The Second Sense/Armchair Imagineering: Updating the Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique Music Loop

Some Disneyland background music loops are custom-recorded just for the park, painstakingly planned and executed to be something entirely unique. Some are what we call “needle-drop”—assembled from existing pieces in a particular style or genre that supports the theme of the area, shop, or restaurant where they are played. Needle-drop loops often make use of edits and cross-fades in order to avoid sounding too much like an amateur mix tape and omit portions, usually vocals, that might be distracting or intrusive.

And sometimes, the sound engineers just cheat, and use songs and music straight from Disney's own library of soundtracks. It's certainly not bad music, but it's so obvious. Lazy, even—how much thought or effort can it possibly take to devise a playlist for a location in Disneyland that uses nothing but the soundtrack versions of well-known Disney songs?

My case in point here will be the background music loop that plays in the Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique, and has since this location was known as Once Upon a Time...A Princess Shoppe.* As you might guess, this loop consists entirely of songs, and a few instrumental pieces, from some of Disney's animated “Princess movies”...specifically, the first six such movies, which constituted the entirety of the Disney Princess brand when it was first launched and when the shop first assumed that identity in 2002. (Previously, it had been the Tinker Bell Toy Shoppe.)

So far, so predictable. If you're going to sell Princess merch, you might as well do it with songs sung by and about your star characters playing in the background. A while back, as a service to my fellow Disney theme park music archivists at Mousebits, I spent some time in the shop just jotting down the playlist and noting any edits made to the tracks. At home, I looked over my notes and assigned a logical “beginning point” for the loop, and wound up with this:

1. Be Our Guest
2. Some Day My Prince Will Come
3. Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo [1^st verse only]
4. Sleeping Beauty Finale
5. Tour of the Kingdom
6. Something There
7. So This Is Love
8. Under the Sea
9. Snow White Overture
10. I'm Wishing/One Song
11. Cinderella [score portion omitted]
12. Hail to the Princess Aurora
13. Part of Your World
14. Belle [intro omitted]
15. A Whole New World
16. With a Smile and a Song
17. A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes [1^st verse only]
18. Once Upon a Dream
19. Kiss the Girl
20. Beauty and the Beast
21. Whistle While You Work
22. Part of Your World (Reprise)

I don't remember how long it took me to realize that I'd gotten it wrong, but one day I was going over the list and it dawned on me that every song from Beauty and the Beast came after a song from The Little Mermaid, which came after a song from Sleeping Beauty, which...

Turns out, the construction of this loop is even lazier than I had previously suspected. Not only is the choice of songs entirely obvious, not only are the versions of those songs the same ones playing in every eight-year-old girl's bedroom, but the order of their arrangement is as straightforward and unimaginative as can be. It's just all six Princess movies taking turns in chronological order. If one of them runs out of songs that directly involve its Princess, its turn is skipped for the remainder of the loop, but nothing else changes. Here's my re-assessment of the playlist, observing this pattern:

1. Snow White Overture
2. I'm Wishing/One Song
3. Cinderella [score portion omitted]
4. Hail to the Princess Aurora
5. Part of Your World
6. Belle [intro omitted]
7. A Whole New World
8. With a Smile and a Song
9. A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes [1^st verse only]
10. Once Upon a Dream
11. Kiss the Girl
12. Beauty and the Beast
13. Whistle While You Work
14. Part of Your World (Reprise)
15. Be Our Guest
16. Some Day My Prince Will Come
17. Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo [1^st verse only]
18. Sleeping Beauty Finale
19. Tour of the Kingdom
20. Something There
21. So This Is Love
22. Under the Sea

What happened, Disneyland? The loop was pretty uninspiring anyway, but this is just appalling arrangement. Area playlists, like professionally produced albums, should be crafted, with careful attention paid to the way each song interacts with its neighbors...not just strung together like someone trying to create a repeating rainbow pattern from half a bag of Skittles.

Long story short, this loop needs work. It needs a more thoughtful arrangement...and it needs to be brought up to speed with the Princess characters that have been added to the lineup since 2002.

Obviously, if we're adding a bunch of songs in service of the latter goal, we'll have to drop some of the ones currently there. I'd like to focus on songs that emphasize these heroines' individual personalities, interests, and challenges, not so much their romances with the male leads—give center stage to the ladies in this very girly shop. Obviously this isn't possible with every Princess, so we'll use what's available, and plump out the playlist (as well as adding variety) with score tracks from the respective films.

With those guidelines in mind, I scoured my soundtracks. I won't bore you with the details of all my list-making, arranging, listening to transitions, editing, and re-arranging. I'll just skip to the good stuff: my proposal for an updated music loop for the Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique!

1. Overture (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs)

2. Hail to the Princess Aurora (Sleeping Beauty)

 

3. Part of Your World (The Little Mermaid)

 

4. Honor to Us All (Mulan)

 

5. The Games (Brave) (0:42 - End)

 

6. Just Around the Riverbend (Pocahontas)

 

7. Almost There (The Princess and the Frog)

 

8. A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes (Cinderella) (edited similarly to the existing loop)

9. I See the Light (Tangled)

 

10. Tour of the Kingdom (The Little Mermaid)

 

11. Reflection (Mulan)

 

12. Touch the Sky (Brave)

 

13. Kingdom Dance (Tangled)

 

14. Belle (Beauty and the Beast)

 

15. Whistle While You Work (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs)

 

16. Bibbidi Bobbidi Boo (Cinderella) (0:37-3:35 of the link. Some of the soundtracks for older Disney movies do this irritating thing where an entire scene's worth of music, song and score alike, is smushed together into a single track.)

 

17. Ray/Mama Odie (The Princess and the Frog) (1:34-2:47) (Some of the soundtracks for newer Disney movies, on the other hand, do this even more irritating thing where score music from vastly different parts of the movie is all mixed together. This section of this track plays over the scene where Naveen asks Tiana to dinner aboard the steamboat.)

 

18. A Whole New World (Aladdin)

19. Do You Hear That?/I Wonder (Sleeping Beauty) (0:00-0:06; 1:09-2:24)
    
    
    
    
20. Colors of the Wind (Pocahontas)

21. Beauty and the Beast (Beauty and the Beast)

 

I arranged the songs with two purposes in mind. Firstly, I wanted each song to sound relatively natural coming after the one before it—no major clashes between key signatures, tempos, etc. This required a lot of trial and error, since it wasn't always intuitively obvious which songs work well in direct seqence. Secondly, in sharp contrast to the plodding chronological sequence of the existing loop, I wanted a lot more thorough mixing of “eras” of Disney animation. If my loop were used in the Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique, even someone who just popped in to browse for ten minutes or so would probably hear music from the classic era, the Disney Renaissance, and the current era.

With all my edits (including trimming a few seconds of silence from the end of some tracks so that each one flows into the next), this playlist clocks in at 53 minutes and 37 seconds, almost exactly the same as the original. I usually consider the “ideal” length for a Disneyland music loop to be right around an hour, so this lineup also has room to grow...say, once Elsa and Anna are officially added to the Disney Princess brand?**

If you agree that my loop is an improvement over the one currently in use in the Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique, I would like to point out that I am not in any sense a trained musician or sound engineer. I wouldn't even consider myself at a “hobbyist” level for these things—that is, creating custom music loops isn't something I do for fun on any sort of regular basis. If a total n00b like me can bang out something like this over the course of a week...why did the presumed professionals in charge of the music for the Princess Shoppe make such a perfunctory effort?

You might think at this point that my nitpicking is officially over the top. After all, it's just a shop. Aimed at children, no less. What do kids know from music mixing? All they care about is grabbing the sparkliest tiara, right? Maybe we'd have something to talk about if it were a ride queue or nice sit-down restaurant that had so little attention paid to its auditory dimension.

I believe that little things matter. Little things like the paint job on a Main Street storefront or the texture of the ground in Frontierland...or the background music in a shop/salon catering to little girls. Disneyland isn't just about Space Mountain and Mickey Mouse***—it's also about atmosphere, and the wonderful escapism provided by a carefully designed themed environment. Details are vital to atmosphere—if they aren't right, even if you don't consciously notice, the wrongness will get to you on some level and make the experience less satisfying. The Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique makes no pretense of being on the same level as the Jungle Cruise or Rancho del Zocalo, but shouldn't it at least aspire to the standard of, say, the Esplanade?

* It was the Era of Needlessly Long Attraction and Shop Names...Ideally Including Punctuation.

** Them not being part of it yet is precisely why I left them out. Make no mistake, it will happen, sooner or later...but for now, Frozen is too profitable as a separate brand.

*** “Space Mountain and Mickey Mouse” is my new expression for the tendency of some fans to think the only important things in Disney theme parks are thrill rides and popular characters.