Electric Mayhem:

 

Throughout the last few months I made a goal to find out as much as I could about the Main Street Electrical Parade, or its title these days: Disney’s Electrical Parade. I found some pretty cool stuff so here is a lot of what I’ve learned:

Disney’s Electrical Parade’s core idea originally began in the mind of Bob Janai. “ Well about 8 months before the opening of Walt Disney World I took a look at Bay Lake and since there were no horizon lights there was just perfect ‘black’ or perfect darkness. So I made a mockup of a glowing whale on a boat in Bay Lake, And one night I took some Disney executives at the time out on the lake on another boat to show them the whale-” – Behind the scenes of Disney’s Electrical Parade documentary.

What Bob Janai was creating looked something like this:

Then on October 1st, 1971 Disney World, Disney’s Contemporary Resort, and more important to this topic, Disney’s Polynesian Resort opened to the public. With the Polynesian resort came the first showing of the Electrical Water Pageant. It was the whale and much more on seven barges with flat lighted 2D frames. The show was also themed to a 1963 music piece called “Baroque Hoedown.” The Electrical Water pageant still exists to this day and now has 14 “floats”. Now it is also often referred to as “The Water Parade.” But the Disney Company wanted to bring the show to Disneyland to boost the park’s evening attendance, seeing there were no nightly fireworks in that period of time. But with no suitable body of water the west coast version was developed with wheels. They had so many problems that I can’t even begin to tell but there were a lot of them. Then on June 17, 1972 the first Main Street Electrical Parade was shown. Some of the original floats kept their 2D shapes from The Electrical Water Pageant, and were just flat frames on wheels. Many of the original floats were also pulled or pushed by hand. Then in 1977 the entire parade was reworked into 3 dimensions. And the music was reworked by Don Dorsey.

    The units of floats throughout the years included: Alice in Wonderland units, Cinderella units, Peter Pan units, a rare Dumbo unit, Snow white units, It’s a Small World units, Under the Sea units, Pinocchio units, a Fox & the Hound unit, A Pete’s Dragon unit, a Tinkerbelle unit, a Blue Fairy unit, a Drum thing unit, and a To Honor America unit. Also in total there are 40 + floats. But now the story after 1977: An identical parade was designed for the Magic Kingdom with slightly wider floats. Then on November 25th, 1996 the Disneyland parade finished its run and was sent to Euro Disneyland. Also in the Magic Kingdom Spectromagic appeared on October 1st, 1991 – May 21st, 1999 and from april 2nd, 2001 – June 5th, 2010.

Then on July 3rd, 2001 the Parade made it’s return to Disneyland in the new California Adventure theme park to boost the new park’s evening attendance. The Parade ran normally for 9 years when the Summer Nightastic upgraded the show with a new Tinkerbell opening float and a pixie dust swoosh along the entire parade done with new advanced LED technology.

In 2010 it was shipped to Florida. The Summer Nightastic lasted until August 15, 2010 and then The Maliboomer drop tower Deconstruction closed the parade route so the glittering classic could not return.

So it’s now 2016. Where can you see this sparkling spectacular? Well, in Hong Kong Disneyland they had the Paint The Night Parade, started on October 1st, 2014, and then was sent to Disneyland California for the Diamond Celebration, celebrating Disneyland 60th. So that is considered an electrical parade. Ok ok where is the original that you have been reading about for 8 minutes? Well it is still being shown in Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom once a night every night. And the original original is still playing in Hong Kong to this day. So thanks for listening to me ramble on about a decorated Christmas house on wheels.

UPDATE: August 22 2016

The Main street electrical parade is returning to Disneyland in early 2017.