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'Mickey’s Most Merriest Celebration' show to debut at this year's Mickey's Very Merry Christmas
- Thread starter wdwmagic
- Start date
kap91
Well-Known Member
Ugh the set design, use of props, special effects, basic illusions, the use of the castle balcony, goofy appearing all over the castle, a huge variety of lesser-known Christmas songs, fanfare trumpeters, action happening in every corner of the stage, just an overall sense of grandness, not beating you over the head with characters, and just freaking hell look at the finale - it gives me goose bumps every single time even all these years later on a crappy video. You can even hear a guy say "damn that's worth the price of admission alone" and it really was.
I know the cost of a show that enormous had to be astronomical and I have no idea how they made the finances work (on cheaper relative ticket prices too) but damn I want stuff like this back.
The magic kingdom in Florida was designed to be a grand park, Disneyland is charming, and intimate and something like this doesn't fit there, but in a park like the magic kingdom large scale grand entertainment is needed, (grand trees too). The park is designed with massive open space and something is needed to take up that space and make it alive. You have a stage that's 40 feet across in front of a 200 ft tall castle in the middle of a viewing area that spans acres. The size of the show itself does not only need to be grand but the mood of the show needs to be appropriate to the atmosphere (something that's been lacking in more recent years).
I will say that it does seem the show writing has gotten much better in the extreme recent past - though I still get the feeling that the shows are being written with in much too intimate a way and instead relying on the set of a thousand stairs (I just came up with that lol) to take up the physical and emotional space. You have shows with very small primary casts, and smaller moods playing on a theater that's even larger than the hub ever was back in 1994 (before the multiple expansions and deforestations took place).
I don't necessarily think all the castle shows have to be this majestic (though I wouldn't complain about he special event shows) but I do think more thought should be put into the overall feel and vibe.
I know the cost of a show that enormous had to be astronomical and I have no idea how they made the finances work (on cheaper relative ticket prices too) but damn I want stuff like this back.
The magic kingdom in Florida was designed to be a grand park, Disneyland is charming, and intimate and something like this doesn't fit there, but in a park like the magic kingdom large scale grand entertainment is needed, (grand trees too). The park is designed with massive open space and something is needed to take up that space and make it alive. You have a stage that's 40 feet across in front of a 200 ft tall castle in the middle of a viewing area that spans acres. The size of the show itself does not only need to be grand but the mood of the show needs to be appropriate to the atmosphere (something that's been lacking in more recent years).
I will say that it does seem the show writing has gotten much better in the extreme recent past - though I still get the feeling that the shows are being written with in much too intimate a way and instead relying on the set of a thousand stairs (I just came up with that lol) to take up the physical and emotional space. You have shows with very small primary casts, and smaller moods playing on a theater that's even larger than the hub ever was back in 1994 (before the multiple expansions and deforestations took place).
I don't necessarily think all the castle shows have to be this majestic (though I wouldn't complain about he special event shows) but I do think more thought should be put into the overall feel and vibe.
brb1006
Well-Known Member
Most Merriest is wonderful and is far better than CTS was on the current stage. But, Oh My Goodness!! Look where MK was in 1994!:
Just found it today on YT! EASILY the BEST Christmas Show in MK's History! Amazing what MK did with only one set of stairs on the stage! Maybe they should try that again sometime!
What ever happened to Disney shows like this?
brb1006
Well-Known Member
And Scrooge Mcduck is even featured.
kap91
Well-Known Member
I honestly don't know....I'm sure budget played a role, but I think it's more than that, I think the vision must have changed along the way - through one reorganization or another, the people responsible for spectacle and majestic came to have different ideas about what it was that people wanted, who the audience was, etc. The biggest root cause had to be he elimination of the kids of the kingdom and the live pit during the daytime shows. I don't know the reasoning behind that move but it resulted in a fundamental change to the size, content, and style of show - probably the most obvious thing being much less of a focus on dance, and to a lesser extent singing, which basically was the bread and butter of kids of the kingdom shows instead towards characters. You can see this in Cinderellas surprise celebration (which I believe was the first show after the change and also around when Celebrate the season debuted). Both these shows were still rather large and interesting - but it's very clear in both the focus was much more on the characters themselves rather than the numbers If that makes sense. This is also where the trend towards shorter shows starts (with someone presumably realizing that guests standing for 30-40 minutes in one location is somewhat miserable for them and not good at all for business).
From there on I think It's just been a little change here and there to result in more intimate, more I guess you could say branded shows, with a target audience skewing younger and younger. The reconfiguration of the stage and hub for Cinderellabration in 2005 really put some things into stone too. The removal of the hub trees around that time suddenly made the shows much more visible and louder, and the addition of the set of a thousand stairs was a giant change to what was even possible to do on that stage - previously being mostly a flat stage with a small center staircase, and for a brief time a slight variant on that and predecessor to the Curey setup with one staircase/elevated platform on each side (with a high speed lift in one that i wish would have been kept/not disabled). Anyway as can be seen currently in the new Christmas show - it's hard to fit a large cast in an attractive way in a space like that.
Disney in general has moved away from large shows and just fewer shows over the last 20 years. They killed ''twas and replaced it with the drastically inferior totally tomorrowland. Jolly Holiday went away around the same time as Sparkling Christmas. Hell there used to be a show in the contemporary concourse at Christmas. And it's hard to say they're all just Disney become tighter with its purse strings. Jolly Holiday was enormously successful and it was a quite expensive separate ticket event.
It just seems to be an attitude change within the people in charge and I suspect that maybe (and I don't have evidence to support this) that the creatives in the company might have used to have more power to direct not only shows themselves but direct the overall direction of entertainment and development within the resort and I suspect that that latter bit has gradually been handed over to the business people
It did, Magic Of Christmas was DL's Sparkling without the kids cast.It played in Tomorrowland and Fantasyland in the 80's