So I was browsing LD's on eBay one night a while back and saw this Haunted Castle, and was intrigued by it. It says Haunted Castle, Show Technologies Inc and came in a generic Pioneer LD branded sleeve. I couldn't find anything in the database for it and google searches turned up nothing LD related, but I did find some info on a Haunted Castle amusement park ride that I'm guessing was built in the early 90's. I'm still looking for more info on it, but I found this site that mentions both the name and the company on the disc

Being a fan of horror I bought it, even before I had deduced it was probably part of an amusement ride. When it came in the mail I put it in the player immediately and as I suspected it seems to be something they projected in the ride. It has 3 looping sequences; Dracula turning into a bat and flying off, Ghoulies and ghosts floating through the air with bones rattling, and a similar sequence with ghosts talking and a big skull with hands floats in. It's most definitely part of a ride because one of the ghosts says something like "Get the little ones." lol

It's pretty freaking cool, both the visuals and creepy audio. I will get some vid and post it, but I don't have any capture equipment on hand right now though so it won't be pretty.

I grabbed a couple pics with my phone, also pretty horrible quality, they are attached.







If anyone has more info on this, I'd love to hear it. I WISH I was a kid again, we used to make haunted houses and this would have been amazing projected on a wall.

A nice find, that's really pretty cool.

My girlfriend suggests you should try asking a few theme park blogs/forums. She's a Disney nut and visits a few and reckons they might be able to help find some more information about it. She recommends MiceChat in particular as they cover lots of different types of theme parks.

Actually after a quick Google about I came across this: Haunted Castle: Six Flags Great Adventure. Sounds like the ride shut down in 1984 because of a fatal fire, no word about if it reopened.

Searching for "Haunted Castle theme park ride" mostly returned results for a newer ride called Haunted Castle: Dark Ride. Not sure if it's part of the same thing but I did find a landing page for a rather dead website for Haunted Castle: Dark Ride which lists one of the builders as Show Technologies: http://www.reocities.com/splatter96/darkride1.html

Hope this gives you a few leads.

That's awesome, thanks for the leads. I did see the Dark Ride site, but there wasn't much info on there, but since Show Technologies was involved it seems likely. I kind of hope it's not associated with the Six Flags ride, that's tragic.

Man, could imagine how cool it would be to turn up something like this for Disney's Haunted Mansion? My brain would explode.

I remember the Haunted Castle in Great Adventure (grew up in NJ and hit GA a lot.)

Don't quite remember if it had video screens showing this stuff though.

Though, it wasn't uncommon for some theme park rides with video to use LD as the storage and playback of the video back in the day. I know that Disney had all their rides that used video, like Mission to Mars, playing back the video from LD.

Yeah, I'm not sure either, I've been digging this evening, big thanks to HippieD for the link, I didn't see the NJ Haunted Castle earlier, that's a sad-sad story. There's also a Haunted Castle in Santa Monica, but I'm unsure how long it's been around. I'm guessing the old geocities site that credits Show Technologies is the closest hit and that was setup outside the US.

At any rate, this is by far the coolest thing I've found so far and thank you guys for your help, I'll update as I find more info.

Ok, I made a couple vids, they do suck - on an angle and I was having issues with my phone cutting me off, so the last clip isn't complete. This will give you an idea of the content though. Just click and it will direct you to photobucket.

Very cool and very strange.

Thanks for the video. It'll be a handy laserdisc to have around if you ever throw a Halloween party.

Definitely a cool find. It seems there were many interesting applications for laserdisc in the commercial world which collectors are only getting the opportunity to discover now that these items are finally appearing for sale decades after they were first released.

The disc was probably created and distributed for theme parks only. It was never intended for general consumption. Just a guess.

I totally agree, and being it's only 3 short clips, I believe it was built for specific points in a track ride.

The Back To The Future Ride at Universal Studios in Orlando featured Laserdisc video. I'd love to see that disc someday.

My god man, could you IMAGINE how awesome it would be having that video in your living room?

That video's on the 2009 DVD and '10 Blu-Rays: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_to_th ... Home_media

i have a space disc like this, and also had a DTS apollo 13 demo disc with these types of hand made labels.
very cool stuff.


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LOL- I will go forth and procure. Thank you, that was some nub level stuff I should've known.

Some of the Disney uses of LaserDisc were a custom high definition format - I don't think it was anything like Hi-Vision's 1135i or 1080i/P - the discs HD video was slow-scan encoded over multiple frames then stored during playback for readout - I recall hearing that a CAV disc held about 15 minutes in the Disney format and a CLV held about 35 minutes - playback required the LD-V8000 with some custom RAM cards and software chips and a Macintosh Quadra with a then super expensive 24 Mb of RAM and a 200 MB hard drive.

The JVC VHD disc format could also do a custom HD format using the VHD stylus kick codes and the VHDpc link to an MSX computer. Later JVC somehow fit 8.1 MHz MUSE-E (the LaserDisc MUSE format) on VHD but I've wondered if it was 6 MHz Narrow MUSE or 4.5MHz NTSC compatible MUSE-4?

I'm certain the HiVision VHD was MUSE-E, because the timing is wrong for anything else. It's hard to know how it performed, though, as I've never found any documentation. And JVC dropped VHD not long after. But my guess is that they made the most of the fact that MUSE-E is a non-subcarrier encoding with embedded audio, & used a more or less VSB-FM technique, with the bottom edge of the modulated frequency band close to DC, & the carrier close to the top edge of what VHD could record — presumably around 12 MHz, as Carson's Rule demands. That would result in a lot of distortion, but the built-in equalizer in the MUSE decoder would clean it up to a useful form, I suppose.

I got several of the space Special Effects Disks off an eBay auction a while back. One of which even had the new Pioneer logo, so it was probably a very late Pioneer US pressing, from what I can tell.

Heh... I hadn't heard of HiVision VHD before. But it didn't make it to market, per Japanese Wikipedia (via google translate) - it also sounds like there was QX VHD (which had 400 horizontal luma lines), but the translation implies it was still color-under so chroma was not as good as LD.

The V8000 hacks also sound interesting