I'm not a fan of Paint the Night. The float design is hit or miss and not a fan of the music either. Also feels shorted and fewer floats than other older Disney light parades. And while the lighting itself may be impressive on a technical level, I think it was poorly executed on an artistic level in a lot of ways. At least one or two floats remind me more of those tacky LED billboards you see everywhere now (Monsters Inc), rather than a Disney light parade... For an example of modern lighting tech being implemented into better float design, Tokyo Disneyland's Dreamlights parade is a good one. Which incidentally was an example of the PROPER way to update the Main Street Electrical Parade, Dreamlights is hands down the best parade in any Disney park at the moment and blows PtN away. Many of the floats have been continually plussed (and new ones added) over the years, recently several received upgrades and a new Tangled float was added using modern lighting tech.
That being said, there are some good things about the parade. I really love a lot of the costumes the lighting used on them. The Little Mermaid float is pretty, and the Beauty and the Beast one is nice as well. The Frozen float is probably the best one in the parade, it's excellent IMO. But the rest of the floats are meh to bad for me. An example of the problems I have with the designs vs pretty lighting can be found in Mickey's final float. Cool lighting technology with an interesting disco/whirly prop, but the rest of the float is just very bland compared to Mickey's floats from Fantillusion or Spectromagic.
This lack of artistic design can even be seen on something so basic as the balls ridden by characters. This is something you could even directly compare to Spectromagic as both parades used these balls. Paint the Night uses a very generic square grid pattern for the lights on these balls, backed by a completely black background. Spectromagic's variants of these balls used lights strung to create elegant curvy diamond shapes. On top of that, the empty diamond spaces between the lights were textured for additional detail, some had mirrored surfaces which reflected the patterns of light. And some even had extra lights inside for additional sparkle effects. The lighbulb tech was older obviously, but the designs of the units themselves and the patterns of the lights was infinitely better executed artistically.
I always wish Spectromagic and Fantillusion had received the same love that Dreamlights has. Those float designs for both parades would have been amazing if the lighting had been upgraded the same way Tokyo has continually plussed its parade.
