November 4 - Baroque Hoedown

On this day, in 2016, French electronic music producer Jean-Jacques Perrey passed away in Morges, Switzerland. Jean's frequent collaborator was Gershon Kingsley and the two of them released two albums of electronic synthesizer music in the early Sixties. Their second album, Kaleidoscopic Vibrations, contained a song called "Baroque Hoedown." Somehow that song caught the attention of creative folks at Disney and in 1971 it inspired the Electrical Water Pageant on the Seven Seas Lagoon at Walt Disney World. The catchy, upbeat tune proved easy to incorporate classic Disney songs into and served as a perfect backdrop loop for the Pageant.

Card Walker, President of Disney at the time, decided that Disneyland needed a nighttime spectacular just like the Florida Project. Because the California park doesn't have a large body of water readily available for a multi-boat pageant, Card had the whole thing turned into a parade. When the Main Street Electrical Parade debuted on June 17, 1972, the epitome of a Disney parade was born. With Baroque Hoedown as its theme and over 600,000 twinkling lights, MSEP was an instant hit. And it stepped off on time in spite of the fact that costumes initially tended to spark and a float was crashed during the first rehearsal.

The Main Street Electrical Parade was innovative in another way as well. It featured the first automated parade show-control. As each float moved along the parade route, radio-activated triggers in each zone would cause float specific music to play through that area's speakers. For the first time, guests along the entire route would experience the parade the same way. Anyone who has ever watched a Disney parade since can appreciate that.

Since the early Seventies, the Main Street Electrical Parade, and its funky theme, have played all over the world. It's spent time at parks in California, Florida, Paris, and Tokyo. Currently it can only be seen at Tokyo Disneyland in a new version called DreamLights but due to its popularity with guests, don't be surprised if it reappears again in the US.

"Baroque Hoedown" itself lives on in the successor to MSEP, Paint the Night. That parade is currently running at both Hong Kong Disneyland and Disney's California Adventure.

As Jean-Jacques Perrey once said, "In the 1970s, Walt Disney Productions chose this tune to be the theme for the Electrical Parade. It was extraordinary, I didn't know about it because the publishers said nothing to me. It was by chance, in 1980, that I went there and was so surprised to hear 'Baroque Hoedown' arranged for a full orchestra." Jean-Jacques may be gone but the phenomenon of his whimsical creation carries on, delighting new generations of guests and reminding old generations that some things in this world are perfect enough to last and last and last.