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MK All-New Nighttime Parade Disney Starlight Set to Debut at Magic Kingdom in 2025
- Thread starter wdwmagic
- Start date
brb1006
Well-Known Member
The Alice in Wonderland characters, Chip and Dale, and older Disney Characters from the company's early years (such as The Three Little Pig characters) and anything from the 60s and 70s era of Disney are absent.
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aladdin2007
Well-Known Member
The parade is incredible in person despite being short and lack of characters . The lights and music were phenomenal . But total pandemonium crowds , ops were on it .
TrainsOfDisney
Well-Known Member
Yes. When I’m home and bored I’m gonna research how many performers are / were in other night parades.
From being on ground, the Baroque Hoedown music at the beginning and the end really got people excited, definitely more so than any other segment.
I would’ve leaned into that music over other source material and also added lyrics at least at the beginning and the end. Even if they didn’t want to go full on party like Paint the Night, part of what makes that parade so fun and repeatable is being able to sing along to it.
I would’ve leaned into that music over other source material and also added lyrics at least at the beginning and the end. Even if they didn’t want to go full on party like Paint the Night, part of what makes that parade so fun and repeatable is being able to sing along to it.
brb1006
Well-Known Member
To put it short for the American side of the Disney Parks. Before Paint the Night, the Main Street Electrical Parade had around 80 performers while Spectromagic had around 120 performers (including smaller floats) and over 40 Disney Characters.
Disney's Fantillusion (the Tokyo version) is the largest amount of performers in a electrical parade with a total of 160 performers.
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Squishy
Well-Known Member
HEA has had it's 2nd half of the main street projections broken for a month nowA Real Nighttime Parade.........HEA looking better than ever.........
What an Amazing Weekend!!!! Thank You TDO!!!
Also, Thanks to our Insiders for all your work on this!!!!! Esp being at MK the last 2 Days for no apparent Reason!
This has been a LONG Road!
Disney Analyst
Well-Known Member
Just watched Tom’s review (I know, I know… I never watch their content), but I mostly agree with all their thoughts and criticisms.
THEMEPARKPIONEER
Well-Known Member
When I first saw Paint the Night I just knew then and there the parks as we knew them were over. I liked this parade better but my god where’s the mini spinny floats, the 3 garden floats both Spectro and MSEP started with and the sign float? This was a disappointment and the music in the beginning and end sounded like the underliner.
aladdin2007
Well-Known Member
It's really not underliner it's blasting through the entire parade it sounded so good on main Street .
zemmyz
Active Member
Just a rough count comparing it to the current gold standard (IMO) TDL Dreamlights.
SL: 9 actual floats, around 27 or so performers in costume (lol), around 30 total characters
TDL DL: 19 actual floats, not including small in betweeners (5 or so smaller additions), around 42 actual performers in costumes, and around 43 total characters
Costuming, float build quality, kinectics, lights, quantity of floats, performers and choreography aside. Which, again, in my opinion, makes Starlight look even worse than I initially have thought.
SL: 9 actual floats, around 27 or so performers in costume (lol), around 30 total characters
TDL DL: 19 actual floats, not including small in betweeners (5 or so smaller additions), around 42 actual performers in costumes, and around 43 total characters
Costuming, float build quality, kinectics, lights, quantity of floats, performers and choreography aside. Which, again, in my opinion, makes Starlight look even worse than I initially have thought.
Disney Analyst
Well-Known Member
Paint the Night at Disneyland has 76 performers in it (not counting parade float drivers).
TrainsOfDisney
Well-Known Member
Yeah that’s the thing…. It’s not the “different vibe” of PTN - it’s the fact there are lots of performers bringing lots energy.
It’s why the highlights of Starlight are the Princess Float and the Train - which are both really nice.
Disney Analyst
Well-Known Member
Absolutely!
But even the train could use a unit of dancers ahead of it, leading to the big train. A cavalcade of dancers and characters infront of or beside the train.
TrainsOfDisney
Well-Known Member
Castle hub is the place to watch! Seeing the floats head on - then circling around you. Castle lights are on. Twinkling blue lights in the tree. Some parade route lighting.
Wayyyyyyy better than Liberty Square and Frontierland.
Wayyyyyyy better than Liberty Square and Frontierland.
DisneyHead123
Well-Known Member
I wonder if the difference in performers is about budget or about labor shortages. Florida was a state hit particularly hard by labor shortages - not only that, but I would imagine DL’s proximity to Hollywood means you’d have way more performers available in that area.
Okay, so now that I've seen it, and somehow managed to also see HEA on the monorail for the first time while leaving... I'm here to give a bit of a review, from the guise of someone who has a bit more knowledge of Disney entertainment than the average Disney fan. Including but not limited to my actual studies, writings, research on the subject st University, and my discussions previously with designers and producers and executives who have dealt with or worked on many parades in the past. Not bragging or anything, just showing my receipts as some say.
Music: It's pretty good. Could have used lyrics, or something, and a group mate of mine commented it "sounds like the stars they're talking about are being waterboarded", but I didn't mind it that much. At least they didn't use popular songs from those newer films. By far the best part of the show and that is saying something. Thank God. 7/10.
Character representation: For the characters that got their own floats, honestly I'm not that happy. With the exception of the Blue Fairy float they were all newer "more commercially viable" in some poor analyst's words, characters. No real classic character core, and honestly it just did not feel right. You only get Mickey and Friends at the end because it's expected they show up. I'm sure if Bob wanted to, he much would have rather put in Elio. Frozen also felt like an afterthought, and really missed Olaf in particular. The lack of secondary characters, the lack of representation of a huge chunk of Disney history that's even represented in MK, and effectively how this feels like an advertisement for seeing a bunch of films on Disney+ with bare minimum appearances from the characters everyone really expects, it makes me wonder how much representation was ordered from the top down rather than because it made sense in a parade. If you want to pull a Eisner, have the decency to do it during the day where investment is less and things can be swapped out easier. 4/10.
Floats: split into two categories worth five points each, because design and the choice of what got a float each deserve in depth discussion.
Choices: Yes we did get a princess float, and the train, but neither of these really suffice and all of them could have had their own separate floats. Not giving Mickey and Minnie a float by themselves is a little ridiculous, and even the other friends arguably could have had a float or to it themselves. There is no question they should have given the princesses each their own float if Moana got one... Yes I know Moana is popular now but there is no reason why we didn't see Cinderella's carriage covered in lights going down that parade route (Yes I know it's been done before but we deserve it again). I cannot comment on how accurate the film specific floats are to their films because I've never seen them outside of adverts (and a ton of music for Frozen against my will), but they are very strange choices for what is supposed to be an evergreen product, especially one where it is unlikely they will change anytime soon. I'm sure none of us want Wish in a decade, but I refuse to rule out putting one of the other floats on the swap list instead, at least personally. They are just popular films now. I'm sure we can all name other films from other decades that could have gotten floats because they are popular when a parade came out that probably shouldn't have in the long term... when you have decades of animated and live action film to pull from, not even pulling from your classic films or lesser known stuff but pulling from the newest and brightest is a gigantic risk. Unlike say putting Little Mermaid in Spectro, I don't know if perhaps besides Frozen, any of the other properties with single floats will last as long and be as popular long term to really deserve one. There were many more choices they could have chosen that would have worked better. No smaller floats, or even additional floats representing other films. They have the money to do this right, they just chose not to. If you proclaim you have $60 billion to spend over 10 years in the parks, take a portion of whatever portion that is meant for Orlando and give it to this parade just to make it equivalent to parades from 20 years ago. Never mind today, parades from when Chicken Little was in theaters. DLE knows how to design parades, that is not questioned. I can question a lot of things about how DLE operates but I cannot question that they have people who know how to design parades because they have designed parades that are actually good for other parks, including night time parades. To put that few floats out, with barely anything but the bare minimum to accompany them, is honestly questionable at best. Seriously? Nine floats is not a nighttime parade worth celebrating, but an expanded nighttime cavalcade that just happened to have an expanded production value. You can do better but choose not to, and that makes me very disappointed. 1/5.
Design: With only a few exceptions, these floats were boring. They did not (minus Blue Fairy) follow the seemingly standard practice of having two different things minimum going on in one float, usually front and back (compilation floats excluded). It does feel like they were designed on the budget because I could clearly see the mesh used to hold up the lights, Even if unintentionally a reference to previous parades did make me smile a bit. The non-compilation floats felt sparse, particularly the Frozen float, but Pan's and the others did suffer from this as well. The lights looked nice but the overall blue feeling of much of the time just felt off especially because it just didn't work with the characters or the surroundings. Maybe it plays better on Main Street but in Liberty Square it just looked a little too blue and white, drowning out everything. When there was colour it looked really good, but there wasn't enough color enough of the time to be able to say that definitively. The Blue Fairy's float was the one I thought looked the best, and arguably the standout float of the whole parade. The ending float was rather pitiful and I honestly question why it was there because it's just way too small and out of scale with the rest of the show. 2/5.
Parade Design: It runs far too fast, probably because there's simply not enough in between to satisfy anyone, even someone with the average attention span of a Vine (I have a feeling some of you may be too young to get that reference). There is no chance to savor, to understand what's going on, because you get a chance to see the floats, as inconsistent as they are, and nothing else as they relatively fly on past. I don't know what those things in the middle are supposed to be in most cases, as most of them seem to be weird dancers with poles on their backs. The actual dancers are fine enough, but you can barely see them. As I mentioned previously, where are the secondary characters? Why is Tink the only character that doesn't have a float, especially when they are not flying Peter and Wendy? Who made the decision to put only one character walking around on the ground, and otherwise have random dancers and whatever those people with poles on their backs are. If you can even see any of them that is, because they aren't even very well illuminated. All you see are the primary characters on their floats and a bunch of people with random lights on them (if you can even see that), plus Tink. It all comes together well enough if you have never seen another Disney nighttime parade in your life, and never plan to do so. It is better than nothing, but nowhere near what Disney is capable of. Despite that, I enjoyed it enough to say it's not terrible. 6/10.
Story: What story? It's just a constant parade of characters without even an attempt at one and only a vague overarching theme that just does not work beyond the most surface level of grasps. Mentioning something about stars does not count as anything other than a theme, and a light one at that. There are times when this works, MSEP doesn't really have a theme and it works well, arguably iconically so. But when you try and have a theme or even a story, and cannot back it up, I get very annoyed. If you want me to feel something, to understand your theme, give me a reason to do so beyond just telling me about it. Basic storytelling. Christmas parade? We get we're celebrating Christmas. Halloween parade the same thing. Even FoF has a relatively strong and cohesive theme because it all connects back to the parade's title. This parade has no way to connect the two beyond telling us about stars. It doesn't work. 0/10.
A grand total of 20/50 - 40%. I've rated shows lower, and I may have been a little harsh. Granted this was not a review written in isolation, but one understanding the parades that we have elsewhere in the past and present. If this was the first parade to come after MSEP (anachronisms be darned), I would have probably giving it closer to a 60 or a 70 simply because it technically improved, but we have decades of nighttime parades across multiple continents to compare it to, and it would do a disservice to the people who developed those parades for me to be anything other than brutally honest that this parade is somewhere between okay and not up to snuff for what Disney can do. It depends on how much you love particular new franchises, and how much you know about what came before and what exists elsewhere. I will admit that I smiled throughout quite a bit of this parade simply because we had a nighttime parade at MK again. But it is a disjointed mess that is far too short and could use a dozen new floats and a few dozen other characters to get things close to where we had it 20 years ago.
Side note, at least it tonight's performance at 9, our Elsa looked more like Marilyn Monroe than the character she was supposed to be. Doesn't have any bearing on my ranking but I thought it was funny.
Music: It's pretty good. Could have used lyrics, or something, and a group mate of mine commented it "sounds like the stars they're talking about are being waterboarded", but I didn't mind it that much. At least they didn't use popular songs from those newer films. By far the best part of the show and that is saying something. Thank God. 7/10.
Character representation: For the characters that got their own floats, honestly I'm not that happy. With the exception of the Blue Fairy float they were all newer "more commercially viable" in some poor analyst's words, characters. No real classic character core, and honestly it just did not feel right. You only get Mickey and Friends at the end because it's expected they show up. I'm sure if Bob wanted to, he much would have rather put in Elio. Frozen also felt like an afterthought, and really missed Olaf in particular. The lack of secondary characters, the lack of representation of a huge chunk of Disney history that's even represented in MK, and effectively how this feels like an advertisement for seeing a bunch of films on Disney+ with bare minimum appearances from the characters everyone really expects, it makes me wonder how much representation was ordered from the top down rather than because it made sense in a parade. If you want to pull a Eisner, have the decency to do it during the day where investment is less and things can be swapped out easier. 4/10.
Floats: split into two categories worth five points each, because design and the choice of what got a float each deserve in depth discussion.
Choices: Yes we did get a princess float, and the train, but neither of these really suffice and all of them could have had their own separate floats. Not giving Mickey and Minnie a float by themselves is a little ridiculous, and even the other friends arguably could have had a float or to it themselves. There is no question they should have given the princesses each their own float if Moana got one... Yes I know Moana is popular now but there is no reason why we didn't see Cinderella's carriage covered in lights going down that parade route (Yes I know it's been done before but we deserve it again). I cannot comment on how accurate the film specific floats are to their films because I've never seen them outside of adverts (and a ton of music for Frozen against my will), but they are very strange choices for what is supposed to be an evergreen product, especially one where it is unlikely they will change anytime soon. I'm sure none of us want Wish in a decade, but I refuse to rule out putting one of the other floats on the swap list instead, at least personally. They are just popular films now. I'm sure we can all name other films from other decades that could have gotten floats because they are popular when a parade came out that probably shouldn't have in the long term... when you have decades of animated and live action film to pull from, not even pulling from your classic films or lesser known stuff but pulling from the newest and brightest is a gigantic risk. Unlike say putting Little Mermaid in Spectro, I don't know if perhaps besides Frozen, any of the other properties with single floats will last as long and be as popular long term to really deserve one. There were many more choices they could have chosen that would have worked better. No smaller floats, or even additional floats representing other films. They have the money to do this right, they just chose not to. If you proclaim you have $60 billion to spend over 10 years in the parks, take a portion of whatever portion that is meant for Orlando and give it to this parade just to make it equivalent to parades from 20 years ago. Never mind today, parades from when Chicken Little was in theaters. DLE knows how to design parades, that is not questioned. I can question a lot of things about how DLE operates but I cannot question that they have people who know how to design parades because they have designed parades that are actually good for other parks, including night time parades. To put that few floats out, with barely anything but the bare minimum to accompany them, is honestly questionable at best. Seriously? Nine floats is not a nighttime parade worth celebrating, but an expanded nighttime cavalcade that just happened to have an expanded production value. You can do better but choose not to, and that makes me very disappointed. 1/5.
Design: With only a few exceptions, these floats were boring. They did not (minus Blue Fairy) follow the seemingly standard practice of having two different things minimum going on in one float, usually front and back (compilation floats excluded). It does feel like they were designed on the budget because I could clearly see the mesh used to hold up the lights, Even if unintentionally a reference to previous parades did make me smile a bit. The non-compilation floats felt sparse, particularly the Frozen float, but Pan's and the others did suffer from this as well. The lights looked nice but the overall blue feeling of much of the time just felt off especially because it just didn't work with the characters or the surroundings. Maybe it plays better on Main Street but in Liberty Square it just looked a little too blue and white, drowning out everything. When there was colour it looked really good, but there wasn't enough color enough of the time to be able to say that definitively. The Blue Fairy's float was the one I thought looked the best, and arguably the standout float of the whole parade. The ending float was rather pitiful and I honestly question why it was there because it's just way too small and out of scale with the rest of the show. 2/5.
Parade Design: It runs far too fast, probably because there's simply not enough in between to satisfy anyone, even someone with the average attention span of a Vine (I have a feeling some of you may be too young to get that reference). There is no chance to savor, to understand what's going on, because you get a chance to see the floats, as inconsistent as they are, and nothing else as they relatively fly on past. I don't know what those things in the middle are supposed to be in most cases, as most of them seem to be weird dancers with poles on their backs. The actual dancers are fine enough, but you can barely see them. As I mentioned previously, where are the secondary characters? Why is Tink the only character that doesn't have a float, especially when they are not flying Peter and Wendy? Who made the decision to put only one character walking around on the ground, and otherwise have random dancers and whatever those people with poles on their backs are. If you can even see any of them that is, because they aren't even very well illuminated. All you see are the primary characters on their floats and a bunch of people with random lights on them (if you can even see that), plus Tink. It all comes together well enough if you have never seen another Disney nighttime parade in your life, and never plan to do so. It is better than nothing, but nowhere near what Disney is capable of. Despite that, I enjoyed it enough to say it's not terrible. 6/10.
Story: What story? It's just a constant parade of characters without even an attempt at one and only a vague overarching theme that just does not work beyond the most surface level of grasps. Mentioning something about stars does not count as anything other than a theme, and a light one at that. There are times when this works, MSEP doesn't really have a theme and it works well, arguably iconically so. But when you try and have a theme or even a story, and cannot back it up, I get very annoyed. If you want me to feel something, to understand your theme, give me a reason to do so beyond just telling me about it. Basic storytelling. Christmas parade? We get we're celebrating Christmas. Halloween parade the same thing. Even FoF has a relatively strong and cohesive theme because it all connects back to the parade's title. This parade has no way to connect the two beyond telling us about stars. It doesn't work. 0/10.
A grand total of 20/50 - 40%. I've rated shows lower, and I may have been a little harsh. Granted this was not a review written in isolation, but one understanding the parades that we have elsewhere in the past and present. If this was the first parade to come after MSEP (anachronisms be darned), I would have probably giving it closer to a 60 or a 70 simply because it technically improved, but we have decades of nighttime parades across multiple continents to compare it to, and it would do a disservice to the people who developed those parades for me to be anything other than brutally honest that this parade is somewhere between okay and not up to snuff for what Disney can do. It depends on how much you love particular new franchises, and how much you know about what came before and what exists elsewhere. I will admit that I smiled throughout quite a bit of this parade simply because we had a nighttime parade at MK again. But it is a disjointed mess that is far too short and could use a dozen new floats and a few dozen other characters to get things close to where we had it 20 years ago.
Side note, at least it tonight's performance at 9, our Elsa looked more like Marilyn Monroe than the character she was supposed to be. Doesn't have any bearing on my ranking but I thought it was funny.
Disney Analyst
Well-Known Member
And the build or design just seems messy.
Why isn’t this a single pane of glass? The seam ruins the illusion completely (if the illusion even works at all):
The tree trunk is rough. Zoom in…
No attempt made to blend the mesh into the set design, so you just see dark mesh on top of the lighter set piece:
No attempt to theme or do something with these structural poles, lit brightly…
The clock tower looks great. But was this weird structure haphazardly attached to it necessary? Is this a macaroni frame where we let the kids glue whatever they wanted onto it?
I think the train is one of the stronger floats in terms of a more complete design, but even this has the bare structure clearly visible behind the carpet and below Mickey and Minnie:
Dreamlights, MSEP, Paint the Night, all did or do a great job having fully realized designs, even behind the lighting.
brb1006
Well-Known Member
Fantillusion is the only electrical parade that manages to pull off a story in a three act structure.
Heroes: Mickey, Tinker Bell, Flora, Fauna, and Merriweather.
Evil: The Disney Villains
Aftermath: The Disney Prince and Princesses (including Minnie)
While they don't fight, the show stop section manages to make you feel a certain emotion. The Villains being fear and dread, while the opening and finale having a playful, triumphant, and hopeful tone.
Some people claim Spectromagic doesn't have a story. Besides the Imagineers, the parade relied more on visual storytelling giving guests their own interpretation of what's going in in certain sections. Similar to how Fantasia relied on music and animation to give viewers a sense of what's going on.