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WizKidRyan
12-03-2001, 02:43 PM
Does anyone know of a website that has pictures or possibly video of Light Magic? I never got to see the show and would like to see what all the hype was about, why it bombed, etc...I know i'm opening a can of worms for "Light Magic sucked" replies, so please refrain from that :D

JPirate23
12-03-2001, 03:33 PM
yesturland.com
there's a few pictures there

Gemini Cricket
12-03-2001, 04:09 PM
http://www.yesterland.com/lightmagic.html


Oh, the horror...

WizKidRyan
12-03-2001, 04:29 PM
Anything larger though? or perhaps some pics showing the fiber optics along main street lit up.
Speaking of the fiber optics...If they spent so much money installing them into the buildings along the parade route, common sense would say that they are still installed to this day. If so, anyone have ideas why they arent used?

Nigel2
12-03-2001, 09:26 PM
No night parade? Well one rumor was that they weren't installed right so they don't work. If they do work that could be one cool lighting ceremony everynight. The only problem with a video is that you can't totaly grasp why the parade was so bad, you need remember that most people sat for hours to see the parade.

hbquikcomjamesl
12-04-2001, 09:28 AM
I've got a few pictures; I suppose I could scan them and email them to you, but it could take a while.

Personally, I disagree with the popular opinion of Light Magic being "that bad." I certainly wouldn't characterize it as being as bad as "Party Gras," or "Flights of Fantasy"; I'd put it more in the league of the Lion King, Mulan, and Hercules parades.

That's not to say that it didn't have problems. In the first place, nothing was adequately tested; nor were there adequate backups. By comparison, while Fantasmic has perhaps thousands of things that can go wrong, several hundred could do so at the same time without anybody in the audience (other than regulars) even noticing. In Light Magic, one minor failure could ruin the show.

Sherman, set the wayback machine to 1972. "Fantasy in the Sky" had been running for over a decade, and there were dance bands in the evenings, but still, relatively few people were taking "Disneyland after dark" seriously, and most guests were out of the park by dusk.

Across the continent, Walt Disney World had opened, with only the Magic Kingdom, a couple of hotels, a couple of golf courses, and a whole lot of undeveloped land. As a spectacular way of "waving bye-bye" to departing guests, they had developed the Electrical Water Pageant. No doubt, the inspiration came from spectacular Christmas light displays, the Christmas boat parades that ran on Newport Harbor, in California, and similar events elsewhere. As the Electrical Water Pageant was being developed in Florida, something similar was being developed in Anaheim, a parade designed specifically to be performed at night. Nobody expected it to last for more than a year or two; it was only really intended to get people interested in staying for (and past) dinner. Presumably other parades, parades that could be performed day or night, would replace it. Maybe America on Parade was already on the drawing board.

The early concepts for this nighttime parade were somewhat different from what finally emerged: for one thing, the early concepts called for a Romantic orchestral score, possibly to include Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain. An electronic score wasn't even in the concept, since at the time, electronic music was generally considered avant garde even by those who ate Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Ives for breakfast. But then, Wendy Carlos gave the world Switched-On Bach, and taught the world that electronic music could be completely accessible. Suddenly, electronic music, particularly with sparkling neo-Baroque sounds, was everywhere. As soon as portable synths hit the market, rock groups embraced them. The market was fairly saturated with sparkling, neo-Baroque, electronic records. The Imagineers working on the Parade realized that they had the perfect sonic complement for what they were doing visually. So they selected Baroque Hoedown, by Gershon Kingsley and Jean-Jacques Perry, and hired Paul Beaver to splice it into a loop, and add a few Disney-specific bits to it.

Nobody expected guests to camp out on Main Street. Nobody expected the Plaza Hub to be flooded with a living sea of guests. Nobody expected the Main Street Electrical Parade to become the biggest draw in the park. And nobody expected the public to demand its return after America on Parade had completed its run.

But all this happened, and more. The Parade developed a downright fanatical following like no other show in the history of Disneyland. Even though WDW had its Electrical Water Pageant, it eventually had to get its own MSEP. When it returned after AOP, the music had been slightly rescored by Don Dorsey, who added an opening fanfare ("Electric fanfare"), and a fanfare for a special Mickey's Birthday float ("Fanfare of Lights," which eventually was redone as the closing fanfare), and a whole bunch of new Disney-specific arrangements (and who would eventually also do an album called "Bachbusters"). And every time something else took The Parade's place, guests demanded its return.

Where the MSEP had very humble beginnings, and didn't attempt to replace (or compete with) anything of significance until after it had already been established, Light Magic was heavily hyped from the beginning. Since most of the MSEP's technology was over two decades old, it was felt that LM would be more spectacular simply because of its newer technology. Since the Lion King parade had been so succesful with a format that involved stopping and performing in place, the Light Magic "Streetacular" concept was seen as a logical extension. On top of that, Disney management was rather overconfident because of the tremendous success of Fantasmic.

What happened? Bottlenecks, for one thing. Nobody had thought to provide a performance that could be adequately seen in Town Square, nor the Plaza Hub, and one of the two viewing areas the show did accommodate, Main Street, had woefully small capacity. Plus, unlike WDW-MK, Disneyland had no backstage return route for parade floats: they simply had to spend several hours in the layover area at Town Square (an area that had once been intended as "Liberty Street," anticipating WDW-MK's Liberty Square), then go back the way they came. Thus, any time Light Magic went from Small World to Town Square, anybody trying to leave the park after LM left the Small World performance stop was trapped by a wall of people until the Main Street performance was over. Then, too, makeup technologies that worked well for Fantasmic, with the nearest performer dozens of yards from the audience, failed miserably in the close quarters of Main Street (somebody should have realized that, considering as how for several weeks, the MSEP "Smee" was wearing the Fantasmic Smee's makeup, instead of a full headpiece).


Light Magic could have been a success. It really was a fairly nice show, when everything actually worked. But there was no way, with finicky technology, makeup jobs that didn't work at close range, a reliance on the trendy, rather than the timeless, and a large number of hostile MSEP fans determined to loathe it sight-unseen, that it could have ever lived up to its hype.

Nigel2
12-04-2001, 11:37 AM
The only way to see the Newport Boat Parade is from your friends house that is on the parade route. For what those houses cost they seriously have major drawbacks, like people who want to look inside (there aren't any high fences to block their views) and they are really cramped houses.

hbquikcomjamesl
12-04-2001, 12:26 PM
As I recall, there's at least one restaurant with a view. Possibly more than one.

zapppop
12-04-2001, 05:27 PM
There's an area on Bay Ave that's great for viewing the boat parade.

Nigel2
12-05-2001, 09:21 PM
I know of the resturant that you are talking about, but if you are on one bridge the boats have a tendency to turn arround early, plus its free to go to a friends house that is nice and warm.:D

disneylandlive
12-13-2001, 09:12 PM
hbquikcomjamesl, what was "Flights of Fantasy" and when did it run?