Looking Back at the Souvenirs of the Main Street Electrical Parade’s 1996 Glowing Away Year

This week the famed Main Street Electrical Parade will make its return to the streets of Disneyland... just 20 short years after it was apparently Glowing Away for good. Back in 1996, the park sold all kinds of merchandise and souvenirs marking the parade's departure, or as they called it, "The Farewell Season." As Main Street U.S.A. prepares to once again be filled with thousands of sparkling lights and electro-synth-magnetic musical sounds, let's "flash"back two decades and explore some of the Glowing Away goodies:

Adam Contreras sent us this compilation which includes the button on the right that actually lit up.

Collector cards were a thing for Disney back then. This was only a year after the 1995 40th anniversary collector cards which were very popular. So...

An old friend of mine, Rick West, found of Theme Park Adventure Magazine, created an incredible special issue of his magazine  dedicated to the parade:

But if you really wanted to remember the parade by watching it whatever you want (at least as long as VCRs were around), Disney had you covered (thank Bob Pritchard for the picture):

As the parade was originally scheduled to end on October 15, 1996, an Annual Passholder "encore performance" was scheduled for October 17th.

Here's the Commemorative Passport for that event and the souvenir program.

There was also an exclusive gift given out to guests at the Annual Passholder event:

I used to collect watches so I had to have the event-exclusive watch that was available. I'm guessing the price was $125, but that's just a guess:

I honestly don't remember the story behind this hat which features the original final date of October 15, 1996.

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Of course there will typical souvenirs with the Parade logo on it like these sweatshirts from Winkie Sanderson's collection and this notepad:

The final season was also used to promote vacations to the resort as shown here:

Come to the Harvest Crusade (remember those???) and enjoy the parade:

And some kids' menu parade fun, too:

And the, there are those light bulbs, the most famous of the Glowing Away season souvenirs. For $10 (all the money going to children's charities), you could own your very own parade-used bulb.

And finally, the light bulbs. Here are ours:

And our readers - Adam Conteras, Anna Jackson, Bob Pritchard, Darren Redstone and Debbie Rosas (thanks all!)

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And finally, a page from our button book showing our light up button, the standard white button and a souvenir for the Electrical Parade's replacement which unfortunately did not last 24 years. There are also a couple of buttons for Mickey's Halloween Treat. Maybe we'll cover that in another post.

Thank you to everyone who sent in their pictures and to my wife Rebekah for digging through our souvenirs and finding our stuff. Welcome home, MSEP.