MK All-New Nighttime Parade Disney Starlight Set to Debut at Magic Kingdom in 2025

MerlinTheGoat

MerlinTheGoat

Well-Known Member
SoFloMagic said:
That's fair.

Its just wild to see people beg for a night parade in the style or spectro, then have disney roll that out only for people to tear it to shreds off of a video of it from a cell phone, without even seeing it.
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I wouldn't say it feels particularly similar to Spectro, unless you consider any "classical" sounding music to be Spectro style. If anything, blue fairy, train and the borrowed music cues scream MSEP lineage. The idea that Starlight is even remotely in the same universe of quality as Spectro is absurd and an insult to Spectro's designers. I also say this as someone who thinks Starlight is decent and has a promising foundation for improvement. If it WAS more similar to Spectro (I've advocated for a "Dreamlights" style rebuild of Spectro forever now) or the others close to its quality, you'd see far less criticism.

Starlight has the potential and foundation to be a legitimately great parade that COULD be a top tier one IMO. But as it stands, it needs a significant amount of work to get there Some of the most glaring problems would even be relatively easy to fix and would immediately elevate it up a couple of points. But I am unconvinced that Disney will ever acknowledge, let alone approve, any of these necessary changes to get it there.

I'll quantify parade quality on a horizontal line with a 10 point scale. 5 is the middle and represents mediocre, neither good nor bad. Below 5 represents varying levels of underwhelming/bad, above 5 are varying levels of decent/good.

Spectromagic to me is a 10/10. The best overall in terms of float design, length, and especially music. Dreamlights has awesome tech and float design, but Spectro and Fant (original version) both have better music (Spectro being the better of the two), and are much longer. I go back and forth between 9/10 or 10/10 for both of these parades. But all three of these are top tier. MSEP was a 7/10 for me in its heyday, the floats and length were quite good for their time until Spectro and the others came along and blew it out of the water. But never been a big fan of the music (catchy but annoying). Paint the Night is barely a 4/10, I find the music and most of the float designs to be ugly, obnoxious and inappropriate for what I expect from a castle park parade. Only reason it isn't lower is because I do like the costumes and two of the princess floats.

Starlight is very tricky for me to rate because it has elements that I really like and want to praise it for, but glaring issues that really drag it down. It's not easy or simple to settle on a solid number, but, I think I have to give it a 6/10 in its current form. Has a good foundation to build on, I like most of the floats and the soundtrack, but it also feels half finished and empty in a lot of spots along with some weird amateurish design faults here and there. If they bring the street performers and their costumes up to the standards of the other parades, I'd bump it up to a 7/10. Add a decent handful of small filler floats between the big ones, it's an 8/10. Another 5 or so good major floats and it might be 9/10 and finally feel "complete". None of these are unreasonable expectations, Starlight stands alongside PtN as the most disappointingly short night parades, both having fewer than 10 major floats each. Dreamlights by comparison has 18 major floats currently (Spectro/Fant had significantly more than even that). And this isn't including the many smaller filler floats and performers, of which even PtN has tons of compared to Starlight.
 
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Joel

Joel

Well-Known Member
SoFloMagic said:
Its just wild to see people beg for a night parade in the style or spectro, then have disney roll that out only for people to tear it to shreds off of a video of it from a cell phone, without even seeing it.
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It really does not feel anything like Spectro to me either, but that's not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself.

As for the "cell phone video" thing. It's 2025 and some people act like it's still 2005 or even 2015. I would almost literally kill to be able to watch Spectro, the original version of Imagination, Horizons, WoM, and MK's Mr. Toad (to name a few) recorded on an S25 Ultra.

I would agree that folks should be a little more hesitant to criticize how good certain aspects of the parade look until they've seen it for themselves (although even those should not be considered above criticism), but plenty of complaints raised in this thread have nothing to do with that.

I could tell that TBA was lacking in a number of key ways that go beyond how it looks in a video, but that didn't stop people from saying you shouldn't judge it until you've seen it in person. On the other hand, mere cell phone video was enough for me to figure out that Runaway Railway was going to instantly become one of my favorite rides, and it did. Crazy how that works. Of course it's best to experience these things for ourselves, but you can actually tell a lot from a well-made video.

I've also never seen Paint the Night live, but it's always been one of my favorite Disney parades. Consider me a double sinner both for comparing Starlight to PtN and for making quality judgments based on a video.

Besides, even if the only issue with Starlight was that it comes across poorly on a YouTube livestream, that's still a pretty serious failing on its own in the current year.
 
wdwmagic

wdwmagic

Administrator
Moderator
Premium Member
Original Poster
Blue Fairy Float

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C

Comped

Well-Known Member
donsullivan said:
This is how the entire industry operates today. There is a core of people in the team with design, project management, and other skills, and then you staff up with specific expertise needed for a project. Or you can complete the core design and then put the actual construction of the project out to bid to companies with the unique expertise required to fulfill your project's needs. It doesn't make sense for any organization like Imagineering or Universal Creative to have staff with every single skill that could be needed, not to mention developing and maintaining manufacturing capabilities for everything they need to operate the parks. There is an entire industry out there (lots of it based in Orlando in recent years) that develops and builds these sorts of things for themed entertainment all over the world.

When you're doing something like building a new park you hire people with all the skills you need as 'Project Hires' to work on that project and their employment ends when the project is delivered to operations. If you don't do that, you end up constantly laying people off when big projects end and you don't have enough work to keep them busy. How does that make sense?
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Much of the industry has been gutted since TAIT was effectively allowed to gain a monopoly over the large scale independent creative studios through acquisition (Falcons was the only major one left untouched). A significant number of jobs went away as a result, which has not done the industry any favors. I don't know why they were allowed to effectively do so without getting dropkicked by the Justice Department/FTC, but I believe it is going to be the single biggest problem we are going to see in terms of the ability of both Disney and Uni to be able to resize their design divisions as required, because the number of jobs that people can go to outside of those who otherwise use them as a bit of a stopping point between gigs (or even spend longer chunks of their career there) has now significantly shrank. We've seen a few major players and mid-level folks go indie, but this is not the vast majority or even close, and in in real terms compared to pre-pandemic many of the jobs that used to be pointed out to new graduates and those who got laid off in a post-project slowdown simply no longer exist. We have yet to see this with more specific subcontractors because nobody has thought of it yet, and I doubt we will, but the actual design and admin jobs that used to fill out many of these projects (or accomplish them entirely) have either been shipped off out of state or eliminated entirely. And people do not talk about that nearly enough.
 

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