The Sorcerer's Guide

In our house, the Main Street Electrical Parade has become known as “the parade that never ends”. This recent run is its 4th at Disneyland; it had a run at California Adventure and 3 runs at the Magic Kingdom. Park guests love the parade, and Disney just can’t leave it alone. So, lets take a look back in time and check out the history of the Electrical Parade and see how far it’s come. Original Debut Electrical Water Pageant in the 1970’s The original idea for a light parade came from the Electrical Water Pageant in Walt Disney World. It consisted of fourteen screens that were decorated with electrical lights and floated across Seven Seas Lagoon. Card Walker, who was Disney’s CEO at the time, and the Disneyland executives were looking for a way to keep people at Disneyland later in the evening. They loved the idea of the lights and so a plan was made that put similar lighting elements on parade floats to give Disneyland a nighttime show. A Chicago-based company was hired to construct t...

Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind opened at Epcot on May 27. A new major attraction will definitely draw crowds, but it will also add ride capacity to the park. So did Cosmic Rewind make Epcot wait times worse? We’ll look at wait times before and after the ride opened. For current wait times at Epcot, check out our RideRouter . In this graph, each point represents a single attraction. The horizontal position represents the average standby wait time for that ride in the 10 days leading up to Cosmic Rewind’s opening (May 17-May 26), and the vertical line represents the wait time in the 10 days after Cosmic Rewind opened (May 27 – June 5). So being in the bottom right means that the line was long before Cosmic Rewind and short after, while the top right means that the line was long before and after the new ride opening. The red dots are the attractions at Epcot. Other colors represent other parks at Walt Disney World, which are included to show how lines are changing as we head into ...