After-Action Report: The Main Street Electrical Parade

This past Tuesday, it was my very great privilege to experience, for the first time in over 20 years, one of the true classics of Disneyland's live entertainment traditions: the Main Street Electrical Parade!

Yes, I had seen the iteration that appeared for a few summers in California Adventure...but it wasn't right, you know? I'm not talking about the digitally remastered soundtrack, revised floats, or even the fact that they had Tinker Bell in the lead instead of the Blue Fairy. It was that it was supposed to be the Main Street Electrical Parade. The full name was fundamental. Transplanting it to a park without a Main Street couldn't help but cheapen it a little...and that's not even taking into consideration the awkward changes to the recorded introduction.*

Now—for the time being—the Electrical Parade has come home. It's about damn time.

But what is it that makes this parade so beloved? There is no shortage of awesome parades in Disneyland's history, from timeless charmers like the Christmas parades to audaciously hip experiments like Totally Minnie or The World According to Goofy. What is about this one that makes it the darling of veteran parkgoers such as myself? It can't just be that it's the park's most long-lived parade, because it wouldn't have been allowed to run so long if it hadn't been a major hit in the first place. The Main Street Electrical Parade is a Disneyland institution, as much as Space Mountain or “it's a small world” or complaining about how long the lines are. All those years it was absent felt more like a mistake than like normal parade turnover.

Anything lampooned by The Simpsons is a cultural institution by definition.

Ultimately, I suspect there's a reinforcement cycle at work here. When the Electrical Parade debuted, it was striking enough to gain an immediate following, and unique enough that the Powers That Was were in no hurry to attempt a replacement. So it stayed around long enough to cement it in people's minds as a Disneyland staple, and you don't get rid of staple attractions unless your name is Paul Pressler. Eventually its original fans got to show it to their kids, and it became a fully intergenerational thing.

As for why the Electrical Parade took off in the first place...just look at it:

There's something inherently compelling about masses of individual colored lights, isn't there? It's probably part of why people look forward to Christmas so much. Nowadays, elaborate holiday light displays are fairly common, but back in the Seventies when the Electrical Parade premiered, they definitely were not. A spectacle of that scope, shown off not just in December but throughout the year/summer, must have seemed like an extraordinary luxury—a luxury that only Disneyland could provide.

And of course, the Main Street Electrical Parade was and is unique in another way: It plays fast and loose with the imagery of the films it represents. Haven't you ever found it a bit odd that—to take what is perhaps the most prominent example—the Alice in Wonderland unit includes so many mini-floats of bugs and snails and turtles, when bugs and snails and turtles don't really feature in the movie itself? Since when is the Blue Fairy** as tall as a house? Why is there a humanoid lion playing the organ in Dumbo's circus?*** All of this works to make the parade, in a sense, the live entertainment equivalent of classic dark rides. It has lots more to offer than just standard images from the films it riffs on.

Its unusual format has also made it easy to adjust over the years, giving people something new to look forward to. Any movie could be the basis for an Electrical Parade unit, as long as it has at least one recognizable image to cover with lights for a float, and music that can be remixed with “Baroque Hoedown.” And indeed, there have been a number of temporary units in the past. Those of us who acquired the CD soundtrack (bundled with the soundtrack for Fantasmic!) will at least be familiar with the music for the Return to OZ unit. I've seen photos of a temporary unit promoting The Fox and the Hound, and I vividly remember one for “it's a small world” that only consisted of a few handcarts with the iconic dolls on them. (There were also actual floats for it at one point, but apparently there was a fire? And they had to reduce it to just the hand trucks.) Important anniversaries like Mickey's 60^th birthday and Disneyland's 35^th have also been so honored.

Strangely enough, even though the original run of the Main Street Electrical Parade overlapped with the first half of the Disney Renaissance, none of those eminently successful movies received temporary floats. (Instead, more than one of them got an entire daytime parade, all to itself.) That was a great period of innovation not just in Walt Disney Animation but in Disneyland as a whole, so we oughtn't complain about the Electrical Parade being allowed to rest on its laurels for a while before it was discontinued. But it does enhance the nostalgia factor of the parade, particularly for people of my generation, whose adolescence, rather than our childhood, corresponded with the Renaissance.

I am a child of the Eighties. Throughout most of the Eighties, Disney was still trying to claw itself out of the Dark Age precipitated by Walt's death. Animated film production had slowed to a trickle, and what was being produced was mostly...not very memorable. It was generally agreed that the age of true classics—the ones we would consider worthy of permanent attractions in Disneyland—was over. There was a standard, fixed set of movies that were considered “good Disney,” and those were the ones reflected in Fantasyland rides...and in the Main Street Electrical Parade. The Renaissance upended this assumption—for the better, don't get me wrong—but it means that there is a stark divide between theme park entertainment from before 1989 and that which came after, and those of us who were on the cusp of adolescence at the time are straddling it. For us, the Electrical Parade is a throwback to the “old” Disney and the old Disneyland—i.e. our actual childhoods. For those younger, it sure is pretty but maybe its age is showing. It doesn't even have Ariel in it.****

This sense of belonging to an earlier era might be why Management decided to phase out the Main Street Electrical Parade in the late Nineties. The animation studio was charging ahead, so the parks had to follow suit. Fair enough, but they underestimated how attached people were to the Electrical Parade. The first attempt at a replacement was Light Magic, which was very poorly received and lasted only a year or two. I never wound up watching that one, even on video. They experimented with running the Electrical Parade in California Adventure, and with just running an additional showing of the daytime parades after sunset. It wasn't until 2015 that they came up with a new nighttime parade that a majority of guests actually accepted. Maybe it had been long enough that we were feeling starved for something sparkly to cruise down Main Street after dark, or maybe it's just that we had a whole generation that had grown up without the Electrical Parade and wouldn't judge Paint the Night for not being it. Regardless, Paint the Night is a success, and the only reason we got a revival of the Main Street Electrical Parade is that its successor had to take a hiatus in order to fix some safety issues with the costumes and choreography. (It turns out that when you strap several pounds of electrical equipment to people's bodies and have them gyrate enthusiastically, it's hell on your worker's comp premiums.)

So enjoy the Electrical Parade while it lasts, because as welcome as it is, it won't last forever and we don't know when it will return again. But judging by the delight its reappearance has garnered from both nostalgic fuddies-duddies like myself and new discoverers, it won't stay away forever.

It never does.

* You can't just substitute words without regard for cadence or indeed syllable count, Disney. Or should I say, Disssneeeeyyyy.

** She's not in the current version of the parade. But she used to lead it, and she was such a big deal that they had her lead a couple parades that came much later.

*** It was King Leonidas from Bedknobs and Broomsticks. And no, I don't know why they did that.

**** Seriously, Ariel is in like every parade since 2000 or so.