"Avid hunter and expert shot, in the end that’s what he got" -Bertie's epitaph
Bertie or Bertie Dread is a member of the Dread Family and a man whose tomb is found in the Haunted Mansion in the Magic Kingdom of Walt Disney World.
Description[]
Biography[]
Bertie was a member of the Dread family with his exact relations being unknown. Bertie was a Great White Hunter, a big-game hunter who specialized in exploited safaris and hunts in western-colonized nations like Africa and South America.
Bertie came to desire the wealth of family patriarch, Jacob Dread and murdered him by poisoning him with a serum taken from Bertie's own pet serpent. As a result of having commit this murder most foul, he was shot dead with a flintlock by Bertie's wife Florence. Following his death he was memorialized beside Jacob's bust on the burial-grounds of Gracey Manor.
History[]
Bertie was first shown in demo-art with a pet snake choking his neck with the epitaph, "His tea-time turned toxic". This was in reference to being poisoned by Forsythia Dread and his snake was responsible for killing Maude.
Appearances[]
Walt Disney World[]
They are presented as busts in front of the Walt Disney World Haunted Mansion as part of the 2010 interactive queue installation and work as a mystery game where guests use clues hidden on the busts and epitaphs to solve the mystery of who killed who.
Each member of the family's plaque is decorated with symbols that represent their murder weapon with Bertie's having a vial as an allusion to the poison which he used. The flintlock which killed him can be seen on the memorial of Florence.
Trivia[]
- In the original testing artwork, Bertie's pet serpent was very distinctly a snake (likely a contractor or a viper) but in the actual bust the serpent is showed to have fins on it's head and tail, a trait which no known species snake has on Earth, not even sea-snakes. Due to this it is very likely that Bertie's pet might be an amphibian rather than a reptile as the animals it most closely resembles are the Two-Toed Amphiuma and the Siren Reticulata, both of which are species of Salamander. It could also however simply be a fictitious species of snake.
- If the pet which Bertie has is in-fact an Amphibian that would mean that the poison used to axe off Jacob would likely be a tetrodotoxin which is a neurotoxin created from the skin of Salamanders. This would mean that Jacob would have died by losing control of his nervous system, being paralyzed and his brain losing the ability to make his lungs move causing him to die from a lack of air.
- Bertie's design resembles a Big Game Hunter designed by imagineer Marc Davis for an unused trophy-room sequence in the Haunted Mansion.
- Bertie wears a pith helmet, a form of helmet which is considered to be an icon for white colonialism.
- Bertie was referred to as Bertie Dread in the testing-phase of the Dread family integration, his exact relation is unknown.
- It is possible that he was Jacob's brother considering that the murder of a family-member by using the venom of a serpent is often a Shakespearian motif, most notably having been used by Claudius to kill his brother in Hamlet.
- Due to Bertie's early-20th century white hunter aesthetic, it is possible that the design could be alluding to a possible connection to the Jungle Cruise attraction.