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© 1996 Disney |
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It’s 1996 at Yesterland. This is your last chance to see the beloved Main Street Electrical Parade. After delighting guests since 1972, with just a few years off to give other parades a chance, it’s “glowing away”—forever—later this year. |
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Sure, you’ll have your memories. But you can also own a little piece of the parade—forever—while supporting local children’s charities. For just $10, you can order commemorative display box with an actual light bulb from a Main Street Electrical Parade float. You’ll have to wait until after the final performance to receive your light bulb. But hurry! The demand is far greater than expected. Speaking of greater demand, 1996 park attendance is way up too. It seems that everyone wants to see the Main Street Electrical Parade one more time—or three more times… or ten more times. |
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Photos by Allen Huffman, 1996 Title float: the biggest bass drum, pulled by a locomotive |
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You’ve been waiting at the edge of the parade route, possibly for many hours. It’s finally time for the dazzling and memorable parade! The lights dim. Electronic theme music begins to bombard your ears. As the excitement mounts, an electronic voice intones: “Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls… Yesterland proudly presents our spectacular festival pageant of nighttime magic and imagination in thousands of sparkling lights and electro-syntho-magnetic musical sounds—the Main Street Electrical Parade!” The main tune you’re hearing is “Baroque Hoedown,” a 1967 piece by Jean-Jacques Perrey and Gershon Kingsley. To provide appropriate music for various units of the parade, additional tunes have been skillfully woven in. |
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Photo by Werner Weiss, 1996 Presented by General Electric |
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You’ll enjoy dozens of parade units, primarily based on popular Disney movies such as Alice in Wonderland, Cinderella, Peter Pan, Dumbo, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, and Pete’s Dragon. You may think the parade you’re seeing is the same one that your parents enjoyed when they were around your age in 1972. But that’s not really the case. Although the concept and the tune are the same, everything else has changed. In its opening year, many of the floats were flat frames decorated with relatively few light bulbs. The few dimensional floats involved simple frameworks or lights strung on floats borrowed from other parades. During the American Bicentennial years of 1975 and 1976, America on Parade served as the park’s daytime and nighttime parade. It was an opportunity to design and build a new generation of elaborate, fully dimensional Main Street Electrical Parade floats with an abundance of bulbs. The version of the parade you’re seeing in 1996 is based on that generation. Even then, this version is different. For example, the “it’s a small world” unit and the “Briny Deep” unit left the parade in 1983. There were also short-lived units that you might remember, such as the “Return To Oz” which was only part of the parade in 1985. |
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Photo by Werner Weiss, 1996 Whirly Bug |
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Photo by Werner Weiss, 1996 Dancing at Cinderella’s royal ball |
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Photo by Werner Weiss, 1996 Captain Hook and Peter Pan dueling aboard the pirate ship |
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Photos by Allen Huffman, 1996 Disney Characters of varying fame, including King Leonidas playing the circus calliope |
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Photo by Werner Weiss, 1996 The Dwarfs whistling while they work |
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Photo by Chris Bales, 1994 Dopey catching a ride on the Dwarfs’ mine train |
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Photo by Werner Weiss, 1996 Pinocchio at the Pleasure Island cigar store |
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Photo by Werner Weiss, 1996 More of dystopian Pleasure Island |
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Photo by Chris Bales, 1992 Pete catching a ride from Elliott |
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As the red, white, and blue lights of the grand finale, “To Honor America,” finally disappear in the distance, the music fades away. But the images of the parade and the sound of its music will stay with you for the rest of your life. Too bad you’ll never see this parade again—well, maybe at another Disney park, but certainly not at Disneyland! |
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The Main Street Electrical Parade premiered at Disneyland on June 17, 1972. It was like nothing that Disneyland guests had ever seen and heard before—unless they had visited Walt Disney World since soon after it opened the previous year. The Electrical Water Pageant, with “Baroque Hoedown,” as its original musical theme, delighted Walt Disney World guests as it floated through Seven Seas Lagoon and Bay Lake nightly, beginning October 26, 1971. |
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Photo by Chris Bales, 2012 Electrical Water Pageant at Walt Disney World |
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Disneyland didn’t have a body of water for a floating parade, but a land-based one would work too. In fact, it worked spectacularly well. Guests loved the Main Street Electrical Parade. As already noted, it was “lights out” for the parade in the summers of 1975 and 1976, with America on Parade taking its place. During the summers of 1983 and 1984, the Main Street Electrical Parade went dark again to make way for Flights of Fantasy, but it then returned for another dozen years. Beginning in 1977, there were two complete sets of the Main Street Electrical Parade, so that the parade could run simultaneously at Disneyland and Magic Kingdom Park. |
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Photo by Werner Weiss, 1996 Light Magic, “Opening 1997” |
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Most discontinued Disneyland attractions go away quietly. Some have announced closing dates. Others just close at the end of a Summer season, never to reopen. The Main Street Electrical Parade was sent off in 1996 with a big advertising campaign. Disneyland would have something new in 1997, Light Magic. Guest response was overwhelming. People who first saw the parade as children returned with their own children. Huge crowds lined the parade route. Originally scheduled to have its last public performance on October 15, Disneyland management extended the parade until November 25 to meet the demand—and to sell even more admission tickets. The parade had its final public performance—ever—on November 25, 1996. Beloved parade, good bye, forever. Well… maybe not quite. On June 14, 1997, the parade ran eight blocks in New York City as The Hercules Electrical Parade to promote the premier of the animated feature Hercules at Disney’s newly restored New Amsterdam Theater. That turned out to be just the beginning. There were runs at Disneyland Paris, Disney’s California Adventure, Magic Kingdom Park, and—eventually—even Disneyland Park. |
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Photo by Werner Weiss, 2001 Main Street Electrical Parade at Disneyland Paris |
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Photo by Tony “WiseBearAZ” Moore Disney’s Electrical Parade at Disney’s California Adventure |
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The parade was called Disney’s Electrical Parade when it ran from July 4, 2001 to April 18, 2010 at Disney’s California Adventure. After all, the park does not have a Main Street, U.S.A. |
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Photo by Werner Weiss, 2011 Main Street Electrical Parade at Magic Kingdom Park |
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Photo by Werner Weiss, 2017 Main Street Electrical Parade, back at Disneyland in 2017 |
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After an absence of more than 20 years, the Main Street Electrical Parade and its 600,000 sparkling lights returned to Disneyland Park with a $95 premier viewing event on January 19, 2017. Public performances began the following evening. Although Disneyland guests had been treated to several years of the much more advanced Paint The Night parade, the nostalgic old parade still held its own. Originally scheduled to close June 18, 2017, the run was extended to August 20, 2017. The only question now is, when will the Main Street Electrical Parade return to Disneyland again? |
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© 1996-2018 Werner Weiss — Disclaimers, Copyright, and Trademarks Updated January 5, 2018. |
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