During a visit to the Orlando area, we were chatting with a server at a restaurant and mentioned we had been to Silver Dollar City in Missouri. Across the room, a bartender perked up and ran over to join in to the conversation. He had grown up in Arkansas, and had visited Silver Dollar City many times growing up in the area.
One of the things he mentioned was that the Disney World The Osborne Family Spectacle of Dancing Lights had moved to Silver Dollar City after it was shut down at Disney’s Hollywood Studios (formerly known as Disney/MGM Studios). He said there were photos online showing displays installed at Disney, then later at Silver Dollar City, matching up.
Could this be true? Casual searching does not reveal any confirmation of this, but Disney usually ensures that anything they once had (such as the MaliBoomer drop tower in California) is not to be promoted as an “ex-Disney” attraction when it is installed elsewhere. I would assume the same would go for a light display.
Silver Dollar City began their Old Time Christmas event in 1988. If A.I. results are to be believed (ahem), it was in the 2010s that the park added 1.5 million lights to the event:
2010s: Introduction of the massive five-story special effects Christmas tree and the Christmas in Midtown expansion, which alone added 1.5 million lights.
Bing Copilot
Today, they boast over 6.5 million lights.
So when did they jump to that number?
Silver Dollar City’s “An Old Time Christmas” festival expanded from 1.5 million lights to 6.5 million lights in 2017 with the debut of the Christmas in Midtown Light Spectacular. This was the park’s largest single lighting expansion in two decades, adding 1.5 million new lights to towering structures and tunnels, which brought the total across the park to 6.5 million.
Bing Copilot, reference Missouri Magazine
2017 is an interesting year. The last year the Osbourne lights were on display at Walt Disney World was … 2015 (though, they run Christmas through early January, so technically 2016 for you nitpickers).
So after the 2015 season, Disney took the lights down and prepared for construction of Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge.
Two years later, in 2017, Silver Dollar City added millions of lights to their display.
And this, my friends, is how rumors get started.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Osborne_Family_Spectacle_of_Dancing_Lights