This Week at Disneyland: Paint the Night Parade

Earlier this week we visited Disneyland to see the new Paint the Night parade for the first time.

First I picked up another 60th Anniversary souvenir!

Paint the Night was wonderful. The opening bars of music pay tribute to the original Main Street Electrical Parade, which is sure to move any Disneyland fan.

One of my favorite memories of the years I spent working at Disneyland is hearing the Electrical Parade music, "Baroque Hoedown," on so many summer evenings.

The new parade is beautiful and very creative in its use of technology, especially for the "doors" float from MONSTERS, INC.

We later learned the CARS unit hadn't been completely functional that night, but what we saw still looked great.

Although Pixar was much in evidence, there were also plenty of non-Pixar floats such as this LITTLE MERMAID float with an impressive moving King Triton.

This TOY STORY float was my second favorite...Slinky Dog looks fantastic, and I love the Lite Brites in the design!

The best float was the FROZEN float, which was huge and absolutely beautiful!

Some of the exquisite detail on the FROZEN float:

Click any of the above photos to enlarge for a closer look. For anyone who won't be able to see the parade in person, it's on YouTube.

Unfortunately our plans to also see the new fireworks show that evening were dashed when the show malfunctioned and had to be cancelled. Hopefully Disney will be able to put in place measures to prevent such occurrences from happening with any frequency as thousands of people were left disappointed. The opening, with laser diamond patterns in the sky, looked nice!

On a positive note, the second new Emporium window was recently unveiled on Main Street, and the magical transformations in the CINDERELLA window are incredibly impressive.

The first new window was a PETER PAN window, seen in this Memorial Day Weekend photo post. There are more windows still to come over the next few weeks!

We'll be returning this summer to see not only the fireworks but the new World of Color show!