See Ya Real Soon: Fantasmic!

Here at the Disneyland Dilettante, I like to categorize my posts. Among numerous others, I have After-Action Reports for discussing currently available attractions and Sentimental Paleontology for my reminiscences about extinct ones. And now, with the Jungle Cruise closed for refurbishment and the Star Wars area under construction, which in turn is causing an 18+ month shutdown of the Rivers of America and the Disneyland Railroad, it seems like a good time to introduce See Ya Real Soon, for all those attractions and features that—for one reason or another—aren't open this week, but will be in the foreseeable future. And what better first example than the prize we got for our patience the last time the river underwent massive changes...the fabulous, the fearsome, the phantasmagorical Fantasmic!?

Buckle up, readers, because it's about to get...personal...

It was the spring of 1992, and Disney was busily reinventing and/or rediscovering itself after its long dark age of the Seventies and Eighties. The animation Renaissance was well underway, with two top-notch fairy tales (The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast) garnering massive acclaim and a third (Aladdin) to come toward the end of the year. The parks had been getting their share of attention as well—Disneyland alone had, in the previous five years, received both Star Tours and Splash Mountain—its first new thrill rides since the Seventies, and the first major strides in ride technology since the Sixties. It was a heady time to be a Disney fan, especially for those of us too young to remember the last time it had been exciting to look forward to what the company would do next.

And then The Ad started appearing in newspapers and on billboards. You know the one:

You'd better believe I sat up and took notice. Fantasia and Sleeping Beauty were among my favorites in the Disney animated film library, and here was possibly the most iconic character of each, facing off in a magic duel. Further ads upped the ante, adding more characters to the mix such as Jiminy Cricket, Kaa, and Ursula, and proclaiming that the new show would feature “good clash[ing] with evil.” I hadn't yet learned the term “high concept,” but I recognized something profound about this treatment of Disney's animated IPs. The conceit that these characters coexisted somehow had always been there in the background, but works that made it explicit were rare,* and the company almost never indulged the idea that the villainous characters could be there right alongside the heroic ones, still engaging in their trademark forms of mischief.

Come to think of it, Fantasmic! could be seen as a sneaky way of promoting the Disney Villains brand, which had just launched the previous year. Fortunately, unlike some brand promotions I could mention (but won't, for now), it also stands as a top-notch piece of entertainment in its own right.

The upshot is that I had never been so excited to go to Disneyland and see the New Thing. Not just excited, but desperate, because I assumed that Fantasmic!, like the Disney Afternoon promotion the previous year and the Blast to the Past event a few years before that, was only going to be temporary. It was being billed as a show (which is what it is), and back then, live entertainment tended to be rotated out on an annual basis, if not more frequently. There was a lot I had missed out on entirely because it was been and done before either of my parents deigned to plan our one annual trip...or sometimes, because they didn't want to “waste” twenty minutes of that one trip watching a parade or show.

Bear in mind also that this was before the rise of the internet, and way before YouTube. If you weren't able to see a Disneyland show yourself, and didn't know anyone who had lugged their camcorder to the park, then you were SOL.

But this time around, fortune smiled: My dad wanted to see Fantasmic! too. (And of course, it turned out to be a permanent feature of Disneyland's nighttime entertainment, which I have gone on to see many, many times.) So at the tender age of fifteen (or maybe not quite—my birthday is in the summer and I don't remember exactly which date we went), I sat on the bank of the Rivers of America, hardly knowing what to expect, and proceeded to have my mind well and truly blown.

Afterward, I went straight to the souvenir cart outside the Café Orleans and bought the CD soundtrack of the show. I spent the next few weeks listening to it repeatedly and gushing to anyone whose ear I could bend about the highlights—Mickey shoots fireworks from his fingertips! Water screens! River on fire! The DRAGON!—but, truth be told, those weren't the things that really enthralled me. It wasn't actually anything. It was everything—the whole package.

I am in love with the synthesis that Fantasmic! represents. Any Disney aficionado will have their heart warmed by the fact that it includes characters and film references spanning the entire history of Disney animation up until the point of its debut, but that's just the start. It also involves arts and sciences spanning the entire history of human performance, from acrobatics to animatronics, puppetry to pyrotechnics, dance to digital projections. I can't think of any other presentation in the world that does this.

Best of all might be the way the show makes use of Disneyland's pre-existing infrastructure and attractions, slotting them into the story in a logical and organic way. Casting the Columbia as Captain Hook's ship and the Mark Twain as Steamboat Willie's...steamboat...is more than just impressively clever. It demonstrates that the essential oneness of Walt Disney's two main legacies—theatrical animation and theme parks—goes a lot deeper than just rides based on movies. There is a sense in which Steamboat Willie's vessel and the Mark Twain really are the same boat, because they both grew out of Walt's childhood fascination with the riverboats. We would have neither Peter Pan nor the Columbia (nor, for that matter, Pirates of the Caribbean) if Walt didn't love tales of high seas adventure. Once you realize that, you can draw more connections—from the Jungle Cruise to The Jungle Book, from Saludos Amigos to “it's a small world.” It's all part of Walt's amazingly multifaceted universe, and that's why it all works together.

Fantasmic!'s Princess medley works because Ariel and Belle are heiresses of the storytelling and musical traditions begun by Snow White. The Villains work as a team because the memorable ones are memorable for the same reasons, whether they first appeared in the Golden Age of Hollywood or the Disney Renaissance. We can believe they would target Mickey Mouse, because his purity is rooted in the same source as the purity of the protagonists from the features. The very premise of Fantasmic! is ambitious to the point of absurdity, but it works, because Disney, through all the company's ups and downs and changes of leadership and weird fads, retains a remarkably consistent thematic core.

Obviously I'm not alone in my love of Fantasmic! The show's popularity speaks for itself through the crowds that amass whenever it performs—crowds so thick, gathering so early, that the park finally resorted to instituting a Fastpass system and official seating times in order to keep the walkways clear. But like any proper nerd, I have a touch of the hipster about me and wonder whether most of the teeming hordes really understand what makes the show so special. Do they feel it the way I do, or are they just attracted by the shiny spectacle? There is of course nothing wrong with spectacle in itself—and Fantasmic! certainly presents a good one—but in a world** where the once undisputed champion of theme park innovation and creativity has gotten locked into playing Follow the Leader with Universal Studios of all places, it would be nice to think that at least the general public wasn't falling for it. Unfortunately, most of the time it seems like they are falling for it. People flock to World of Color in numbers just as huge as the ones drawn by Fantasmic!, even though the former is by far the lesser of the two shows.

But if nothing else, I think Fantasmic! has left its mark on the public consensus of what an epic Disney crossover adventure should be like. It's very common in Disney fanfiction, for instance, to portray Mickey Mouse as a fighter (but with his good nature intact), Maleficent as the most powerful Villain, and the Princesses as having their own association within the larger “family” of characters. You know where else you'll find these and other suspiciously familiar conceits? The Kingdom Hearts video game franchise. Even the symphonic metal band Nightwish recorded a song entitled “FantasMic,” whose lyrics allude to numerous animated Disney films.***

Not a bad impact for a 25-minute theme park show.

The greater Disney Universe portrayed in Fantasmic! has grown a lot in the two decades and more since it premiered, but the intricacy of the presentation precludes any changes to the show's content (apart from, say, the characters that appear on the steamboat during the finale). Therefore, updates to Fantasmic! have been limited to the technology of the various effects. We've been told to expect just such an upgrade when the show returns after they're done butchering the river...though it's hard to imagine what more they could do to improve upon its magnificence. Then again, I wouldn't have thought there was any room for improvement back in 1992, but the Imagineers have surprised me over the years. Either way, I can't wait!

See Ya Real Soon, Fantasmic!

* In most cases, rather than go full-tilt with a “shared Disney universe,” they settled for the idea that the characters are in fact actors playing roles. The standout examples here are “Mickey's Christmas Carol” and Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which execute this concept in completely different ways.

** With my apologies to the estate of Don LaFontaine.

*** The bandleader, Tuomas Holopainen, is a huge Disney geek, as evidenced by his 2014 concept album, “The Life And Times of Scrooge.” Yes, that Scrooge.