with friends and relatives of the Moonbase Alpha crew, and announce their intention to bring them all home at a festive reception party.

Only Commander Koenig (Landau), immune to the alien psychic powers that have clouded the perception of the rest of the crew, sees the visitors for what they really are...

Disgusting monsters! Yes, these alleged humans actually look more like Sigmund & the Sea-Monsters might look after climbing out of an eyeball and slime casserole.

They glow and undulate. Green globs literally drip down their bodies, and we get plenty of too-close views of their veiny eyeballs.

What really got to me throughout this episode is the fact that nobody else can see them for what they really are, standing among them completely unaware.

We later see a group of these inter-dimensional monsters stationed on the Moon's surface, waiting for orders to seize nuclear material from a remote waste site.

But the monster party doesn't stop there. Maya, a regular character added for the show's second season, is an alien "metamorph", and has the ability to transform temporarily into almost anything.

She uses that power to change into no less than five different monstrous creatures, including this fish-eyed alien...

...an amphibious man resembling the Creature From the Black Lagoon...

...a one-eyed, two-horned Moon Ape that wouldn't look too out of place on Jason of Star Command...

...and even a large cockroach that had me scratching uncomfortably at still fresh psychological scars from my viewing of Bug!

The fifth monster is one of our gooey, one-eyed haystack friends, a disguise Maya uses to try to infiltrate their ranks.

The Bringers of Wonder episodes can be found on DVD in Space 1999: Set 7.
Toss a copy of Jason of Star Command or Sigmund and the Sea Monsters in your cart while you're at it.