The odd mix of kitsch, disney classics, spectacle, sorcerer mickey, psychedelic rock (in the pachyderms //jungle cruise scene), and odd cuteness (pinocchio puppets) worked incredibly well because the show clearly sets up that it is a tour through mickey's dreams. It becomes a good versus evil story, but the whole sum was stronger than its individual parts because of that opposition and variety. It showed a relatively wide range of creative and aesthetic and instrumental deliverables. It premiered around the same time as Twin Peaks, so honestly, looking back at it now, it is kind of Disneyland's version of twin peaks. For those who haven't seen fantasmic yet/before, the rock music is unexpected in the park, the mix of practical effects, live actors, pyro, and projection in different ways, and the unexpected transformation of tom sawyer island, the sailing ship, and mark twain each contribute to this incredible sense of wonder and surprise. It is as if these things are appearing out of thin air.
THAT was what made fantasmic so incredible. Through its high and low points, there was a strong sense that it emulated a lucid dream. The orlando show is inferior because the show doesn't float out of the park the way somebody daydreaming might begin to imagine weird stimuli along the banks of the rivers of america; they are seated and expecting a show, and the quality of that show and its set pieces can be judged and weighted against any other live production on the planet. At disneyland, the mark twain is superior to their ship, and beyond that, it wasn't built for the show; it is leveraged wonderfully, so while using existing assets presents design constraints, it also removes potential for much criticism.
Newer shows try to emulate fantasmic but entirely miss the point. I hope remember... dreams come true sticks around because its subject matter is disneyland, honors walt disney, and it features a score that mixes well with when you wish upon a star. It doesn't compete with the animated and studio entertainment collages we see everywhere now with disneyland forever, world of color, and happily ever after. Its strongest theme is nostalgia, cementing disneyland's place in people's hearts and indoctrinating people into the club of people who have experienced, begun to understand, and love the park. Fantasmic is a lucid, abstract, surreal adventure, good versus evil tale in the form of a spectacle that presents mickey mouse, a globally recognizable icon with frankly very little actual media associated with him (almost by design, as a bad mickey mouse movie could eviscerate his selling power, the brand identity of the company, etc) in his best form as sorcerer mickey. These shows are perfectly distinguishable and this distinction makes them each worthy of being seen by disneyland guests. They are the west coast equivalent of wishes versus illuminations.. while they aren't that blatantly different, they are as different as it comes for the west coast. And as much as I just laid out how important and clear their differences are, the fact that the gap is far smaller than that between a magic kingdom firework and an epcot show goes to show how much less variety there is in the content of nighttime entertainment on the west coast (and park content for that matter).
Walt vs mickey
disneyland content versus content sourced across the company's other media platforms
nostalgia and romance versus adventure and good versus evil
classic versus contemporary (though fantasmic is classic now as well)
Newer shows seem to miss this point entirely. Fantasmic defines the genre of steve davison shows we see everywhere today, but it happened more carefully, and the newer shows that it has inspired seem to misunderstand how it worked. Happily ever after takes animation and theatrical projects and assembles them far more successfully than most recent shows into a hero's journey experience before turning it back to guests to encourage them to lead their own adventures and have the same courage to unlock their dreams as their favorite Disney protagonists do. But beyond that (and with Rivers of Light clearly omitted from this discussion for being the exception and not the rule), World of Color and Tokyo's fantasmic are kind of blah. The ballad opening of Tokyo's fantasmic is a complete snoozefest, and I can only speculate that they did this because the japanese audience loves english lyrics, even if they can't understand them, as the selling power of that resort to that audience is its very american identity, or because their audience thought the intro to the American fantasmic's was too scary/sudden (but neither the snoozefest intro and their corny lyricized take on the fantasmic score belong in our show). The show transforms into something no different from World of Color, which is why changes to fantasmic are so alarming to some people. World of color individually is fine, as is Fantasmic, but mixed together incorrectly and you get a cancelling effect of each show's strengths.World of color has no story, and furthermore, it features the same movies and scores in some cases as fantasmic, even the same tech, creating redundancy that benefits nobody. This problem was made dramatically worse when Remember... was replaced by Disneyland Forever, and suddenly we had 3 movie montage shows playing at the same time in the same resort. They all reinforced the disney brand, but were so highly redundant in content and tech that by the time I dragged my friends to Fantasmic! (the most successful narratively speaking of all three), they were completely uninterested; "we get it, they play music and projections on buildings and water. its all the same crap." They insisted on taking a bathroom break and left before the finale.
Which is why I think that,
1. if fantasmic gets pirates, WOC needs to lose it, or...
2.If world of color is based on a tv show, then I would love to see the intro and finale maintained from it while the body be replaced by Happily Ever After, including the narration at its intro and conclusion that are essential to its success. This way, the same media can be presented for different reasons and in order to produce a different overall effect/emotion/point/lesson than either the way it is presented now (as a montage) or as it is in fantasmic. The contemporary impression of world of color would be retained by it sandwhiching happily ever after, while happily ever after's thoughtfulness would bring some depth to WOC. and,
3. Remember... cannot go anywhere. Why? because thankfully, its presence gives us some variety in nighttime entertainment. This means no generic Disneyland Forever, and it means not replacing RDCT with Happily Ever After. Why do I feel so strongly about this? Because Remember is that classic disneyland experience of a firework show, amplified, honoring disneyland. Happily ever after replacing it would eliminate that nostalgia moment and give disneyland TWO contemporary heroes journey nighttime shows featuring media borrowed from the disney enertainment catalogue that would compete directly with one another, while working twice as hard and as expensively to produce the same emotional and thematic response in park guests. Think about how strange it would be to watch Happily Ever After from the Rivers of America while awaiting your fantasmic showtime. One preceding the other would exhaust guests and ruin fantasmic before it has had a chance.
I echo the skepticism some have of the changes to fantasmic. It is easy to worry that steve's team thinks that all a show needs to be successful is a unique opening score and reprise of that score in the finale, a catchy name, and a bunch of meaningless and unrelated propaganda and music in the mid-section. It is easy to imagine the team is creating another montage show a la world of color, which itself is inspired by the original fantasmic, while completely missing the mark of preserving this show's flow and impression overall of being a lucid dream. I can 100% imagine a market research / guest survey-driven enhancement project in which the least popular scenes, a la pinocchio, are replaced (i hope that at least the jimminy cricket scene where he starts to drown before peter pan remains as the intro to Pirates). The logic they'd be following is that of replacing weaker scenes with stronger ones or ones that sound more exciting on paper to produce a show that is stronger from end to end, while unfortunately, guests answering a survey nor those interpreting said data are likely to understand that the show is more than the sum of its parts, and when you subtract some stranger elements, you can simplify/flatten the overall experience and make it less surprising or as meaningless as World of Color. Having said that, I check youtube every morning for leaked footage or mattercam footage or distant audio of the show's rehearsals and I don't plan on returning to DL until the show is up and running. I want to love it; I gain nothing by harboring disappointment over it. I hope the new show equipment impresses audiences today the way the original equipment did when the show opened.
