Two answers to the same question.
By the late 1980s the Main Street Electrical Parade had run for well over a decade on both coasts, and both resorts faced the same question: what could possibly follow it? Florida answered with a parade. California answered with a river. Don had a hand in the second and a stake in both, since each grew from the ground the Electrical Parade had prepared.
Walt Disney World's answer began under the working name Electromagic. Fourteen years of lighting technology had passed since 1977, and the new parade used all of it: over 600,000 lights, a hundred miles of fiber-optic cable across thirty-seven floats and sixty-one costumes, liquid neon, ultraviolet, gas plasma, liquid-nitrogen effects and searchlights, run by onboard computers on every float, with 948 batteries per performance, 112 of them for the audio system alone. It debuted as SpectroMagic on October 1, 1991, Walt Disney World's twentieth anniversary, and included a first: a cascading color change sweeping across seven floats and thirty costumes. Don's contribution rode near the front: the original concept for the peacock float, whose fanning, color-shifting tail became the parade's signature image.
Disneyland's answer took longer because it was harder. Don's company had been engaged in 1985 to research a nighttime spectacular for the Rivers of America, the park's largest potential audience area and its most stubborn stage: 180 degrees of sightlines, an island open to the public by day, and no place to hide a show. At the 2024 D23 panel, Don recalled the 1987 concept that gave the project its edge: a nighttime show with Haunted Mansion ghosts and a Chernabog finale, darkness played as spectacle.
Five years of consulting with specialists in magic, special effects, fountains, lasers, watercraft, multi-channel audio and projection followed, and the go-ahead came in 1990. The river was drained and given a cement bottom to anchor fountains and flame effects. The Mark Twain and the Columbia were rigged to change from day duty to show duty in minutes. The show got water screens for film projection, a river surface that catches fire, multicolored lasers, a ten-channel audio system and a thirty-foot fire-breathing dragon, with sound effects designed by Don.
Fantasmic! opened in May 1992 and has anchored Disneyland's nights ever since. The fuller telling of its development, in Don's own words, is on the story page.
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