To get in the holiday mood: I never had a chance to see Luminaria in person, though from videos I can certainly see some of its faults (smoke, mostly). It seems like it really did a good job of hitting the "grown up" tone of DCA1.0, without relying on familiar characters or imagery; at least some of the great music got to be reused for the snowfall moments in DL when they started doing the lights on the castle about a decade ago
Luminaria's other fault (aside from the smoke in your face, and the lagoon chock full of clearly visible hardware 24/7) was that you had to look down into the lagoon to see most of it. Fireworks shows you have to look down to see aren't all that impressive, nice music or not. I'm trying to remember if this was the show that I skewered online for its pacing (probably under a previous username), described exactly what I'd do to fix it, and then a couple weeks later they debuted a new improved version that seemed to have literally used a printout of my post as a checklist. I know it sounds bonkers now, but DL management at the time was ... interesting ...
That's fascinating! Luminaria only ran for about 6 weeks before being quietly retired, so I'm not sure if they would have changed that particular show (though they probably expected it to return at the time, given the infrastructure investments), but given how frequently things changed in DCA's early days it could be the show. As far as I know, it was the only regularly-schedule "nighttime spectacular" (not Rockin' the Bay concerts, etc.) on Paradise Bay until World of Color debuted in 2010. I'm sure it would be nearly impossible to find now, but it would be great to see that old post! World of Color is the most obvious recent example of having things tweaked after opening, as various elements and segments were added and removed (and infamously being subject to Iger's meddling). The crowd control procedures also changed very early on; the 5 sections were merged into 3 within a couple weeks of opening. It sounds like Rivers of Light at DAK is currently getting ready to debut, and by all accounts it will continue to evolve for several weeks/months after it opens
Can confirm because I tried. Probably would've been on Usenet. Also slightly possible that I have my timeline totally fubar'd and it was World of Color right after its debut. But I distinctly remember all that smoke - and I was one of the lucky ones upwind.
This is great .... Does anybody have video performances from Disney"s On the Record? I saw this 3 times while it was in Kansas City for a week schedule and the tour was cancelled immediately after that and never made it to California.
