Nostalgia for a Past Futurism: The Main Street Electrical Parade

Abstract

Disneyland plays with time and space, presenting fantasies based on displacement from the present. Frontierland invites guests to visit America’s past, while Tomorrowland sends them to the future; Adventureland draws on settings around the globe, while Fantasyland builds on stories of the European medieval past. As with the films on which it draws, Disneyland uses music as an element of theming, along with architecture, color, greenery, scent, and other background noises, to help set the stage for guests’ imagination of different places and times. However, when using music as scenery, historical accuracy often takes second place to emotional impact. The soundtrack for the 1973 (non-Disney) film The Sting provides a good example: while set in 1936, the film’s soundtrack features ragtime music by Scott Joplin written decades earlier. The anachronism doesn’t register for listeners because of the way the past is fungible; our sense of what is old-fashioned isn’t tied to some particular year, so anything “old-timey” can help create a sense of “pastness.” The Main Street Electrical Parade, introduced on the evening of June 17, 1972, was the first nighttime parade at Disneyland. With all the lights on Main Street turned off, twenty-two individual floats covered in six hundred thousand colored light bulbs create a dazzling and glittering effect.1 The twenty-minute parade ran at Disneyland for twenty-four