An animated Old Hag from “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” that laughed, screamed and rattled her chains for decades whenever kids touched her lock cage is back at Disneyland and ready to haunt a new generation of children’s nightmares.
“She was scary,” Walt Disney Imagineering’s David Caranci said. “At 6 years old I was completely horrified of her, but I always wanted to visit her.”
The fan-favorite “Witch in the Cage” —as she was known — serves as the centerpiece of the new Disney100 exhibit celebrating the influence of Disney animation on Disneyland now on display in the theater lobby of “Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln.”
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The Old Hag first debuted in the 1970s in the jewelry shop on Main Street USA. An employee behind the counter triggered the animated witch with the push of a button whenever anyone got too close or dared to touch the lock on the cage.
“Kids would go up to her and try to unlock the cage,” Caranci said during an interview in the exhibit lobby. “A cast member would have a clicker and when they clicked it she would come alive.”
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The Old Hag would bang on the glass window inside the cage, rattle her chains, scream wildly and cackle madly while her eyes glowed an eerie yellow.
“There’s a lot of nostalgia with her,” said Caranci, Imagineering’s manager of creative development. “A lot of people remember her. We’ve had people come through and say, ‘My mom talks about this witch in a cage. We thought she was crazy.’”
The Witch in the Cage was moved in the 1990s to the Villains shop in Fantasyland, which today houses Merlin’s Marvelous Miscellany shop.
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The animated Old Hag was “lost to time” in the early 2000s until she was found two decades later when Caranci and fellow Imagineer Kim Irvine discovered her in a Disneyland warehouse and had the robo-sorceress refurbished to working order.
“She does work and she’s still scary,” Caranci said. “She’s not going to work in the exhibit, but maybe we’ll find a home for her somewhere in the future.”