Welcome to Extinct Attractions. This week, I’ll be taking a look back at another version of the One Man’s Dream, though this one was the original from Tokyo Disneyland.
On June 6th, Fantasy Springs will open in Tokyo DisneySea at long last, and with the Tokyo Disney Resort being what it is, there will be a special celebration leading up to the opening. Just announced this past week, the Dreaming of Fantasy Springs celebration will begin on April 9 and run a bit past the opening until June 30. The park will have a lot of decorations and merch and food items to celebrate the opening of the land. There will also be a special greeting from Mickey Mouse and some of the characters from Tangled, Frozen and Peter Pan, who the land is themed around.
Via Disney Wiki
The Tokyo Disney Resort is known for taking every opportunity that it can to celebrate, with the anniversary of each park or even land openings like Fantasy Springs generally prime chances. This practice started on Tokyo Disneyland’s 5th anniversary, which introduced a new parade called Disney Classics on Parade as well as today’s featured attraction, One Man’s Dream.
To house the new show, they added a new theater in Tomorrowland of all places, called Showbase 2000. As we’ll see, the show was chockfull of Disney characters, none of which really could call Tomorrowland home, so it was a bit of a bold move to throw the show in a theater there.
But all that aside, the show hit the park on its 5th anniversary of April 15th, 1988, and quickly became a fan favorite, so much so that Disneyland got its own version a year and a half later. I talked about that version a few weeks ago and there are quite a few similarities between the shows, so to get a more complete picture, I would recommend checking back on that article as I’ll be referencing it a lot here.
Disneyland basically took the opening of the show directly from Tokyo Disneyland, opening with a black and white house and Mickey and Minnie in black and white, though with a pretty big difference in that the Tokyo version was, of course, in Japanese. The Tokyo version’s stage was also a bigger, so it had a certain gravitas, which really checks out for the resort.
Via YouTube
The Alice in Wonderland sequence followed next with Alice strolling about singing, but in the Tokyo version she then encountered the Caterpillar in my favorite part of the show (as he is my favorite Disney character). The Caterpillar had a gigantic head with someone’s tiny legs sticking out from it and then it was followed by a double digit number of other body parts, all on a comparatively small pairs of legs. These body parts all came together to perform a huge song and dance number that was just so outrageous and fun and really fit the extravagance of One Man’s Dream and the madness of Alice in Wonderland.
The Jungle Book was the follow-up in both Disneyland and Tokyo DIsneyland with King Louie and ten of his closest monkey friends, but Tokyo’s version really showcased how many performers were in the show because the monkeys were on stage at the same time as the Caterpillar parts, showcasing 25 or more performers in the show.
Peter Pan was the next featured film with Disneyland also copying the segment directly from Tokyo Disneyland, though I again took an interesting take away from this version. Namely, the transition to putting the wires on Peter Pan and Wendy to fly around the stage is extremely seamless, with part of the success likely due to lower resolution cameras, but it is impressive nonetheless.
Via YouTube
After those couple of similarities, the Evil Queen led another section of the show that was solely original to Tokyo when the beautiful version of her used her giant Magic Mirror to summon some trees and turn into the Hag version of herself. In a wholly instrumental section, she then appeared before a backdrop of a bunch of spiders and a spiderweb and basically ran around the stage through the people dressed as trees to a very ‘80s sounding score. The spiders then revealed that they were also performers as they climbed down the webs to surround the witch who was now clutching the poison apple as the section came to a close. It was chaotic and amazing.
The entire rest of the show was duplicated in Disneyland from the princesses and their princes dancing to instrumental versions of songs from their movies to the stage show section with Daisy in a ballet, Goofy in an opera and Mickey doing theater along with his amazing Shakespearan bob that I’m never going to stop talking about.
The show then closed with the same Hollywood section with a bunch of characters on the red carpet moving into a full dance club number. What really stood out was how well the characters were treated with almost every single walkaround character going through a costume change at some point in the show, which is something you barely ever see one character in a show do, so the fact that they made so many costumes is simply fantastic.
Via eBay
One Man’s Dream at Tokyo Disneyland lasted quite a bit longer than its counterpart in California, finally closing on September 3, 1995 with Feel the Magic taking its place. A seven year run is pretty impressive for an anniversary show, but what’s even more impressive is that its story wasn’t quite done yet, but that’s a story for a couple of weeks from now.
20 Times "Disney Memes" Really Hit The Mark With Their Relatable Content | DeMilked
Via DeMilked
As always, don’t forget to check out my interactive maps of the Disney Parks throughout the years where you can watch or learn more about all the attractions from every Disney park around the world.
Thanks for reading and have a magical day!