Emma Thompson – IAMNOTASTALKER

In February (on what turned out to be an exorbitantly crowded day), the Grim Cheaper and I visited The Happiest Place on Earth with Miss Pinky Lovejoy, of the Thinking Pink blog, and her husband, Keith Coogan. Since I had just recently watched – and fallen in love with – Saving Mr. Banks, I decided to do a little stalking of the Disneyland locales that appeared in the flick while I was there.

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In Saving Mr. Banks, which chronicles the making of the 1964 film Mary Poppins, Walt Disney (Tom Hanks) takes P.L. Travers (Emma Thompson) to Disneyland for the day in the hopes that the trip will soften the prickly author and make her more a bit more agreeable to work with. When P.L. arrives at the park, she is driven right through the main gates and up to the the back side of Disneyland Railroad’s Main Street Train Station, where Walt is waiting for her.

The Main Street Train Station and Disneyland Railroad are both original attractions, opened the same day that the park was on July 17th, 1955. The Victorian-style station is one of four located throughout the property and is serviced by five different trains. The locomotives, which run on bio-diesel fuel, are all historically accurate in their design, with one, the C.K. Holiday train, boasting a special caboose named the Lilly Belle. The Belle, which was originally part of the now-retired Retlaw 1 train, was redesigned with luxurious appointments in 1974 in order to act as a special passenger car for VIPs. You can check out some photographs of it here. The car is still in operation to this day and is open to the public, pending availability. If you would like to ride the Lilly Belle, inquire at the front desk of the Main Street Railroad Station as soon as the park opens and, if it is running that day and is available, you and your party will be given a scheduled ride time. Passengers are even given special train tickets to commemorate the experience. (There are rumors floating around the internet that the public is no longer allowed on the Belle. While this website claims the rumors have been confirmed, I am not sure if that is accurate.)

While outside the Main Street Train Station, Walt is shown jovially greeting admirers and handing out pre-signed autographs, which never ceases to crack me up as your chances of catching Tom Hanks happily interacting with fans are slim to none. The guy’s a great actor, but not AT ALL friendly – in fact he was downright mean to me when I met him a few years back. He was also deemed one of The Top Ten Worst Autograph Signers of 2013 by Mike the Fanboy – and rightly so. You can read Mike’s write-up here.

Walt and P.L. then make their way down Main Street, U.S.A. Mid-walk, Walt gazes up longingly at a window that bears his father’s name.

That window, located above the Emporium (Disneyland’s largest gift shop), is, too, a park original and has been there since opening day. It reads “Elias Disney, Contractor, Est. 1895.” Elias held a number of different jobs throughout his lifetime, including mail carrier, orange farmer and railroad crewman. He also did some work contracting houses in Chicago and it is believed that he might have started his own contracting business in 1895, hence the year listed on the window.

Walt then manages to get P.L. on a ride – the King Arthur Carrousel – although she does so very begrudgingly.

The King Arthur Carrousel (which utilizes a British spelling) is also a Disneyland Opening Day attraction and has been in operation since 1955. (It was in fact a carousel, the one at Griffith Park, that inspired Walt to create Disneyland in the first place.) The merry-go-round was originally built in 1922 and, prior to its relocation to The Happiest Place on Earth, had been a part of Sunnyside Beach Park in Toronto, Canada. Walt had the ride enlarged and remodeled before it made its Disney debut. The carousel features 68 hand-carved wooden horses (each has a name – supposedly, you were once able to stop by Disneyland City Hall and pick up a list of those names), one chariot and 3,328 sparkling bulb lights. Jingles, the horse that P.L. rides in Saving Mr. Banks, is one of the attraction’s actual steeds and its most ornately-decorated. In an ironic twist, on April 8th, 2008, as part of the park’s 50th anniversary celebration, Jingles was dedicated to none other than Mary Poppins herself, actress Julie Andrews.

The Disneyland locations can be seen briefly in the Saving Mr. Banks trailer, which you can watch by clicking below.

For more stalking fun, be sure to follow me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Los Angeles magazine online. And you can check out my other blog, The Well-Heeled Diabetic, here.

Until next time, Happy Stalking! Smile

Stalk It: Disneyland Resort is located at 1313 Disneyland Drive in Anaheim. You can visit the park’s official website here. The areas used in Saving Mr. Banks include the rear side of the Main Street Train Station, just beyond the park’s front entrance; the Elias Disney window, which can be found on the west side of Main Street, on the second floor of the Emporium, next to and just south of the Crystal Arcade storefront; and the King Arthur Carrousel, which is in Fantasyland, just north of Sleeping Beauty’s Castle.

Just up the street from the Just Married mansion which I blogged about yesterday is the residence which stood in for Wayne Manor, aka Batman’s abode, in the 1966 television series and movie of the same name. As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, the Batman mansion and the Just Married mansion are quite often mistaken for each other due to a myriad of reasons. So, to set the record straight – and since we already were in the area a couple of weeks ago doing some Just Married stalking- I decided to drag my fiancé a few hundreds yards up the road to also stalk Bruce Wayne’s pad. Sadly, though, not very much of it is visible from the street.

According to Zillow, the residence, which was built in 1928, boasts ten bedrooms, six bathrooms, a whopping 16,599 square feet of living space, and sits on over five acres of land! And if you look at the above photographs, it is very easy to see why the property is often confused with the Just Married mansion that burned down in October of 2005. Not only are both houses gargantuan, set far back from the road, and Tudor/Gothic Revival in style, but both were constructed almost entirely out of brick by the very same architect, Paul Revere Williams, and bear a striking resemblance to each other. Further adding to the confusion between the properties is the fact that they are located within blocks of each other on the very same street, San Rafael Avenue, in Pasadena and have both been featured in countless productions over the years.

Because the location rumors about the two mansions have been running rampant for so very long, this weekend I decided to try to get my hands on as many of the productions filmed on the premises as I could to try to set the record straight once and for all. And I didn’t do too bad – the only movies I wasn’t able to track down were Topper, Three Men and a Little Lady, Executive Action, The Gumball Rally, The Bells of St. Mary’s, Sweet Bird of Youth, and True Confessions. If anyone has those movies or has seen them in the past, can you let me know which, if either, of the San Rafael mansions was featured in them?

As I mentioned above, the mansion’s most famous appearance was as Wayne Manor in the 1966 television series Batman and the subsequent movie of the same name that was made that very same year. But its resume hardly ends there.

The residence was also used as both the St. Audrey’s Home for Boys where Grace (aka Emma Thompson) was taken in by a nun . . .

. . . and as Roman Strauss’ (aka Kenneth Branagh’s) home in 1991’s Dead Again.

In the first Rush Hour movie, the mansion stood in for Los Angeles’ Chinese Consulate.

As you can see in the above photograph and screen capture, though, the exterior gate which appears in that movie is not the home’s real life gate.

In 1999’s Bowfinger, the mansion was used as the residence of action star Kit Ramsey (aka Eddie Murphy).

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And in that flick the home’s real life gate does actually appear and was the site of one of the movie’s funniest scenes.

In Scary Movie 2, the mansion stood in for Hell House/Kane Manor where most of the film’s action takes place.

In X-Files: Fight The Future, it was used as the Somerset, England home of the Well-Manicured Man (aka John Neville).

According to some reports that I found online, the mansion was also featured in 1986’s Stand By Me, which seemed a bit odd being that I had always heard that Stand By Me was filmed almost in its entirety in the state of Oregon. After re-watching the flick earlier today, though, I believe that the mansion did appear once at the very end of the movie as the residence of “The Writer” (aka Richard Dreyfuss). As you can see in the above screen captures, the front driveway area does match that of the Batman mansion. Why would they come all the way to Pasadena to film this one brief scene, though, when the rest of the movie was filmed hundreds of miles away in Oregon, you ask? Well, according to IMDB’s Stand By Me trivia page, an actor named David Dukes was originally cast in the role of “The Writer”. After his scenes were shot, though, and filming had wrapped, they re-cast the role with actor Richard Dreyfuss and re-shot all of his character’s scenes. So, since the Richard Dreyfuss scenes were filmed at a later date – I am guessing after principal photography in Oregon had already wrapped – it makes sense that they would have been shot somewhere in the L.A. area, closer to where the film was being edited.

And if you’ll notice in the above screen captures, which were taken from the movie Dead Again, the mansion’s front window and the view from it does sort of match that which appeared in Stand By Me, which makes me think that the property was actually used in the movie, although I don’t have any concrete proof to back that up.

Fellow stalker Ivan just sent me the above screen captures from the television series Land of Giants, in which Wayne Manor stood in for the residence belonging to Uncle Trojar in the episode entitled “Collector’s Item”. And, yes, the mansion was blown up t the end of that episode. Thank you, Ivan! 🙂

According to fave website OnLocationVacations, the mansion was also the site of some filming from the upcoming Dinner For Schmucks movie starring Steve Carell, Paul Rudd, and Zach Galifianikis. Besides being a filming location, the mansion was also the Pasadena Showcase House of Design in 1997. So, I hope that at least partially puts to rest some of the locations rumors about the two landmark San Rafael Avenue mansions. If I come across any further information, I will post it here! And please let me know, dear readers, if you come across any information yourselves!

Until next time, Happy Stalking! 🙂

Stalk It: Wayne Manor from the Batman television series is located at 380 South San Rafael Avenue in Pasadena. Unfortunately, the residence is not very visible from the street. To see the best views of the home, drive just a bit north of where the main gates are located.

Tag: Emma Thompson

The Disneyland Locations from “Saving Mr. Banks”

Wayne Manor From the “Batman” Television Series