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:
