In October of 1996, after decades of wowing guests old and young alike, Disneyland said
goodbye to the Main Street Electrical Parade.
It was a fan favorite, but the parade was showing signs of age and in an increasingly
competitive industry it was time to create something new and exciting in order to keep
moving forward.
That something would be Disneyland’s Light Magic.
Obviously Disney had to step up their game.
They weren’t just creating a replacement to last year’s throwaway parade.
They were designing the follow-up to the Main Street Electrical Parade.
It was a staple of Disneyland, and so it had some pretty big shoes to fill.
So Disney went all out when it came to the concept and technology of Light Magic.
Rather than a traditional parade that featured numerous floats that never stopped moving,
Light Magic would instead be the offspring of both parade and stage performance.
Touted as a “streetacular”, it would feature four massive 80-foot-long floats that would
come to a complete stop before playing out the full 20-minute performance for audiences.
This would occur once by it’s a small world and then once more along Main Street USA.
With a cast of 125 costumed performers, it was a hefty step up from the Main Street Electrical
Parade’s 80 or so dancers and characters.
However it wasn’t just the format that would be new.
Partnering with fiber-optic specialists, Lazarus Lighting Design Inc, these floats were going
to be technical marvels.
The parade utilized over 2,500 miles of fiber-optic cable, over 1500 strobe lights, 132 robotic
lights, and 185 air cannons that would be capable of blowing smoke and confetti.
Disney even went as far as redesigning the area outside of it’s a small world in order
to prepare for the show and improve the viewing experience for guests.
It was bigger, it was high-tech, and it was without a doubt different from the Main Street
Electrical Parade, and all of that came with a price because
the estimated budget for Disneyland’s Light Magic was 20 million dollars.
They were betting big.
So big that Disneyland’s Chief of Entertainment at the time, Mike Davis, was quoted saying
“We hope it’s the longest running show in the history of show business.”
Talk about realistic expectations.
The cutting edge nature of Light Magic didn’t stop with the parade itself.
Even the press kits used to promote the new show were a step up from the usual Disney
Parks methods.
You see, this was the first press kit they distributed that was digital, using a CD-ROM.
Taking a cue from the other divisions, Disney Parks loaded the CDs with video clips, interviews,
photos, and parts of the soundtrack.
To introduce Light Magic to the public, Disney decided to host a $25 ticketed preview night
for Disneyland passholders.
On May 13th, 1997 nearly 20,000 people filled the parade route and were introduced to Disneyland’s
Light Magic for the very first time… and it was awful.
It was reported that some guests hated it so much that they were actually booing at
the performance, and after the parade guest relations were forced to deal with a number
of refund requests.
There were of course technical glitches and mishaps that were to be expected with a test
run of the parade, but beyond that the parade was criticized for being everything from confusing
to just plain boring.
The streetacular was a performance that featured fairies and popular Disney characters who
would dance to Celtic arrangements of both original music and popular Disney tunes.
The plot, if you could call it a plot, followed the fairies as they woke up and danced.
A storm brews over the characters, but Tinker Bell shows up and clears it away with some
pixie dust.
Then there’s a two-minute projected sequence and then the characters return to... dance some more.
They play some percussion and then... that’s really it.
The technical glitches were eventually ironed out, but even after it’s May 23rd public
debut, Light Magic was critically panned as not only a sad follow-up to the beloved Main
Street Electrical Parade, but just as a bad parade in general.
Meanwhile by comparison, Disneyland’s daytime parade, the Hercules Victory Parade, was a hit.
So much so that Disney began to lean on it when it came to advertising the park in the
summer of 1997.
When Labor Day weekend rolled around the Light Magic ended it’s summer run, and just a
month later Disney would announce that it was to go on a two-year hiatus to in order
to be retooled and fixed up for the summer season of the year 2000.
Instead of Light Magic, the 1998 summer season would instead feature a parade promoting the
upcoming animated feature film, Mulan, taking a cue from Hercules’ success.
The Mulan parade would eventually go on to be a crowd pleaser, and at a reported fifth
of the cost of Light Magic.
That following February, when PKR Consulting reported on the hospitality industry in the
Orange County area, they specifically attributed Light Magic’s poor reception and word of
mouth to the 1% drop in hotel occupancy that year.
If that wasn’t bad enough labor disputes caused Lazarus Lighting Design to sue Disney.
They argued that Disney owed them over half a million dollars in unpaid labor, and demanded
a million dollars in damages and lost business.
They claimed that Disney provided storyboards for the parade just three months prior to
it’s debut, and made costly changes as late at 16 days before the public would see it.
They also claimed that Disney blamed them for the poor reception and glitches, hurting
their reputation as a business.
But really, Light Magic’s shortcomings had little to do with faulty projectors or technical snafus.
Disney aimed to create a show that stood out as different from the Main Street Electrical
Parade, and while they succeeded at being different, they didn’t adapt to those differences.
A parade in many ways is fleeting.
Floats approach, and just as quickly they’re gone.
We’re drawn to the spectacle of the float design and the characters on them.
Parades might have a theme, but they seldom need a plot.
However once you stop those floats for twenty minutes, well, it’s not a parade anymore.
It’s a stage performance.
That’s when spectacle and design take a backseat to elements like story and pacing
and theme and that’s what Light Magic was lacking.
Sure it had fancy floats, but when there’s nothing engaging happening on them, they’re useless.
The summer of 2000 would eventually roll around and as many expected, Light Magic was nowhere
to be found.
Disney quietly let the parade fade into the past.
For them, it was a costly lesson and cautionary tale about what happens when the core elements
of entertainment are pushed aside for fancy bells and whistles.
It pays to mix things up once in a while, but sometimes you can stray too far from the
very thing that pulls people in to begin with.