Did it actually go all around The World Showcase ?? My memories are of it only performing from around the USA along the "west" side down to Morocco :shrug:
In its original form, Tapestry of Nations was made up of three identical sets of puppets and percussion units. There were four gates involved: UK/Canada, Mexico/Norway and two somewhere in the middle (I'm a bit hazy, but I think they were the gates near Morocco and Germany). The only pavilions that you couldn't see ToN in were Mexico and Canada.
The same music would play throughout World Showcase, and each segment would emerge from backstage at the same time and head in the same direction around the Promenade. (So if you were near the far gate where the parade was heading toward you, you might be sitting there for a few minutes with music playing but not seeing anything for a few minutes) At the peak moment of the parade when the lights go out, the puppets and floats would be stretched all around the Promenade from the Mexico/Norway gate to the UK/Canada gate, so ALL of World Showcase would go dark simultaneously and everything would sparkle and strobe together.
When the lights came up and the parade resumed moving, they exited at the next gate (where the previous segment had just finished coming out) So you could actually sit right by the middle two gates and see the parade twice, once as one segment came out of that gate, and again as the next segment was exiting out that gate.
Each subsequent performance would then reverse direction, so the first performance went clockwise, second counter-clockwise, etc.
Over time, they eliminated segments of the parade so that when Tapestry of Dreams ended, they were only running one of the parade segments. In my opinion, as soon as they started removing segments the parade lost something because then only the parts of World Showcase where the parade was running went dark, so you lost the impact of all of the countries uniting in one parade.
-Rob
