The Walt Disney Archives didn’t just bring artifacts to the D23 Expo with their “Step in Time” exhibition and parking Walt Disney’s plane for fans to see, they also delighted packed crowds of Disney diehards at the Walt Disney Archives Stage. The Main Street Electrical Parade may have just completed yet another run at the Disneyland Resort, but moderator Graham Allan welcomed us back to a “spectacular pageant of nighttime magic and imagination in thousands of sparkling lights and electrosynthomagnetic musical sounds.”
(The Walt Disney Company)
Ron Miziker started with his unconventional path to becoming a show producer for Disney, sharing that he was a producer on The 50/50 Club, a daytime talk show based out of Cincinnati that would routinely have Disney characters on as a guest when their movie was being re-released. Ron got to know Card Walker, who was Vice President of Advertising and Sales for Disney at the time. Wishing to return to California, Ron asked Card if there were any openings for a producer at the studio. There wasn’t, but he was offered a role as an assistant producer for Disney On Parade, a touring spectacle that was a precursor to Disney On Ice. His boss was Disney Legend Bob Jani, Vice President of Entertainment, and after the tour wrapped, Bob recruited Ron to help produce entertainment for Walt Disney World, which was getting ready to open. Among the unique entertainment offerings was the Electrical Water Pageant.
Ron recalled returning to California in the fall of 1971 after Walt Disney World’s grand opening festivities had wrapped up. Disneyland was having a serious morale problem, with Cast Members feeling that their beloved park was no longer special thanks to all of the attention Magic Kingdom was getting. Card Walker, who was now CEO of the company, called Bob and Ron into a meeting and tasked them with creating a nighttime spectacular for Disneyland that would make the fireworks look boring… and he gave them just two weeks to get it done! The quick solution was to take the concept behind the Electrical Water Pageant and put it on wheels as a parade, but bringing that idea to life would prove more challenging than they ever could have imagined.
In the early 70s, string lights were large bulbs that didn’t look as appealing up close, which made the Electrical Water Pageant easy to create since Guests couldn’t get close to it. This new concept, however, would be very close to Guests’ eyes at Disneyland, so finding a solution was challenging. The answer came from Chicago, Walt Disney’s birthplace, where an Italian company called Silvestri Corp was creating intricate lights on strings for holiday displays in the city’s Magnificent Mile retail district. Silvestri was commissioned to not only manufacture enough lights for the floats but also contracted to build them. Unlike the Electrical Water Pageant, this new parade would need to be decorated on both sides and made from pipe frames with a sparkly scrim material that was transparent for float drivers.
While Silvestri Corp was assembling lights and building floats, Ron went back to Disneyland where work was required on Main Street U.S.A. to get ready for the nighttime parade. There had never been a need for all of the lights on Main Street to need to go off at the same time, so all of the electrical work needed to be redone to synch it up to one control system. Previous parades provided music from each individual float, but the vision for this new spectacular was to have a consistent theme playing even between floats, which required the a whole new sound system that could be synched by between the floats and speakers via radio frequency. The team was also still trying to solve a critical problem – how to power the lights on the floats. At the time, off-the-shelf car batteries would’ve made the floats too heavy to drive, but luckily a new lightweight battery made of nickel-cadmium came on the market and brought with it a solution to the parade’s power problems.
If it sounds like everything was going according to plan, it wasn’t. The team at Silvestri Corp had a laissez-faire attitude to assembling the floats, which prompted Ron to surprise them with a visit. Everything was in pieces, not a single float had been assembled, and none of the lightbulbs had been colored. After reporting back to the boss, Ron was instructed to pack everything up and ship it to Anaheim as-is. 14 moving vans later, a new challenge was thrown their way in the form of not enough labor available in Southern California to complete the work on time.
Ron teared up as he recalled what happened. He remembered that Walt Disney World had a hard time getting parade performers, so office workers across property would volunteer to perform in them each day during their break. A call went out to Disneyland Cast Members for help and the response was overwhelming. At any given time, around the click, 200-300 people were working to deliver the Main Street Electrical Parade on time. Work included individually dipping bulps into dye to add color and making sure each light string worked, as one bad bulb would kill the entire string. Meanwhile, parade performers were rehearsing without floats.
Ron recalled that the performers only had two proper rehearsals before the first performance. The first was on the Thursday before the premiere, during which lights were still being installed and only 70% of the floats were operable. The performers didn’t have their costumes yet and the lights weren’t turned on. It didn’t go well, with a float carsh collapsing the canopy above the Cinderella segment and horses having difficulty pulling their carriages (the original iteration of the parade had real horses!). The crew worked all night to repair damages and try to get the lights working by the Friday rehearsal. This time the performers had their costumes, but the batteries needed to be charged, so they were still rehearsing without lights. Thankfully, this dress rehearsal went a lot smoother.
On opening night, June 17th, 1972, work was being done down to the very last second. Electricians rode the floats to the parade gate making their final tweaks, in some cases jumping off movie floats as they rolled out for their debut. The batteries only had enough charge to take the floats down to the Matterhorn, so out of necessity the lights weren’t turned on until the float was visible to Guests. With the hundreds of volunteers watching from backstage, it was a momentous occasion when the cheers and applause erupted as the Main Street Electrical Parade made its inaugural run. Photography wasn’t allowed during the panel, with many never-before-seen photos and videos shown from the parade’s early years. The panel ended with a reconstruction of how the parade looked in 1972 made from archival footage and the restored original soundtrack.
Speaking of the parade’s soundtrack, Disney Legend Jack Wagner is credited with finding “Baroque Hoedown” by Jean-Jacques Perrey, the tune most associated with the parade. Music Director Don Dorsey would update the track in 1977 when it returned from a hiatus caused by his other project, America on Parade. He recalls that the original track was a 1-minute, 30-second loop directly from Perrey’s album, modified only by a baseline Disney added. It originally opened with an electronic wipe sound, but Don wanted a better introduction, particularly since the parade was now being duplicated and was about to premiere at Walt Disney World. He wrote the opening fanfare and created a new remix of the song, with Jack Wagner recording the legendary introduction. It was originally heard in Wagner’s natural voice, but was processed with a vocoder in 1979 to sound electronic.
The parade evolved many times over the years, but one short-lived addition was highlighted during the panel. When Bedknobs and Broomsticks was re-released in 1977, floats were added from that film, including the Briny Band performing from the open mouth of a whale. The mandate was to incorporate the song “The Beautifuly Briny Sea” into the segment, but the song was simply incompatible with “Baroque Hoedown.” Don’s creative solution was to make it sound off, as iff the Briny Band was so nervous to be playing inside the mouth of a whale that they weren’t playing in synch. However, it sounded so bad that it was hated by the parade performers and Guests. Ron believes it didn’t last more than three weeks before that track was pulled, but the Briny Band played on without unique music emitting from their float.
The Main Street Electrical Parade has a long history of “glowing away” and returning to Disneyland, but its return in 2001 brought a unique challenge. Since the parade would be performed in Disney California Adventure Park, it would no longer be on Main Street. The decision was made to rename it “Disney’s Electrical Parade,” which required an ammendment to the opening spiel. To make it work, Don went back to the original unaltered Jack Wagner introduction, inserted his own voice saying “Disney,” and reprocessed it with a vocoder.
Show Director Jordan Peterson didn’t get much time to speak since the panel ran long, but he oversaw the most recent changes to the parade, including the brand-new finale inspired by it’s a small world that incorporates more recent Disney characters, including Encanto. Yet again, the iconic introduction would need modifying to be more more inclusive for a new generation. Conversations went back-and-forth about how to change “ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls” into something that not only welcomed everyone regardless of their gender identity, but also didn’t disrupt the flow of the introduction. Walt Disney’s hometown had already become the solution to the problem of lights, but now Walt’s words would be used to create a new introduction that kept the same syllable count – “To all who come to this happy place, welcome.”
The story behind the creation of Disney’s “pageant of nighttime magic and imagination” was more interesting than I ever could have imagined. Graham, Ron, Don, and Jordan all provided an insightful and engaging look back at a show that redefined nighttime entertainment for Disney Parks around the world.
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