:lol:
Yeah, OK.
The Macy's Parade is a live (albeit, lip synched) parade that actually looks like a parade and has entertainment for the entire family. Disney's "parade" was a 2 hour taped, horribly edited commercial for Disney Parks, with the occasional character float headed down Main Street, with God Awful "musicians" pretending to sing, while 10 year old girls were directed to scream for them.
Let's not also forget that the Macy's parade is LIVE...you know, happening at the time of broadcast?
The Disney version is taped over several days three weeks earlier. And edited together over those weeks, and THIS is the best they came up with?
Whereas Macy's is a live show, it's Emmy material compared to what they put out in this special this year.
To give some perspective, a few years ago I was at the MK for a taping day in early Dec. Those "guests" who stand in the route are really more "extras" then guests. They stand in the same spot all day, responding to orders to "look happy!" "look festive!" "cheer now!" when often times nothing is actually happening in front of them.
The park was actually pretty slow once you got past Main Street. For the very short period Regis and Kelly were there (you could almost make them out with a zoom lens, they have that whole area so blocked off you can't get within 100's of feet of them, and they are only there very briefly), and then they run the same float up and down Main Street three or four times, stop, an hour later run another one, etc. It's about as artificial as it can be.
So once I got past that mess, the park itself was great. In early afternoon I was in Liberty Square, and I heard someone singing "Silent Night" over a loud speaker. When I walked towards the Castle, there was Beyonce. It was pretty cool, seeing her sing it. And then again. I got down in the crowd, and actually pretty close to the front. However, it kept misting out, and people kept leaving because the "director" was yelling at everyone to take off any rain gear, umbrellas, etc. lest the scene not look perfect, as Beyonce sang the song for the 5th or 6th time. (She was a trooper, in a white gown that wouldn't have done well wet, but she didn't stop unless they told her too.)
After the 8th or 9th time hearing the song, even I got bored and walked away. They kept fighting to keep people from leaving the area because they needed a crowd, but how long can one stand and watch Beyonce sing the same song. As cool as it was, people wanted to go about their day at the MK, and the attitude of the people filming wasn't terribly welcoming. To this day I have no idea how many times that poor girl sang that day, it was easily a dozen.
Martin can correct me if I am wrong, but I think why he and others find the show rather offensive is that, in SPITE of the fact they filmed all this stuff over and over, and had three weeks to edit it, they still did a crappy job. Hand Martin the raw footage, and he could have had something 10x better in half the time. It just was very lazily done.
Personally, it's the "pretend" thing I don't care for. It wasn't until only a few years ago that they stopped trying to pretend it was live when the fact that it isn't became obvious. Regis and Kelly talk so much about their lives, they couldn't keep up the, "We spent Xmas in Aruba with the Seinfelds, but oh yeah, we flew in to Orlando real quick for the parade and went back..." That and them needing people on the Internet to sign up to sit on Main Street all day and give them reaction shots.
It just could be done so much better, and the fakey fake-ness turns a lot of people off. One could argue that Disney is all about the fake, which is a fair assessment - but the thing is, that fake was always based on heart, somewhere. Bringing the popular pop stars of the moment into "spontaneous" performances that are contrived is fine, but when that's all it is and there isn't a single genuine moment in the entire thing - it's gotten boring, and has lost every once of charm.
