Disney – Spectre Collie

It’s Tough to Be Replaced

A post in praise of one of the best theme park productions Disney’s ever made

Photo of the It’s Tough to Be a Bug attraction sign by Michael Gray from Wantagh NY, USA

This weekend is the end of It’s Tough to Be a Bug, a 4D movie-type attraction that opened with Disney’s Animal Kingdom in 1998. (Before A Bug’s Life came out, memorably). It’s slated to be replaced with a similar show themed to Zootopia.

It would be hypocritical of me to throw too much of a tantrum about the loss of the show, since I haven’t taken the time to re-visit it the last several times I’ve been to Animal Kingdom. There’s a phenomenon on the internet for Disney fans to declare an attraction to be universally beloved and irreplaceable only after it’s been announced that it’s scheduled to be replaced, even if the attraction has lasted years with little interest. Twenty-seven years is a pretty good run for anything.

But it’s still a shame, because It’s Tough to Be a Bug is outstanding. I think it’s the best example of something that satisfies all the constraints of what I dismissively call “Corporate Entertainment Product” — constraints that often seem mutually exclusive with making art — and still manages to feel original, innovative, and even fearless.

As the centerpiece of Animal Kingdom, it had to carry through the overall theme of conservation, but it never feels preachy.¹ It had to promote an upcoming Pixar movie, but it felt more like world-building than opportunistic advertising. It had to be educational without sacrificing any of its entertainment value. It had to push the concept of a 4D movie like Honey I Shrunk the Audience or Muppet-Vision 3D, without making the effects feel like “cheap 3D tricks.” (In the words of Kermit the Frog). And it had to be family-friendly without feeling so watered down as to be forgettable.

That last bit is the part that makes it a real stand-out. The effects in the seats are genuinely surprising and clever — the shock of getting stung in the back by a hornet, and the funnier gag of having thousands of bugs crawling out of the theater underneath you. And I might feel differently if I were an arachnophobe, but being in a dark, “bug-spray”-filled room as giant black widow spiders dropped from the ceiling was exactly the right combination of fun and scary, making good on the overall premise of the movie that feels as exciting as a thrill ride.

Even its placement was ingenious. The exact same show ran for several years at California Adventure, but it was missing the “silent storytelling” of Animal Kingdom’s queue, which felt like you were gradually shrinking down to the size of a bug, to find thousands of insects living underneath the Tree of Life, performing a non-stop revue of Broadway-style edutainment.

Since a lot of us have seen the show countless times, it’s easy to forget how perfect the performances are. Especially Dave Foley as the well-intentioned master of ceremonies balancing insect evangelism with treating the show as a house of horrors. (“That’s right… acid!”)

The 3D effects are perfectly done as well. My favorite is the sequence where the flying insects turn an ad for an exterminator into a movie screen hovering above the audience, onto which is projected scenes from B-movies about giant insects attacking and terrifying humans. The woman’s hand holding a can of bug spray leaving the movie to come off the top of the screen and then spraying the actual theater full of fog: chef’s kiss perfection.

And of course, my favorite line from the entire show, which appeals equally to my love of clever showmanship and my inner 12-year-old boy. It’s during the finale song, when the bugs are all singing about how much humans and insects rely on each other, and the dung beetles sing:

“If it weren’t for the fact that we like the taste, you’d be out there wallowing in shoulder-high waste!”

Shoulder-high waste! In my opinion, that song is easily one of the top 5 Disney attraction songs.

So I want to be sanguine about the replacement. Again, 27 years is a good run by any measure. A new Zootopia movie will likely bring a lot more traffic to the centerpiece of the park, which can be underused.² And it’ll likely be an opportunity to bring in some updated technology, represent a wider range of animal life, and appeal more to guests outside of the US.

But it would be criminal if It’s Tough to Be a Bug were remembered only as a show that had fallen out of interest and become dated, because I think it’s near-timeless, and the perfect example of the kind of thing you can literally only do inside a Disney park.

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Especially compared to how didactic some of the other attractions felt in the early days.
2
Until I was working at the park (on an unrealized project), I’d never wandered through the paths around the Tree of Life, which are often empty.

One Thing I Like About Captain America: Brave New World

I’m still happy that so many of Hollywood’s resources are being put towards weird genre mashups

For quite a while now, the consensus around Captain America: Brave New World was a shrug and “it’s fine.” Critics were eager to dismiss it as yet another symbol of Hollywood’s cultural bankruptcy, a sign of how the MCU is destroying the very notion of art itself, but that’s nothing new. But even long-time fans seem to have been giving it a tepid response.

So I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it! It jumps right into some Mission: Impossible-ish action sequences, playing like a modern action-heavy spy thriller but with a hero who has giant wings that absorb energy. Then it picks up the storyline about Isaiah Bradley from The Falcon and the Winter Soldier¹, and before you know it, we’re at the White House and Harrison Ford is the President on a futuristic podium talking about the Celestial buried at the end of The Eternals and how it’s giving the world adamantium.

I’ve said lots of times how I was never a Marvel guy when I read comics, so it still comes as a pleasant surprise whenever I see an MCU reference work on me the way it’s supposed to. As soon as they mentioned adamantium, I was mentally doing a fist pump and silently saying “Hell yeah!”

There’s one scene in the midst of all that which I especially liked, because it was so odd that it took me out of the movie. The scene had new Captain America Sam Wilson in a room somewhere in the White House having a private conversation with newly-elected President Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross. The topic of the conversation is that Ross wants Wilson to re-start the Avengers.

I didn’t put a spoiler around that because it’s about the least surprising thing he could’ve said. Even if you didn’t assume (as I had) that this was the whole reason for having a Captain America in the first place, you’d know that it was going to happen because they’ve already announced the titles of the next two Avengers movies.² This conversation was about as unexciting as it gets… which is why it was so odd that they scored it with suspense movie tension music.

It actually took me a minute to notice it was happening; it just kind of washed over me like the lingering Big Action Movie Soundtrack meant to make every punch and explosion seem momentous. But this was different. It was going for actual tension, clearly implying that I was supposed to be on the edge of my seat while watching this innocuous conversation between an old man with heart problems and a superhero I’d just seen take out an entire castle full of bad guys.

I don’t think that the choice worked, exactly, but what I like about it is that it reminded me just what a weird mashup of genres this movie is. And how remarkable it is that the MCU has grown so huge while making these bizarre, nerdy movies that, for the most part, don’t give a damn about awards season. Captain America: The Winter Soldier was one of the best in the franchise, and a huge part of that was how it transitioned from big-budget action movie to super-paranoid 1970s spy thriller and then to something far weirder.

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Or more accurately, from Kyle Baker’s Truth comics
2
It was more surprising when they mentioned Celestial Island, since I’d assumed they were just going to pretend like The Eternals had never happened.

Del Coronado

A quick post of praise for Walt Disney World’s most underrated hotel, Coronado Springs

We traveled to Georgia over the Christmas break to visit family, and we decided to tack on a few days at Walt Disney World in Florida over the week between Christmas and New Year’s. It was kind of a last-minute trip, prompted by changes in travel plans and by the potential of getting employee discounts on the hotels and parks.

The whole period at the end of December is among the busiest — if not the busiest — times of year for Disney World, and bluntly, I wouldn’t have even considered it if not for the employee main entrance pass. Even as it was, we were blocked out of the Magic Kingdom for the entire trip, and the waits were so long for everything that we went on barely any of the attractions.

On the plus side, though, that did a lot to help us enforce our pledge to make this a relaxing vacation instead of an exhausting one. Being able to head to the parks after sleeping in, and having no set agenda when we got there, meant that we could mostly just enjoy them as parks instead of trying to cram for maximum magic per second ratio. And a big part of what prompted the side trip was that gut punch of an election, after which we both just wanted to escape the real world for a little bit and just enjoy staying at a nice hotel.

Our resort choices at the time I booked (late November) were down to the Port Orleans Riverside and the Coronado Springs resort. I’ve stayed at Riverside before, and I like it fine. Like most of the moderate resorts at WDW, it feels to me like a nice motel. I don’t remember anything particularly remarkable about the Riverside apart from having boat access to Disney Springs, which was convenient.

I’d never stayed at the Coronado Springs before, especially after hearing people from Imagineering complain about being booked there while working on site. The two most common complaints I heard about this one: It was a convention center first and foremost, so the Disney touches were kept at a minimum. And its buildings are so spread out around a huge property that it required a long walk or bus ride to get from your room to any of the facilities.

In 2019, they opened a huge expansion to the resort centered around the Gran Destino Tower. This is a beautiful building inspired by Spanish architecture, named and lightly themed after Destino, the short film collaboration between Salvador Dali and Walt Disney. It’s remarkable how much it makes the resort feel like a “deluxe” resort still charging “moderate” room rates.

Agatha the Irredeemable

Final (for now) thoughts on Agatha All Along. Spoilers for the entire series.

Agatha All Along ended a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve spent the time since then trying to figure out what exactly I thought of it.

My initial reaction was that I was a little disappointed. Midway through the season, it seemed like they suddenly decided they weren’t content to do another televised MCU installment, and they wanted to be putting out stuff for Emmy reels and best-of compilations. But I initially felt as if they’d managed to make all the plot threads fit together, but without the end result meaning much of anything.

The last two episodes were genuinely surprising. For WandaVision, the big “reveals” had been mostly figured out by fans of the comics early on in the season, so that series was a case of watching stuff we already knew was going to happen, but in a way that was so satisfying and fun that nobody really cared. I’d assumed that Agatha All Along was going to do the same, presenting some not-particularly challenging mysteries and let us all have fun pretending to be surprised. “Oh, she’s still under Wanda’s spell!” “Oh, that’s Wanda’s son Billy Kaplan/Wiccan!” “Oh, she’s the Marvel embodiment of Death!” “Her sudden outbursts are foreshadowing things that will happen later in the series!” I was perfectly satisfied with this level of engagement, only to get a double rug-pull in the last two episodes.

I hadn’t suspected at all that the Witches’ Road was Billy’s creation. I did expect that we’d meet a Great and Powerful Oz type character at the end, who had some connection to Rio, but hadn’t even considered the possibility that the entire premise of WandaVision was playing out again on a smaller scale. And it seemed kind of obvious that Agatha was lying about the road, and her experience with it in particular. But I’d thought it was going to be a simple case of undeserved bravado, claiming she’d been on it when she hadn’t. Or we’d see the rumor play out, where her previous trip on the road had presented a choice between the power she wanted (the Darkhold?) and her son. It never once occurred to me that the final episode would take agency back from Billy Kaplan and make the title of the series make sense! It was a really clever layering of surprises: he subconsciously created the road just like Wanda first created the Hex, but in the end, the instigator of the whole thing really was Agatha all along.

Mid-season of the Witch

Agatha All Along revealed a bunch of stuff we already knew, and it was surprisingly good

Up until episode 6 of Agatha All Along, I’d been enjoying it a lot, if not exactly loving it. I couldn’t help but compare it to WandaVision, which I loved for being so aggressively meta and having each episode feeling like a dense puzzle box. But if Agatha All Along had tried to be as gimmick-driven, it would’ve come across as an uninspired retread.

So I think the show runners used the extended gag of the first episode for all that it was worth, and then wisely set off in a new direction and allowed this series to be its own thing. Instead of each episode being themed to a different era of sitcom, each episode has been an escape room themed to a different decade. They’re still packed with easter eggs and references the MCU hyper-fans crave, but the episodes have felt a little more straightforward as a result.

Which feels odd to type, when I think back on stuff like battling fire demons with prog rock, or an extended Evil Dead slumber party with Agatha hanging from the ceiling and backwards spider-walking. This is still some spectacle-driven television, high-budget even if not quite high enough budget to avoid cutting away right as someone turns over Elizabeth Olsen’s body. And all the elements of horror-comedy are there. The series deserves a ton of credit for sticking to its dark and weird tone without watering everything down. But for whatever reason, it hasn’t felt as cohesive; I haven’t gotten a larger sense of this is what the series is all about.

Until episode 6, which jumped back in time to tell the Teen/Billy’s story from the start. And which was so well done that it’s retroactively made the entire series better. There weren’t any incredibly surprising reveals¹, but it all fit together perfectly, and it answered questions that I didn’t even know I had. There was way too much I liked about this episode for another “one thing I liked,” so here’s a bunch of barely-organized observations (with spoilers).

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My fiancé predicted the one returning character from WandaVision in another bit of stunt-casting, but I hadn’t seen it coming at all.

One Thing I Like About Agatha All Along and also a bonus thing

Even in the middle of super hero fatigue, the WandaVision spin-off insists that it has a reason to exist.

I could tell that I had hit my over-saturation point with promotional material for Agatha All Along when I was watching an interview with Aubrey Plaza. The interviewer mentioned Patti Lupone, and I said — out loud, even though I was alone in the room at the time — “Oh, what are you going to say? That they lived together? That they were roommates? Oh, what fun! What an unlikely pair, huh? I bet there are some zany stories that came as a result of that, I tell you!”

And I felt bad, because they seem like fine people, and it’s not their fault that YouTube and Instagram have spent years honing in on my interests to such a degree that I’m now getting practically nothing besides ads for and interviews about the series, all the time, on every possible channel. And it’s not their fault that Disney is so eager to promote the series. But what it does is really drive home the inescapable fact that the show is product.

As is every piece of commercial art. It feels like a weirdly Generation X fixation to always look for the exact point when “art” becomes “commerce,” when the reality is that they’ve always been inseparably entangled. It’s just especially noticeable with something like Agatha All Along, which is not only a spin-off series, but part of a 14-year-old, multi-billion dollar multimedia franchise. The MCU has programming slots to fill, whether or not you’ve got a groundbreaking new idea to fill it with.

That all sounds like a cynical, damning-with-faint-praise set-up, but the truth is that I’ve been enjoying Agatha All Along, and I’m pleasantly surprised. I loved WandaVision, and it’s still one of my favorite television series of all time, so I was predisposed to like the spin-off, but I was also predisposed to hold it to an impossibly high standard. From what I’ve seen so far — at the time I’m writing this, I’ve seen the first three episodes — it’s not particularly groundbreaking, but it is engaging and clever TV with a bunch of outstanding actors. Which as I understood it, was the whole point of the MCU on television.

Ouhrrr! Werewolves of Malibu

A begrudging appreciation for the original Werewolf By Night comic series

When I first got into The Sandman back in 1988, it was the first I became aware of the long tradition of horror comics that inspired it. And I realized that I especially had this nerd-cultural blind spot for the history of EC Comics, and its later successors like Creepy and Eerie in the mid-1960s.

The stories quickly become formulaic and predictable — often a few pages of setup ended with the exact same reveal of a character saying “For you see, I am a ghoul!/vampire!/werewolf!/zombie!” But the art was often phenomenal, with artists like Jack Davis doing incredible black-and-white line work. Reading those helped me better appreciate why series like Swamp Thing were such a big deal: they finally combined longer-form horror storytelling with the kind of highly-stylized artwork that had been overshadowed by super heroes, and brought it all to the mainstream.

It wasn’t until Marvel announced the Moon Knight series that I became aware of the horror-inspired side of the Marvel universe, running in The Tomb of Dracula and Werewolf By Night in particular. It’s fascinating, because while you can trace a direct line from early horror comics through DC’s anthologies all the way up to Swamp Thing; the Marvel side feels like something entirely different. At least with these two series, they’re 100% Marvel super-hero comics that happen to feature a werewolf and a vampire, heavily influenced by the Comics Code Authority and what creators are allowed to show.

Werewolf By Night is the much more interesting one to me, since it is the “no, but”ingest piece of collaborative storytelling I’ve seen since the Star Wars sequels.

What If… Nothing Was Different?

Thoughts on the new “What If…?” app and other immersive experiences for the Vision Pro, and revisiting some old assumptions about interactive storytelling

Today I went through¹ the new What If…? app from Marvel and ILM for the Vision Pro. It’s an interesting and extremely well-made mash-up of the animated series, some light minigames, and the “immersive” format that Apple is pushing with the visionOS platform.

I think it’s currently one of the best examples of what the platform is capable of.

People more cynical than me could probably dismiss it as just another VR experience, just like they insisted that the Vision Pro is just a fancy VR headset and Apple doesn’t want you to say that! I still think that the differences are subtle, but significant. You could absolutely bring the What If app to another mixed-reality headset, and you could even bring it to a pure VR headset without losing much. But I believe it would feel like an inferior port.

It’s designed to fit in perfectly with how (I think) Apple is positioning their headset. In particular: it’s a seated, “lean back” experience, feeling more like an animated series with interactive elements than a simplified game with extended cut-scenes. It also uses gesture controls as its only interface, having you grab infinity stones, fling objects around, fire magic bolts, hold shields, and open portals using only your hands. (Tying it into Doctor Strange and having your guide be Sorcerer Supreme Wong was an inspired choice).

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Watched? Played? :shudder: Experienced? The lack of useful verbs is still a problem when trying to talk about interactive entertainment

One Thing I Like About The Marvels

The Marvels is full of moments that remind you it’s essentially the polar opposite of Captain America: Civil War

The Marvels is undeniably a little bit of a mess. It’s abundantly clear that there were too many ideas that people got attached to, and the filmmakers tried to cram everything into it. In addition to what was undoubtedly tons of edits due to studio interference and so on, the result is that moments don’t land as well as they could have, and the movie ends up feeling both overstuffed and slight.¹

But I honestly don’t believe it matters a bit, because there’s more than enough charm and fun to carry the whole thing through.

The thing I kept thinking of throughout the movie was, oddly, Donald Glover’s story about his meeting Billy Dee Williams to try and get some ideas on how to approach the role of Lando Calrissian: after all the setup and research and questions, Williams’s response was simply, “Just be charming.”

I think it’s tough for post-Endgame audiences to appreciate just how much of the MCU was built on simply that mantra: just be charming and accessible. While looking for images from The Marvels, I couldn’t avoid seeing a review snippet that complained that the MCU was floundering now that it has lost all of its “heavy hitters.” I realize I need to remember that the franchise is over 10 years old at this point, so people might not remember, but I still can’t get over anyone suggesting that Iron-Man and Thor were “heavy hitters.” People need to realize that this entire franchise was built off the B- and C-listers. And the franchise was started by treating Iron-Man as a romantic comedy with also robot suits, with the overriding idea being “just be charming.”

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I also feel like there was a continuity error more glaring than I’d ever expect from an MCU installment: I’d swear that Kamala goes from wearing the Ms Marvel costume her mother made for her at the end of the series, to wearing a T-shirt and flannel, with no explanation for the change. I don’t care all that much, but I bring it up because I never ever notice that kind of thing, which makes me think it must have been glaring.

One Thing I Like About Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

I liked that the movie had the confidence to slow down and be quiet

I’ll come out as a grouch right of the bat: I didn’t like Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse nearly as much as the first movie.¹

That’s to be expected, though: Into the Spider-Verse was a once-in-a-generation masterpiece. It seemed to come out of nowhere and not just do every single thing right, but to be so relentlessly imaginative that it tricked you into believing that anything was possible.

And the moments when Across the Spider-Verse works best are truly astonishing. It is near-flawless technically and artistically, seemingly designed and art directed with the overriding rule being that absolutely nothing would be dismissed because it was too difficult, or because it didn’t fit.

It builds on that feeling of confidence that made the first movie so exciting: mixing and matching art and animation styles not just between universes, but between characters and even between shots in the same scene. You can see the sketch marks and guide lines on some characters, the crisp lines on others, and more than one is made from paper or newsprint². When it’s working, the movie captures that feeling of “anything goes” experimentation from comic books, but applied to animation.³

But still I was a bit disappointed simply because I could see the seams in this one. Into the Spider-Verse was relentlessly inventive but also felt “tight,” as if every detail and every stray idea was in the movie for a reason. Plus it never insulted the audience’s (or at least my) intelligence: you pretty much figured out things at the same time as the characters did, and there were no overly drawn-out revelations, or twists meant to blow your mind that you’d seen coming a mile away. Across the Spider-Verse was frustrating at points, because I was either wanting it to hurry up and get to the point already, or because I was wanting it to just calm down and be quiet for a second.

So much of it was manic. I felt like the first movie was able to throw everything together and make it all work, while the second often felt over-stuffed to me. It often seemed like the team knew they had made a masterpiece, and were now desperately trying not just to recapture lightning in a bottle, but to stretch it out into a franchise, Peter Jackson-style, even if it didn’t fit the story.

But this post is supposed to emphasize what I liked about the movie, and what I especially liked were the moments when it stopped the chase scenes and the constant one-liners and asides, and used all its artistic mastery not to overwhelm, but to just tell a story.

The beginning is excellent, deliberately deviating from the format of the first movie’s manic introductions (with a self-referential first line setting up exactly that) to re-introduce characters and introduce one of the main themes of the movie: that these stories are about characters defined by tragedy. It worked wonderfully and was one of the highlights of the entire movie, combining art and music and melodrama and humor in a way that only this series has been able to pull off.

There’s a lengthy scene with Miles and his mother that had me in tears, just because it was such a fearlessly earnest (but not quite maudlin) description of how much a mother can love her son, and the inevitable sadness that comes from realizing that letting a child reach their full potential means losing a huge part of them.

But my favorite scene in the movie is one fairly late in the movie, when (mild spoiler) Gwen returns to her home and has an extended conversation with her father. The scene itself is well performed by the actors, although I don’t think it’s quite as powerful as the one between Rio and Miles. But what makes it so remarkable is that every single aspect of the scene goes towards expressing all the emotion contained in the scene. The backgrounds gain and lose detail. The characters shift between more and less sketchy, full clarity to black shadow, as their moods change. The entire color palette of the scene changes with the characters’ emotional state.

It feels as experimental as the pinnacle of the most inventive Warner Bros shorts, but all in the context of a feature film, and all for a purpose.

I guess that it’s good that I didn’t like Across the Spider-Verse quite as much — and to be clear, it’s like the difference between a B+ and an A++ — because Into the Spider-Verse was almost too perfect in execution. Since these movies are so technically proficient and seemingly capable of absolutely anything, it’s nice to be reminded that there are real, talented, artists behind it all, trying to express something real and personal.

1
To be clear, when I say “the first movie,” I mean Into the Spider-Verse, and not that one with the naked guy running in profile.
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And for two completely different story reasons!
3
The various comic book-style captions from the “editor” explaining throwaway gags or blink-and-you’ll-miss-it references were an especially nice touch.

One Thing I Like About Quantumania

Spoiler: It’s MODOFK.

Reading reviews about Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania gives me the impression that a lot of critics have negative reviews pre-written, much like celebrity obituaries. Ironically, they complain about the corporate-driven sameness and lack of imagination in every installment, in a way that’s so repetitious and over-familiar that I’m getting deja vu that I’ve made this exact same complaint in previous blog posts about MCU projects.

Somehow, they never seem to mention that it’s corporate-driven content that keeps them submitting reviews for movies that they’re predisposed to dislike. Imagine going back to a pre-Siskel & Ebert/Pauline Kael world, where critics only had to write about things if they had an interesting observation to make!

To be fair: Quantumania does have plenty of signs of Creeping Marvel Fatigue. It never reaches the level of “why exactly does this movie exist, again?” that Eternals did, but it does lapse into the feeling that it’s going through the motions. They’re grand, sweeping, extremely expensive motions, granted, but still.

One Thing I Love About Disneyland’s New Fireworks Show

“Wondrous Journeys” is the exceedingly rare case of a “nighttime spectacular” that feels like more than just spectacle

Concept art used in this post is from the Disney Parks Blog.

I love fireworks, and I’ve been going to Disney parks for around 50 years, but I’ve still only seen two fireworks shows that I’d call perfect. One was the show for Disneyland’s 50th anniversary, which used sound clips and songs from the various attractions to celebrate the history of the park itself.¹

The other was Illuminations: Reflections of Earth at Epcot, which used pyrotechnics to represent the dawn of creation and an LED-covered globe to tell an optimistic story about human civilization. From the pre-show music, to the opening narration blowing out the torches around the lake, to the spectacular conclusion, it’s still in my opinion the best show that Disney’s ever produced.

Almost all of the others I’ve seen have been fine but mostly forgettable. I get why people get misty-eyed over Wishes or Happily Ever After at the Magic Kingdom, but they’ve never made me “feel” anything. None of the songs or flames or projection effects really add anything to the experience; they feel more like they’re there only because they have to be. Disney can’t just launch off a bunch of fireworks and be done with it; people have paid money to see some real spectacle.

So I had low expectations for the new fireworks show that Disneyland has for the studio’s 100th anniversary. For starters, it’s called Wondrous Journeys, which I had to go look up right before writing this post, because it’s exactly the kind of forgettable Magical Word Soup that Disney insists on using to name things. It also starts out following the predictable pattern: introduction from a narrator talking about the importance of wishes or dreams or imagination; an inoffensive pop song done in whatever style is popular on Disney Radio at the moment; and then a series of songs from Disney TV and movies all grouped by theme, from the hero’s “I wish” moments, to the “scary” bit, to the end.

But by the end of it, I was in tears, and I felt like I’d actually seen something new from Disney entertainment, for the first time in over a decade.

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The show used the announcer from the Disneyland Railroad announcing a Grand Circle Tour of the Magic Kingdom before setting off on a segment devoted to each land, which was a particularly brilliant touch.