Where the whole thing started.
In 1974, Disney was preparing the largest parade it had ever built: America on Parade, the Bicentennial pageant that would run at Disneyland and Walt Disney World through 1976. The plan called for the sound of mechanical band organs combined with electronics, and midway through preparation, synthesist Paul Beaver, Hollywood's go-to Moog man, died suddenly. Jack Wagner, Disneyland's head of music production, called a Moog company sales rep and asked if anyone else local could program the instrument. The rep suggested a student at Cal State Fullerton named Don Dorsey.
Don was hired as a consultant to help create the “Great American Band Organ” sound: the wheeze and sparkle of antique carrousel organs, married to synthesizers. It worked well enough that when the parade ended, Jack hired Don as his full-time audio production assistant, which put him in the room when the Main Street Electrical Parade came back in 1977.
The staging was its own education. Disneyland's parade route ran through seven separate audio zones, and each had to be cued in advance so that a seven-minute pre-show would conclude exactly as the floats arrived, and not a moment sooner. There was no system for that. There was Don, spending months on rooftops with a stopwatch, studying float movement and calling cues over a headset to a technician armed with volume knobs.
That was the argument no memo could have made. On the strength of the timing work, Disney was persuaded to begin developing a computer system to track floats and coordinate audio automatically. The first Mickey Track system switched on in 1980, its software designed to Don's specifications, and Disney parades have been keeping time by computer ever since.
The full story of what came next lives on the Electrical Parade and Parade Control pages.
Back to top