On this anniversary date, May 13 (if Wikipedia can be believed), let’s talk about one of the greatest entertainment spectacles the world has ever seen. Or at least Anaheim has ever seen.
Disneyland’s Fantasmic! blew me away when I first saw it, though I didn’t intend to see it.
During my return to visiting Disneyland, my first trip was spent just trying to see all the things in California that did not exist in Florida’s Magic Kingdom. During my next few trips, the first with a digital camera, I was still focusing on other rides and re-learning how different things were at “Walt Disney’s Original Magic Kingdom”.
I was not interested in shows or parades.
But when I was walking through New Orleans Square to get to a ride (Haunted Mansion, most likely), I stumbled into a performance of Fantastic and was mesmerized.
I had never seen anything like it.
So, obviously, I wanted to see it up close (which was easy to do back then just by showing up early) and take pictures of it with my brand new Epson PhotoPC camera.
Unfortunately, there was no zoom lens on the camera, so this is as close as I could get. And because my camera only had 1 megabyte of memory, I was taking photos in 320×240 resolution. If you blow them up on a modern computer screen (or even a phone!) they are so pixelated they look like 8-bit graphics 😉
So here are a few more…
Fantasmic on August 16, 1996. Fantasmic on August 16, 1996. Fantasmic on August 16, 1996. Fantasmic on August 16, 1996. Fantasmic on August 16, 1996. Fantasmic on August 16, 1996. Fantasmic on August 16, 1996. Fantasmic on August 16, 1996.
Oddly enough, I didn’t take a picture of the Mark Twain in the finale. Maybe it wasn’t running the night I saw it? Or perhaps I ran out of memory?
Ah, the days of early digital cameras!
I must have found these light poles fascinating. I took two pictures, and in “high resolution” mode!
And that’s about the worst quality of photos I will be sharing in this essays. Hopefully.
Until next time…