MSEP Returns

My last visit to WDW, with no Spectro, no MSEP, and not much of anything else in the evenings, the MK was pretty dead from about dusk on (and generally closed early). About the only park that wasn't pretty much dead in the evenings was Epcot. I probably got to bed earlier during the WDW portion of last fall's vacation than I did the nights I spent on trains!

And granted, I can't imagine a year-round nighttime parade, unless it's that particular parade's debut or farewell season. But Fantasmic is still dark, and will presumably be dark until ROA can once more accommodate it.

And "Dabob2," I was also "never much of a parade guy." The Rose Parade is probably the one thing I find more soporific than one of Mahler's typically-long-winded symphonies, and my New Year's Day ritual normally includes staying away from televisions until after the last repeat broadcast thereof is over. But even the real clunkers among Disney parades (at least from1972 on) are qualitatively different from other parades. For one thing, they're shorter. They're not padded out to 2 hours or more; they're pared down to 20-25 minutes. And thanks to sound systems (e.g., PAGEANT) developed for (and since) the MSEP, each unit's soundtrack follows it -- from speakers in both the floats and the buildings -- down the route, with perfect clarity.

 

Well, I was never much of a Disney parade guy either. Shorter and "meh" is better than long and "meh," but still "meh."

Probably my favorite Disney parade was Eureka, which they jettisoned from DCA in their mad rush to make the park more like DL.

And interestingly, I kind of like the Rose Parade. I can kind of pay attention or not on TV, and I like the very ephemeral nature of it - that those elaborate floats will be seen only once (yeah, I know they're displayed briefly in a park too, but you know what I mean) - and living on the East Coast now means that it airs at a very "okay, I'm up now"-friendly time for post-New-Year's-Eve.

In other words... to each his own.

 

I was in WDW from the afternoon of October 17th through the afternoon of October 23rd, 2016. And I think "Mickey's Not So Scary" was closing MK early most evenings.

I did catch the EWP several times. This time, I took advantage of the fact that they'd finally started publishing the schedule; even so, I went to the trouble of mapping its route, so that I'd know which hotels it would be servicing, and at what time of the night.

 

Last night, I picked up my 3-day promotional ticket from the local grocer.

Between Lent, the "Spring Break" donut-hole blackout, concerts at Disney Hall the evenings of April 2nd and 8th, and May 21st, docenting at the International Printing Museum every Saturday that I'm home, and my own Spring vacation taking up 17 of the last 27 days of the promotion period, I did NOT opt to pay the extra $40 for park-hopping.

 

Extended to August 20th: BREAKING: Main Street Electrical Parade Extended to August 20th at Disneyland - WDW News Today

 

I'll wait until I hear it from the, uh, mouse's mouth.

 

Last night was the first night of my 3-days-for-$150 ticket.

First the score:
It's definitely not the Don Dorsey arrangement. And it's certainly not the composers' original arrangement (which can be heard on The Essential Perrey and Kingsley, which appears to still be available on CD). And I have only the vaguest memories of the Paul Beaver arrangement, other than a general impression that it was very close to the composers' arrangement.

But it's an arrangement that (like the Dorsey) respects the original. And it brings out different aspects of the original, compared to previous arrangements. The original has a drum track (almost certainly acoustic in origin; realistic drum synths didn't exist in the late 1960s), which the Dorsey, for the most part, lacked. Although the current arrangement is practically buried in its drum track. The unit-specific cues for Alice and Cinderella are definitely not as good as Dorsey's, but many of the other unit-specific cues are better than Dorsey's.

And at any rate, like the Dorsey arrangement, and like the score from Spectro, it's still far more pleasant than "pain in the night."

As to The Parade itself, I definitely miss the Blue Fairy. And I miss other floats that no longer exist. And I wonder why, given that Spectro has been retired and dismantled (as big a mistake, as I see it, as permanently doing away with the MSEP would be) WDW didn't send over the butterfly and dragonfly costumes from Spectro, that were inserted into the MSEP for its turn-of-the-21st-century WDW run. But Elliott is looking better than ever, with animated wings, and I also note that the butterfly in the Alice unit is now animated, and the new Cheshire Cat is a big improvement over previous ones.

Magic Kingdoms are supposed to be places where (except in Tomorrowland) the timeless always wins out over the timely, and (even in Tomorrowland) the universal always wins out over the topical.

 

Starting to look forward to seeing the parade where it belongs as our trip gets closer.
I am sure the grandkids will love it.

 

I might add that I can remember the music from America On Parade, because it was largely based on Yankee Doodle, and was arranged (and hand-cut into fanfold books) for a band organ, with some synth tracks added.

I can only remember the music from the Lion King parade because it was the music from the movie.

I can remember some of the original music from Christmas Fantasy, and from whatever the previous Christmas parade was. And I can vaguely remember Party Gras. I can even remember some of the rather Celtic-sounding music from Light Magic.

I can't remember so much as one bar of the music from Flights of Fantasy, or (thankfully) "Pain in the Night."

But I can recall the MSEP score (not just Baroque Hoedown, but most of the unit cues from the Don Dorsey version) without even having to think about it, and I can also easily recall those of Spectro and Fantasmic, albeit not in quite so much detail.

I understand that one of the hallmarks of a successful Broadway musical is if members of the audience are whistling some tune from the show after they leave the building. Well, I say that one of the hallmarks of a successful Disney parade (or show) is how memorable the music is. The MSEP sold soundtrack records. So did Fantasmic and Spectro.

Oh, and on different arrangements of Baroque Hoedown: in the composers' version, you hear the inner voices more than in the more recent ones. In the Don Dorsey version, the bass line is particularly strong. The present one has the strongest percussion line. Perhaps a bit too strong in places. There's also, BTW, a concert arrangement for symphony orchestra; it's been performed several times at the Bowl, probably by both the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra. Thankfully, they're all good.

 

Well, here it is, straight from the Mouse's mouth: August 20, 2017.

BTW, Jean-Jacques Perrey died only last November, at age 87 (I had been under the impression that he'd died longer ago than that), while Gershon Kingsley is still alive at age 94. Don Dorsey is still very much alive, and still in business, as "Don Dorsey Consulting."

 

Last night's Parades sounded a good deal better than this past Saturday night's. Alice's mic was working (it wasn't Saturday), and it was much easier to hear the unit cues for Alice and Cinderella.

And I might just be getting used to it, but it seems like the whole score was better balanced, and not quite as deeply buried in drums.

But I still miss the Blue Fairy. (Which I confided to the CM who took my dinner order at Jolly Holiday, who agreed with me).

 

I still can't believe they messed with the closing announcement (borrowing the last 5 words of the opening one rather than using the normal "Disneyland's Main Street Electrical Parade!"

 

Actually, my memory may be playing tricks with me, but that may have been exactly how it was, when the vocoded announcements first replaced Jack Wagner's voice. (If you've heard the old 7" vinyl soundtrack record, you just hear a few effects over low, sustained chords, between Electric Fanfare and Baroque Hoedown.) Before they added the present flag/eagle unit, there was no closing fanfare: when the Parade concluded with a "Disney Characters in Neon" unit (accompanied by various Disney themes set to a disco beat, of all things), the Parade soundtrack just faded out at the end.

BTW, the closing fanfare ("Fanfare of Lights") originated (in a very different arrangement) as a looping unit cue for a "Mickey's 50th Anniversary" float that ran in 1978. And the Paul Beaver version from the 1972 MSEP soundtrack didn't have any fanfares; both were written by Don Dorsey. It's too far back for me to have any clear recollection of what (if anything) Paul Beaver used at the beginning.

Incidentally, I've mentioned The Essential Perrey & Kingsley before; it's still available on both Amazon and B&N, among other vendors, and I'd regard it as essential for the CD library of any MSEP fan.

 

so that Mickey's Birthday float that WDW had in '78 had it's own music? (I knew the one from '88 did.

 

Yes. Mickey standing in front of a big flat "Mickey's Face icon" lit in clear bulbs, with large digits "50" left unlit in the middle. It can be seen here, along with other pictures, including some of 1972 floats I don't even remember. If I remember right, it ran between the lead unit (Blue Fairy/Casey Jr./Big Bass Drum) and the Alice unit. The cue for it (i.e., the original version of "Fanfare of Lights") is included, if memory serves, in the MSEP soundtrack included as a bonus on at least one version of the Fantasmic soundtrack CD.

 

Wow, lots of technical stuff!

I cried when I heard that music back on Main Street. And my 7yo granddaughter who complained the whole time we were waiting; stating that she doesn't even like parades and did not want to see a parade............................................stared transfixed through the whole thing.