Moving the Earth, on schedule.
In mid-1997, Don approached Disney with plans for a nighttime spectacular on a scale befitting the world's first global Millennium Celebration. Direction from above was vague, so Don supplied it: he settled on earth itself as the theme and wrote the treatment, which was approved within three months. Ron Logan, the Disney Legend then running Walt Disney Entertainment, put his view of the assignment on the record years later: “From the very beginning, Don Dorsey has been the entertainment show 'father' of that lagoon.” Over the next twenty-six months Don led a production team of more than six hundred designers, engineers, programmers and construction workers, and delivered the show ahead of schedule and under budget.
The show tells the story of our planet in three movements: Chaos, Order and Meaning. Nineteen torches ring the lagoon, one for each completed century of the last two millennia. The twentieth waits inside the Earth itself, revealed when the globe's continents open like petals in the finale and a torch rises thirty-eight feet from its heart. Jim Cummings speaks the opening invitation and the closing benediction.
The centerpiece began as a sketch on a plane and a styrofoam model. Built, it was a rotating steel Earth twenty-eight feet across and 350,000 pounds with its barge, wrapped in 15,600 LED clusters of a dozen diodes each: the world's first spherical video screen, run by six onboard computer processors. Don, alongside engineer John Haupt, convinced Logan the thing was actually feasible. Each night it began the show offstage and made a grand entrance across the forty-two-acre lagoon through a field of floating pyrotechnic stars, its continent-shaped screens lighting up with natural wonders, landmarks and human achievement.
The fire answered to a keyboard. The show opens with two pyrotechnic meteors colliding above the lagoon, an air-launch effect Don developed with Disney's entertainment and R&D divisions, which ignites a barge christened Don D's Inferno: thirty-seven custom flame effects consuming two hundred gallons of propane in under ninety seconds, felt as waves of heat by guests five hundred feet away. Being a keyboardist, Don rigged the whole barge to be played and programmed from a MIDI keyboard, which saved weeks of production time and gave Forbes a headline two decades later.
The score was composed by Gavin Greenaway and recorded at Abbey Road Studios in London by members of the London Philharmonic and London Symphony orchestras. Logan later quoted Greenaway on Don's storyboards: “I have never seen an outline so detailed and thought through.” Don wrote the lyrics to the finale anthem “We Go On” and to “Promise,” both sung on the recordings by Kellie Coffey. When a sync flaw between music and fireworks surfaced at bar 140, Don refused to let it stand, and twelve bars were re-recorded at a cost of eighty thousand dollars. ABC adopted the soundtrack for its millennium news coverage, and Greenaway won an Emmy.
On January 30, 2000, the Disney-produced Super Bowl XXXIV halftime show recreated the Millennium Celebration for one of the largest television audiences on Earth, opening with the Reflections of Earth score; “We Go On” was performed that night by Toni Braxton with Enrique Iglesias and Christina Aguilera.
Disney's requirement was a show that could outlive the millennium by perhaps five years. Guests got their first look at a soft-opening performance on September 22, 1999; the official premiere came on October 1, and from that night it played nightly until September 30, 2019: twenty years to the day, seen by millions, with eleven consecutive Golden Ticket Awards for Best Outdoor Night Production Show along the way. On the final night, thirty-eight members of the original team gathered to see it out; the reunion photographs and signed “Promise” sheet music now live in the Orange County Library System's Orlando Memory archive.
Go back to the Lagoon, or read how the lagoon years began with Carnaval de Lumière.
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