Originally Posted By dresswhites ok i am kind nostaligc. 10 years ago i started in the disneyland college program. one of my biggest memories from that first summer was Light Magic. can you believe that if light magic had survived, it would be 10 years old! so now 10 years later what are your opinions of the show? do you think it was a good show? do you still think it was a bad show? do you think it could of improved with time or there was no hope for it? i hated the show as a custodian, because of all that confetti. but thinking about it as a guest, i think there were some good aspects. it was something different. i loved when Main Street became a glow with the fiber optics. that was really magical. i always thought it was shame that small world mall never got the fiber coptic treatment. i think seeing small world, the towers, maybe the storybook light house, and parts of the matterhorn lit up in fiberoptics would be neat. i also always thought it was shame they took out all the fiber optics on main street. for the various fireworks shows, the fiber optics would be extra magical touch. so what your opinions of lIght magic?
Originally Posted By retlawfan Well, I certainly miss the nightmares it gave me. j/k I just really never got into it. I tried, but it just never got good. I always felt that the masks that the pixies wore at the beginning of the run would give the kids nightmares. The music started to grow on me. But not much. Sorry to rain on your parade...er. Streetacular. I'm sure some people liked it.
Originally Posted By MsLindanne My opinion on "Light Magic"? I thought it was great! I loved the music and I have it on a cd and play it all the time. I also recorded it using my camcorder, then my battery died, so I only got a small portion of it. I always thought I would have another opportunity to get the whole thing, but then they pulled the plug and it went "bah bye". I was so disappointed! I think the problem was: where you sat depended upon getting a good view. We asked different cast members, so we had a good view. But that wasn't enough I guess. I always hoped they would bring it back after making some changes...It was so pretty and seeing the characters in their little night clothes was cute. Oh well...they can't all be great parades. Now Lion King was wonderful! I never got tired of it. ºoº
Originally Posted By gurgitoy2 Yeah, I was there all the time that summer and saw it many, many times. One of my fondest summers at Disnyland. The parade...oh, excuse me, "Streetacular" was good to me, but needed obvious tweaking. I think it was just too many cooks stirring the pot. It tried to be too many things, so it never really succeeded as a whole. I loved the fiber optics, and I am also sad they removed them from Main Street. I feel that they could still be put to good use, but now that won't happen. I also liked the floats. The problem was that you had to be sitting right in front of one to get the best show, because of those screens. Also, the pixies were truly nightmare enducing! I love the music, but really didn't like the whole "Riverdance" feel to it. If more time were spent retooling it, I think it could have stayed, but it never recoverd from that disastrous AP preview. It's been 10 years now since Disneyland has had a true nightime "electrical" parade, and it needs one badly, in my opinion. I hope that somewhere, DCE is coming up with something for Disneyland...
Originally Posted By ni_teach The "Streetacular" problems out weighed the good portions. It was just so flawed that I don't think any amount of tweaking would have made it worked.
Originally Posted By MsLindanne Have any of you seen "Spectromagic" from WDW? That is their "nighttime" parade and it is similiar to the Electrical Light Parade and very good. I've often hoped they would bring it to Disneyland, but they probably won't. I've seen so many different parades thru the years and some of them have been wonderful, and other's just so-so. I know "Light Magic" cost a lot of money so it was a shame that they couldn't do something with it. I still enjoyed it though! ºoº
Originally Posted By monorailblue Never saw Light Magic myself--it died while I was living in South America--but the footage I've seen does show very nice lighting effects. Oh, and nothing else. Every single other element turned out dreadfully, as near as I can tell. 1. Freaky characters. 2. Terrible/no story. 3. Can't get a show from anywhere on the route. 4. No show while the floats were rolling. These last two are abysmal, inexcusable failures, if you ask me. The perfect counter-example is Lion King. It stopped and did street shows, but each now stop began where the prior one left off--so it leapfrogged along the entire route doing shows. Everywhere you stood, it did a street show, with no gaps. AND, it was a full fledged and interesting parade when it was moving. Even if that was all you spent time watching, you still got a full show! To create a street-show style "-tacular" that did NOT perform anything while moving, and that did not have show stops covering the entire route--really, it's been posted a million times before, but WHAT WERE THEY THINKING????!!!!???? As for a new, true nighttime parade--I don't think Disneyland could logistically handle one anymore, what with the Main-Street-centricity of all current fireworks shows, ever more crowded walkways each day of the year, etc. The nightly rush back to Disneyland from DCA is also a problem. It was hard enough in the old days--its even harder now.
Originally Posted By FerretAfros I never got to see LM in person, but I saw a video of the Main Street portion. My first impression was that the music was well done, but it was very dated to the late 90's. If it had stayed around, I'm pretty sure that would have needed to change. I think that one of the biggest flaws was not only that there was really nothing going on while it moved, but all of the floats also looked the same, so it was boring to begin with, but it also repeated the boring over and over. However, it did leave some pretty cool stuff for the park. The Small World Mall makeover really added a lot for all future parades, and was a generally great investment. The infrastructure of that area was really changed for the better, both for during parades and the rest of the time as well. Although they don't use the towers for much any more (other than projections on iasw), they leave plenty of possibilities for any future parades. The fiber optics on Main Street looked really cool, but unfortunately they took them out. I don't know how difficult that would be to reinstall, but they also leave a lot of possiblities for future parades, fireworks, and other nighttime shows. Overall, the concept behind Light Magic was great, but as expensive as it was, they just didn't put enough effort into making sure that everybody could appreciate it. Had they done something in the Hub (even if the stops didn't completely cover the route, but most of it), that would have really helped the reputation. No matter what, it showed people the technical achievements that Disney is capable of, raising the bar, even if the entertainment value wasn't as high.
Originally Posted By dldhistory here is some info on Light Magic: <a href="http://www.dldhistory.com/parades.asp?Tab=Disneyland&Page=21" target="_blank">http://www.dldhistory.com/para des.asp?Tab=Disneyland&Page=21</a> --Richard <a href="http://www.dldhistory.com" target="_blank">http://www.dldhistory.com</a> The Most Unique Disneyland History Site
Originally Posted By doombuggy I didn't care for it due to the fact they just had to jump on the River Dance band wagon which was all the rage at the time.
Originally Posted By code90 WOW! That was my first summer working there.... I remember the HUGE traffic jams of people trying to get to Main Street to leave after seeing the show up at Small World Mall. But their way out was blocked because the performers and the so-called "rolling stages" had to reset themselves right there on Matterhorn way, and that would take forever! I think management had to open up the backstage gates behind Storybook and funnel the guests through the rest of Fantasyland.... By the time these poor guests went though all that, the show would be on Main Street and they would be have 2 B funneled behind Main Street and let out at Town Square. So the solution was to have the entertainment dept. drive these "rolling stages" down the the parade route to Main Street in the middle of the afternoon, after the Hercules Parade was done 4 the day. So the "streetacular" would then begin on Main Sreet and not Small World Mall. What a nightmare!!! The lines outside city hall were enormous at the end of the night.
Originally Posted By FerretAfros They drove the parade through DL in the middle of the day?! That sounds pretty terrible. First, I'm sure people would think that it was an actual parade, which couldn't have been good for PR. Also, it would have showed the floats in daylight, and if they're like the other night time floats, they probably looked terrible. They probably didn't have the room backstage to fit all of the floats for both parades, but this doesn't really sound like a good solution. Having been back where they store the parades, it appeared to me that there would be room to store two parades (especially if one only had 4 large floats) back there, but they would make it a little more difficult to move around back there. I assume they tested it before they decided to run it through the middle of the park during the day, but that just sounds gross.
Originally Posted By code90 It was very gross... and really bad bad show... the floats would roll down the route with no music, with guest control CM's moving people out of the way and the announcement telling everyone to come back that evening to see Light Magic. Entertainment still had ample room to store Herc Parade, X-mas Fantasy, and Light Magic behind the park. But all of this was really done just to relieve the the terrible guest control situations that occured afer the show if Light Magic had stepped off at the Small World area. Truly a "What were they thinking?!" type of show.
Originally Posted By MsLindanne Now I don't remember the floats going down Main Street during the day at all. Guess I was elsewhere when this was all happening. I still enjoyed it though...maybe it was because where my son and I "planted ourselves", it was the perfect spot and we saw a bunch. I really enjoyed the music and it was so colorful. Well, not everything is perfect and this obviously wasn't what they hoped it would be. Maybe if they could have asked some of us guests, we could have given them a few ideas. Gotta say, some of them here have been great!! ºoº
Originally Posted By FerretAfros How tough would it have been to take the stages down to the holding area next to Space Mountain using the backstage road? I know there is a pretty tight turn just after crossing the railroad tracks behind Innoventions, but it didn't seem any sharper than the corner in Town Square. This way, they could have stored the Hercules parade there during the afternoon, and after it leaves, they could bring in the other floats using the backstage road. I guess it was too narrow or too tight of a turn, or maybe they just liked taking the floats through the middle of the park for fun.
Originally Posted By Indigo As the guy who wrote the FAQ on Light Magic It frightens me to think that ten years has gone by so quickly. So what has ten years of water under the bridge brought? To start with a complete reset for Team Disney Anaheim. Paul Pressler was hired and tasked with the unfortunate job of replacing the Main Street Electrical Parade. If Pressler had risen organically from within Disneyland, he would have known how foolish an idea that was. MSEP was designed to evolve (it started on push carts and grew into great floats with fiber optics and pyro (see Hercules Float)) and could have kept right on evolving. Both Pressler and Eisner had tight reins on the evolution of the parade, down to suggesting the music, the story, the kids in the video. I'm not sure who came up with the idea for huge floats with show stops. But that person had obviously never sat through the early days of the Lion King Celebration when it was impossible to navigate through Main Street USA, when that show stop was on-going. Had Pressler had more themepark experience he would have nixed that element as well. Finally, after pruning all the bad elements of the show, we would have been left with a stage show with amazing new fiber optic effects in a new enclosed fantasyland theatre that featured a story of Tinker Bell and her quest to save Disney's most famous characters from an evil nightmare. In the end, despite the valiant efforts of the cast members who tried their best every night to make some magic happen for the guests they performed to, Light Magic was a mess for Disneyland, a fiscal albatross around its neck for many years, and should be an object lesson for any Disney executive who is asked to take over a themepark with no themepark experience.
Originally Posted By imadisneygal I never once saw the rolling stages moved through the Park back up north from Main Street during Park hours. I worked at the Main Entrance and Guest Relations during that time and I am sure I would have seen this taking place. There is no way on earth they could have used the backstage roads for that - way too tight. Personally, I think they could have replaced the MSEP with the second coming of Walt himself and people would have said, "Yeah, but where's the Baroque Hoedown!??!? And where are the little twinkly lights?!?!?!" It was a huge disaster from start to finish, but it was a near impossible task to replace the MSEP.
Originally Posted By dresswhites if i recall,the last hercules parade of the day traveled from main street to small world, so they would already be in the barn when light magic rolled out. i don't recall light magic rolling down main street during the day. i know it did roll down small world mall around 5 or so, and would park between the matterhorn and alice. its first show would then be main street, then then the floats would reset between alice and matterhorn. it would perform at small world. then small world and main street. i did think it was pretty bad show for the floats to go down the route only to get in posistion. it did kind of ruin the magic. also they had the pixies on the float while it was doing this and they pretended to be asleeep. however they looked like they were passed out or dead. it was wierd. the other odd thing was the first show on main street was like 630pm or 7pm. it wasn't even dark. as a custodian, the show was a nightmare. oh the confetti! i remember that summer you could find confetti in every planter in the park, along harbor, at the various hotels around the park, and the castmembers appartments. it was an interesting summer!
Originally Posted By dresswhites code 90, if you don't mind me asking which area of the park did you or do you work?
