Welcome to Extinct Attractions. Happy Halloween! This week, I took a look back at another Tokyo Disneyland Halloween parade.
With Halloween today, Tokyo Disneyland’s new parade ends its run in the park. The Villain’s Halloween “Into the Frenzy” features a whole slew of villains plus the normal Mickey & Friends in their Halloween garb. Starting in 1997, Tokyo Disneyland began celebrating Halloween in a more organized fashion with new parades and fireworks, a staple of the park, every few years. I appreciate that the resort brings it each and every year, so today we are going to jump back to September 9, 2013 when Tokyo DIsneyland was celebrating its 30th anniversary with a brand-new Halloween parade.
They wanted to make things special at the park for the anniversary, so they went all-in with Angel (Experiment 624) making her first appearance at Tokyo Disneyland. But that wasn’t all as the Happy Halloween Harvest! Parade also featured the first parade experience from Winnie the Pooh and his friends at the Tokyo parks, which seems impossible somehow. Anywho, let’s jump into it.
The show started out with a squad of dancers dressed as scarecrows setting the stage before the first float that had Donald and his nephews on it. They had some really fun Halloween-themed outfits, but with a harvest feel to them to hit the name of the parade on the nose. It was a pretty inventive idea to add that bit of extra theming that really had that Tokyo Disneyland touch to it.
The next float in the parade featured a bit of lady power with Daisy, Clarice, and Clarabelle all wearing some nice Halloween frocks and sharing a float with a gang of admiring trick or treaters dancing their way along behind them. Their float was fun, but they had the unpleasant task of leading into one of the coolest floats, a cowboy saloon with Goofy and Max up top and the Three Little Pigs calling the saloon home. WIth a gang of cowboys in their trail, it represented Westernland well and had a really nice kinetic energy to it.
Via D23
Mickey’s float, a giant pumpkin-like roller, came along next with Pluto setting up shop below him. In the video, we got to spend a lot of time with Mickey because the show stop occurred right when he was in front of the camera, but luckily the actor playing Mickey was an excellent dancer, who went way harder than was necessary, but really upped the entertainment factor. Nearly every Tokyo Disney parade has a show stop or two, presumably because the Japanese are much more patient than Americans like myself who simply cannot sit still that long.
My favorite float in the show was up next with Stitch and Angel flipping the script a bit, dressed up as scientists who had seemingly made a giant pumpkin talk along with their companions Chip and Dale. It was a pretty impressive pumpkin puppet that didn’t quite fit in the show but was so cool that it was all I wanted to look at.
With that, there were just two floats next, starting with the Winnie the Pooh float that also featured his friends Piglet, Eeyore and Tigger. It was a pretty standard float, but it was cool to see them dressed up in Halloween garb and still crazy that it was their first appearance in a Tokyo Disneyland parade.
Via Studio Loren
Minnie got the final word with a fun float that had some pumpkins kind of flying behind her. It felt a bit like a toy shed full of pumpkins, which sounds odd but made sense in my mind at least.
As a whole, I thought the parade was pretty cool, but it didn’t quite hit the levels of some of its fellow Tokyo Disneyland parades. But hey, it’s hard to complain when they so consistently change the parade, with the Happy Halloween Harvest lasting longer than some of its fellow parades at three years before coming to an end on November 1, 2015. It served its purpose well, and what more can one ask for really?
Via Orlando Weekly
As always, don’t forget to check out my interactive maps of the Disney Parks throughout the years where you can watch or learn more about all the attractions from every Disney park around the world.
Thanks for reading and have a magical day!