I had so much fun with this on the Haunted Mansion monster thread at Micechat that I thought I'd develop it a tad more and essentially cross-post it here. Hope no one minds.
This is about the Decapitated Knight in the graveyard. He's often called the "Headless Knight," although I don't know why. He's still got his head. Anyway, in combing through the concept art it struck me that at least three different ideas for the DK were suggested and then shot down before he finally came to rest in his present context. I have to think that Marc Davis must have been terribly fond of the Knight in order to persist so hard in finding him a place.
I have no idea what order the three failed ideas belong in, so the sequence is a little random.
First we have the DK as a solo figure. He is one scary dude:

But something that fearsome would have been out of place in a fun-filled graveyard jamboree. As that concept took hold, it became clear that a gruesome DK did not fit. This early artwork was actually put on a postcard, but the note on the back as much as admits that there's a problem:

Not sure how much stock I'd put in that 1964 date. It could be right, but postcard info is notoriously unreliable.
Okay, so the graveyard's going to be musical. How about we make the DK a comic character, pair him with someone, and make them opera singers?

(The caption for this picture says that this is an opera scene.) But a much funnier pair of opera singers also emerged from Davis's pencil, and we all know that they got the gig:

When Davis sketched a series of floating apparitions in an early concept painting of the hitchhiking ghost gag, he included the DK once again:

But in the end they went with a HHG gag that plays off of the many urban legends about phantom hitchhikers, who are never famous figures from history or from the remote past but closer in time to the unlucky folk who pick them up. Gus, Ezra, and Phineas are a little odd and old-fashioned looking, but not particularly ancient. Imagine a Roman soldier instead of Phineas, and you can see how it wouldn't work.
Oh dear, that's strike three for the DK. Is there no hope? Well...there was this other concept drawing that had a jailor-and-prisoner pair in it:

Hey, y'know? If we make the jailor not just a jailor but an executioner as well, he could link to both the prisoner and to the DK. Make it a trio instead of a duo.
And so it was.
This is about the Decapitated Knight in the graveyard. He's often called the "Headless Knight," although I don't know why. He's still got his head. Anyway, in combing through the concept art it struck me that at least three different ideas for the DK were suggested and then shot down before he finally came to rest in his present context. I have to think that Marc Davis must have been terribly fond of the Knight in order to persist so hard in finding him a place.
I have no idea what order the three failed ideas belong in, so the sequence is a little random.
First we have the DK as a solo figure. He is one scary dude:

But something that fearsome would have been out of place in a fun-filled graveyard jamboree. As that concept took hold, it became clear that a gruesome DK did not fit. This early artwork was actually put on a postcard, but the note on the back as much as admits that there's a problem:

Not sure how much stock I'd put in that 1964 date. It could be right, but postcard info is notoriously unreliable.
Okay, so the graveyard's going to be musical. How about we make the DK a comic character, pair him with someone, and make them opera singers?

(The caption for this picture says that this is an opera scene.) But a much funnier pair of opera singers also emerged from Davis's pencil, and we all know that they got the gig:

When Davis sketched a series of floating apparitions in an early concept painting of the hitchhiking ghost gag, he included the DK once again:

But in the end they went with a HHG gag that plays off of the many urban legends about phantom hitchhikers, who are never famous figures from history or from the remote past but closer in time to the unlucky folk who pick them up. Gus, Ezra, and Phineas are a little odd and old-fashioned looking, but not particularly ancient. Imagine a Roman soldier instead of Phineas, and you can see how it wouldn't work.
Oh dear, that's strike three for the DK. Is there no hope? Well...there was this other concept drawing that had a jailor-and-prisoner pair in it:

Hey, y'know? If we make the jailor not just a jailor but an executioner as well, he could link to both the prisoner and to the DK. Make it a trio instead of a duo.
And so it was.






