I saw the show last night, and I have a few thoughts. I'm less interested in writing a full essay than I am in venting my viscera, so here we go...
First, I had visited the Odyssey thing (best word I can find, honestly) earlier in the day, just in time to hear some plaid holding forth on how wonderful it was that "Veggie Veggie Fruit Fruit" was "featured" in EF. Okay. I was looking at the bank of posters she was standing in front of and asked whether featuring on a poster meant that something was being put back. She helpfully provided me with a lecture on the superiority of Soarin' relative to the new Epcot theme, and then she ran away. (No, really. It was as though the floor opened up and she got pulled away on her very own sled for a war wagon someplace...) I then looked at the rest of the posters on display, and then I went to watch the video, and wow, that's some exquisitely hamfisted emotional manipulation going on. I'm not sure that how angry I felt was the desired goal, but all I could think of was just how much shown in all those posters had been removed in favor of comparatively few additions. Anyway...
I had been over at the Studios until shortly before the show, so I didn't pay any heed to the kindergarten announcements about kids watching their parents. Seems that's Disney's nod and wink to childhood nowadays. Lots of attractions now include similar language.
And then there was the show.
Let me start by saying that I didn't think it was possible to render something like condescension using a medium like fireworks. I must say, WDI continues to amaze. This was truly artful. Masterful, even.
I agree that using the kindergarten narration is not good show, for all reasons given previously by other commenters. I also found it rather ironic that in all the frenetically cramming clips together to get the classic EPCOT tracks into something resembling a sequence, those tracks that actually originally included young child voices did not make the final cut. Beyond that, I'm not sure why there needed to be a rearrangement with new vocal tracks for all of these songs, and quite frankly, instrumentals could've worked just fine in many cases. And really, I could've done without "Veggie Veggie Fruit Fruit" if I could've heard the classic Imagination intro sequence. Whatever money they set aside for all the re-doing could've been better spent on something else. The archive would've been fabulous for this.
Maybe I misheard, but I got dropped out of the not-quite "Flow" when I thought I heard the line "Sing it proud" in the "Universe of Energy" re-record with Wayne Brady belting with a smile on his face. In any case, what I was hearing didn't resemble what I fell in love with all those years ago, and that's not good show for something that bills itself as a tribute. Words like "tribute" don't mean much these days, and that's symptomatic of larger societal problems, but Disney's mostly in the emotional manipulation business anymore. The goal is for me to feel like there's a tribute, not to produce a tribute of substance. I get it. It was not always this way, to be sure.
Aladdin... eeugh. Forget it.
I have a suspicion that the kites may end up disappearing before too long, if only because they're the main part of the show immediately run by human performers/technicians. Unless there's a way to automate them with drones, I foresee Disney deciding that the involved labor is surplus to acceptable expenditures for the temporary show.
Interesting how Figment is featured on so much of the EF merchandise but not in the show itself. I also notice that of the merchandise that I see floating around in the park -- and I saw enough EF stuff being worn that I honestly wondered if there had been a giveaway of some kind to build up publicity -- I don't see him on much of it. I can also say that I was not emotionally manipulated enough by the "tribute" that I wanted to drop $27 or so for a silkscreened EF ceramic disk-style tree ornament with him on it. If this holds for more people than me, I have a feeling we might find Figment removed from a lack of successful merchandise response. I haven't been following the discussions on the subject recently, but that's the sense I got from when I walked into MouseGear (and when I looked at the F&W souvenirs, which are great, but if they don't sell...).
A few commenters are impressed that Disney would go to even this effort for a "tribute" show, and that the development team had good "intentions." The truth is, intentions and effort are only as good as the results they produce. I could hand you a wiffle ball bat and send you out to the backyard with instructions not to come back for dinner until you were done pounding the side of the household oak tree so hard and so many times that you managed to chop it down. You may be great for effort and intentions, but you would never produce the desired product, and you would go hungry long before you ever managed to fell Ol' Ironbark. Quit giving effort points to a company that has always had the resources to do far better than it keeps doing (repeatedly!) in recent memory. If you're trying to project support for your own perceived shortcomings and your needs for the patience of others, stop it. Corporations are not people, and they should not be treated as such. Nobody buys a ticket at Disney rates to attend a park with a tagline of "Aw, you tried."
If I had access to the resources to put something like this on, I would have done things a little differently. (Not having the original scores available to me, unlike certain corporations, means that I need to talk around what I'm thinking...) Step one, get some screens out into the lagoon to take up some projections. Step two, darken the lagoon at showtime. Step three, lead off with the bass from the "You Make the World Go 'Round" instrumental from the park entrance music. Once the treble line starts, set off a few fireworks with some spark trails. At the instrumentals that substitute for the vocal track, project a show title and either continue the song with some visuals of the dinos or fade it out to segue to another piece with its own projections. Step four, choreograph pyrotechnics, kites, and whatever else floats your proverbial boat for the remainder of the presentation. Find a space for "Symphony of the Seed" and some winding animations for the projection, and run it into "Listen to the Land" with the children's voices on the chorus if there's truly a time crunch and full songs can't be included. Whichever songs play, use the projections to let the (supposedly ignorant) audience know at least which building housed the speakers that originally played the thing. Limit the show to one track per pavilion, but if possible, play the track. (If a municipality can contract to have a fireworks display that's longer and includes full songs, Disney has no excuse.) Include a medley from the World Showcase pavilions, but hire better people to stitch those together than whoever stitched EF. Last, but never, ever least, don't lowball "One Little Spark." Start it with the sound effect track from the ride intro, project the twinkling background from said intro, and let it play with a gradually more colorful animation. You'll have a proper singalong before too long, and quite possibly more than a few damp eyes. Feedback might even call some segments "genuine," which itself should show that it's just me fantasizing and not producing anything of record for TDO of WDC.
Ultimately, this was less of an evening entertainment offering than it was an advertisement for the new Odyssey... thing, in advance of the new developments said thing heralds. As ads go, it was amazingly heavy-handed and out of touch, resulting in more than a couple people thinking that they're not the target demographic for whatever the show was meant to communicate. It wasn't so much a tribute to classic EPCOT and its fans so much as it was a tribute to the shadows classic EPCOT could cast on the wall of a cave, if viewed from an improper angle by someone with advanced cataracts. This show didn't come from people who had the slightest idea how classic EPCOT worked or even what made the music memorable, but it maybe did come from people who were looking to buff their resumes with night show experience.
I probably should've just stopped at a final F&W booth for the night and then hurried home.
