Q: How long is the parade supposed to be?
A: 610 meters
The original soundtrack for the Main Street Electrical Parade, which includes Baroque Hoedown and all of the little Disney-specific additions is only 5 minutes and 10 seconds long. That’s a short parade. And if you remove the intro and ending, you only end up with four minutes of music, repeated.
Disneyland could get away with this because of the way the parade was presented. Individual floats contained radio transmitters that triggered the next section of the song when entering a particular zone. In other words, the first float triggered the intro, the next float triggered variation 1, and on down the line until the last float triggered the ending. That way, each section of the parade route got the whole thing, synchronized with pretty much where they were standing.
On top of that, some floats played their own sound effects and flourishes, timed with the main themes. It was cool. And if you were 7 years old and kind of a synthesizer nerd, it was really fucking cool.
In fact, repeating individual sections for a long time with minor internal variations before moving on to the next section is a pretty good analogue for lots of EDM. Hmm. That might just work….except that there are no radio transmitter zones in the middle of the desert. Or a public address infrastructure.
I knew I couldn’t get away with just writing 4 minutes of music. But if I took what Paul Beaver originally did and started folding in other Disney tunes (there were more in ’98 than there were in ’77, right?) we have … 5 minutes. Hmm.
So instead I just wrote a bunch of goofy shit and glued it all together. In alphabetical order, here are the names for the individual parts:
- Alistair
- Baroque Hoedown
- Bad Rave
- Circus
- Disco-12
- Driving
- Ending
- Fanfare
- Funk-o-matix
- Hillbilly
- Lame-o
- Meat
- Parent Trap
- Porno
- Powerlucy
- Propeller
- Sega
- Sillybeat
- Switch-a-roo
- Taco Stand
These titles will come up again, I’m sure.