After-Action Report: Disneyland Forever

What do you think of my spiffy new banner? We can thank my sister for the artwork on that. Go, appreciate more of her Disney art! And maybe buy something from her on Redbubble!

Disneyland's Diamond Anniversary has hit the ground running, with special decorations and souvenirs, a new parade, and a new fireworks show (and that's just in Disneyland itself). Last week, I designated the Paint the Night Parade as the “Diamond” for the year 2015 on the grounds that of the big 60^th Anniversary offerings, I like it the best. But I didn't say why I like it the best, in particular why it wins out over the fireworks show, “Disneyland Forever.”

Make no mistake: my preference gap here is huge. While it's not perfect—there's too much Pixar for my tastes, for one thing—I see Paint the Night as the closest we're likely to come to an out-and-out revival of the Main Street Electrical Parade. But “Disneyland Forever” really doesn't do it for me. Basically the only reason I see myself bothering to watch it in the future is that it comes right on the heels of the first run of Paint the Night and the crowd level means you literally can't move until the whole package is done.

As for why it doesn't do it for me...let's look at the Disneyland fireworks shows of the past, which by and large I have loved. Following the lead of “Fantasy in the Sky,” the original and by far the longest-runner to date, they have mostly used soundtracks comprising instrumental medleys of Disney songs, sometimes interwoven or interspersed with an original tune composed for the purpose, while the fireworks themselves are timed to burst in concert with the beats of the music. Over the years, the shows have gotten progressively more elaborate, but this basic formula—song medley with timed bursts—has remained in use. The one big exception—2005's “Remember...Dreams Come True”—had the perfect excuse for bucking the trend: It was the 50^th Anniversary show, and instead of songs from Disney's musical films, it used music and sounds from the park itself, from the iconic attractions, grouped according to themed land.

So you would think that the next big anniversary show, especially with a title like “Disneyland Forever,” would do something similar, right? But...it doesn't. Not even close. It's more like an object lesson in how not to orchestrate a Disneyland fireworks show. It starts off strong enough, using the oft-invoked image of Walt Disney standing in the orange groves and dreaming about what he would build there—at this point digital projectors all along Main Street cast graphics of orange trees onto the buildings—but then it rather inexplicably launches a series of song sequences from various movies. Both the selection of movies and the order in which they are arranged seems largely arbitrary; the songs are just played one after another instead of being spun into medleys and there is very little flow-through from one sequence to the next. Perhaps making matters worse, except for a Peter Pan reference early on (so Tinker Bell can start the fireworks as she always does), all the movies used actually post-date the construction of Disneyland, as if the show were saying that Walt Disney stood in the orange groves in the Fifties and dreamed about building a theme park, but then decided that would be too hard and just went back to making films.

What happened here? Given the bits that “Disneyland Forever” gets right, why didn't the show planners go all the way with it? Did they chicken out (or cheap out)? Why call it “Disneyland Forever” if it has almost nothing to do with Disneyland? Were they trying to avoid rehashing “Remember...Dreams Come True?” Did they just...was this a committee project where none of the committee members actually communicated with each other until it was too late to coordinate their ideas? It just boggles my mind that something this uninspired and disjointed was allowed to be the final product when we know Disneyland's showrunners can do miles better.

Sadly, what happened here is probably the same thing that's been happening across the Disney theme parks for a while now: unfettered, undirected corporate synergy. Disneyland's upper management does not believe that the park exists in any way for its own sake, but rather to promote already-popular movies and sell related merchandise. I said above that the selection of films used in the show seems random, but upon closer inspection, it's a nigh-perfect checklist of Disney demographic market segments. You've got Mary Poppins for the old-timers, The Little Mermaid and The Lion King for my generation (we get two because we are, by and large, the ones footing the bill nowadays), Winnie-the-Pooh for the preschoolers and Finding Nemo for the grade-schoolers, Tangled for the teens, and Frozen to whip the entire crowd into an orgiastic sing-along frenzy which will translate directly into sales of Elsa mouse-ear beanies. Oh, and The Jungle Book, because Disney has a live-action version in the works and they want to get it back on people's radar. These films have little in common apart from that checkbox aspect, which adds to the disjointed feeling. And of course, Marketing might want to promote something else next year, so it's important to minimize overlap between the songs, the better to cut and paste new sequences.

Yuck.

I could do better than this! They should have put me in charge of planning this show! I may not be an Imagineer once I get up from my armchair, but I have the same portfolio of traditions to inspire me that the real ones do. And those digital projectors are brimming with unexplored potential. So here's how I would take a concept like “Disneyland Forever” and inject a little truth in advertising into that title.

Okay, a lot.

As much as I adore “Remember...Dreams Come True,” I realize that copying it too closely would make for a uniquely unsatisfying experience. So rather than summarizing the highlights of Disneyland geographically, my version of “Forever” presents the development of the park chronologically. This also ties in well with the orange grove introduction. Picture this: the trees pop up on the buildings to your left and right, the narrator rhapsodizes about Walt's vision...and then a fanfare swells and the tree images dissolve into iconic structures from Disneyland's earliest days. The Jungle Cruise, the Mark Twain, the Moonliner and Clock of the World. Sleeping Beauty Castle would play itself, of course, though it could also be overlaid with images of the Carrousel and the Tea Cups. Disney characters appear, at first as silhouettes, then coming into full color and detail and cavorting around the portrait of the early park.

And then the real fun begins. A peppy tune plays: the first iteration of the “Disneyland Forever” theme song. It's very Fifties; you can hear in it echoes of the Tin Pan Alley-style songs typical of Disney's animated movies of this period...not least because after the first verse and chorus, it becomes “medleyfied” with snippets of some of those very songs, as well as “The Monorail Song,” jazz by the Firehouse Five Plus Two, maybe a bit of Matterhorn polka... And Disneyland grows with the music, images of the attractions springing up as the soundtrack introduces them. These images needn't be photorealistic—an art style similar to Shag's might actually be more suitable due to its bold shapes and vivid colors. Nor would the park's history be presented as a strictly accurate chronology, instead going roughly decade-by-decade.

During the Sixties, the theme tune takes on an interesting flare, a little bit surf rock, a little bit jazz, and the fireworks, projections and medley bits highlight all the outstanding attractions of that era, from the Enchanted Tiki Room to the Haunted Mansion. The Seventies brings disco, America Sings and Space Mountain...but also country for the Country Bears and Big Thunder Mountain. And so on, with each decade represented by musical styles typical of both mainstream culture and Disney for that time, and major additions to Disneyland in the same period. By the time the show catches up to the present, the music is contemporary pop and the projectors show images of the park much as we know it today.

Composing this soundtrack would obviously be a major challenge, but I'm certain the Disney team is up to it. As evidence I point to Tokyo Disneyland's 100 Years of Magic Parade, which did an amazing job of mixing together the Disney portfolio, musical trends of the 20^th Century, and a unique theme song in order to illustrate the studio progressing through the decades while retaining the same storytelling spirit throughout. Now, I know the Asian parks are sort of allowed to do their own thing and don't have access to the exact same talent pool as the American parks, but surely we have a similar quality of Imagineers over here? Especially if several of them put their heads together, which would totally work with a project subdivided into thematically distinct chunks like this one. (Provided, that is, they didn't act like the hypothetical non-communicative committee I mentioned above.)

Granted, with all of the above, I've been taking the title of the show as a given and mapping it out based on the assumption that it should be about Disneyland. But there's nothing inherently wrong with a fireworks show that just uses music and imagery from the Disney movie library, as they traditionally have done. It just needs a non-misleading title.* And it needs to work the music into something more creative and refreshing than mere songs, almost unaltered from the soundtracks that spawned them, strung one after another like the world's least carefully planned tribute album.

Come on, guys. Step up your game here.

* Market research indicates that the ideal title should be “Dreamers...Remembering the Magical Sky Wishes: A Disney-Pixar-Marvel Fantasy Fireworks Spectacular (presented by Honda).”