After the Main Street Electrical Parade at Disneyland went dark for a short hiatus, it once again shone brightly with an updated soundtrack as it made its glittering debut in Walt Disney World. Don Dorsey, who worked on the updated soundtrack, had a lightbulb go off in his head to create a unique introduction that would synchronize the start of the parade with the light cue for dramatic effect. Dorsey recalled, “I had seen the parade in 1972 and been inspired by it and thought there’s a better way to start this than just an (audio sound effect) sweep and a (music) fade in, so I created the process that we now call ‘Opening Window,’ which allows you to do an intro and get into the continuous (music) loop seamlessly.” This unique process has been used to start Disney parades ever since. Dorsey also had ideas for the narrated introduction, “The first Battlestar Galactica was on TV, and I heard the cylon voices and I said, ‘We need to do that for the parade,’ so I brought in the idea of processing the voice.” The dialogue is none other than the official voice of Disneyland and Walt Disney World at the time, Jack Wagner, who was instrumental in the creation of the parade. Dorsey remembers the day they recorded the now famous lines. “The sound that you hear is a synthesizer, but it’s Jack articulating it. When Jack and I did the original one, he was performing it live. He was listening in headphones to the output of the synthesizer and I was playing the chords so he was he was hearing it as it would be on the street.” As for the unique description of the parade, it was Entertainment Vice President Bob Jani who wrote the dialogue with the now trademark lines, describing the “spectacular festival pageant of nighttime magic and imagination, in thousands of sparkling lights and electro-synthe-magnetic musical sounds… the Main Street Electrical Parade!”
