Mousekingdom Blog

It’s not often you feel Disney have done themselves a disservice with their own publicity, but that certainly seems to be the case with the new ‘immersive entertainment’ at the Magic Kingdom in Orlando. We had heard about a whole series of new live shows being brought in a number of weeks ago, but had been having enormous difficulty finding out any serious details.

There was Dream Along With Mickey (the replacement for Cinderellabration), Captain Jack’s Pirate Tutorial (which had been in trail mode for much of the summer), Woody’s Cowboy Camp, Let’s Have A Ball, the Main Street Family Fun Parade and something called the High School Musical Pep Rally. And yet virtually nothing from Disney publicity about all this (until three days after it had all made its debut - and then only after another email!).

We suspected it might have been because the shows were all going to be low-key and unremarkable in the big scheme of things. But we suspected wrong, and Disney certainly could do themselves a favour by highlighting these new elements which, with the possible exception of the Pep Rally (which is pretty meaningless if you haven’t seen the Disney TV channel ‘High School Musical’ film or been to a typical American high school pep rally, which has no equivalent in Europe), make for a great package of entertainment.

We spent a good half-day just going from show to show, and were left very impressed by most of it. Much is aimed primarily at children, with plenty of opportunity for interaction with the Cast Members, but it is certainly not for kiddies only, and the likes of Captain Jack will be hugely popular with everyone. Dream Along With Mickey is a classic Disney show on the Castle Forecourt stage and, in many ways, much better for an all-round audience than the rather sacharine overtones of the previous show, Cinderellabration (which was great for young princess wannabes, but hardly riveting viewing for others).

And the Family Fun Parade (three times a day from the Castle Forecourt area to Town Square) went down really well with all concerned. If you ever wanted to be in a Disney parade, just make sure your family is in the Forecourt area 10 minutes prior to the Parade time, and you have a good chance of being part of the fun.

Let’s Have A Ball is a rather contrived song and dance show, but great for kids, and the actor who plays ‘Simon’ (no relation!) really keeps it ticking along well to make it fun for all. Woody’s Cowboy Camp is similar, 15 minutes with Sam the Singing Cowboy, Woody, Jessie and Bullseye, plus an array of dancers with fun cowboy props, and plenty of audience interaction. The only problem we noted was the area they used for the show (out in front of the Country Bears attraction) gets rather crowded for a street show, with people not sure where to stand to watch while other folks struggle to get past from one side of Frontierland to the other.

Captain Jack’s Pirate Tutorial will surely be a huge hit, as it trades on the immense popularity of the film series. A lookalike for Cap’n Jack performs with his pirate mate Mack, and there is lots of ad-lib humour as well as a witty, well-scripted show. Again, children will get the most out of it but adults will surely get a big kick out of the Johnny Depp character. Both performers do extremely well, and this really deserves a bigger stage than the paved area to the side of the Pirates of the Caribbean ride in Adventureland.

The only show we didn’t ‘get’ was the High School Musical Pep Rally, which seems rather frenetic and pointless if you haven’t seen the film. There is plenty of energy from the cast, but a non-American audience will probably find this rather baffling.

All in all, though, this is a terrific array of new entertainment for the MK, and anyone heading there in the near future is strongly advised to catch at least a few of these shows. Once again, it is Disney performers at their best, and the only surprise is there hasn’t been any real publicity for them.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 18th, 2006 at 10:59 pm and is filed under Disney Theme Parks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.