Beautifully mechanised miniature Disneyland Main Street Electrical Parade

Guygadbois sez, "Two years in the making, this one-of-a-kind mechanized miniature Main Street Electrical Parade runs nighttime shows from a display the size of a coffee table."

This guy is the poster child for Happy Mutantism. What a wonderful video. I want to grow up to be him.

Mechanizing a Miniature Main Street Electrical Parade

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

MORE: Disney • fanac • happy mutants • makers • submitterator • videos

More at Boing Boing

The technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek

Hackers prepare for first "national holiday" in their honor

http://www.facebook.com/KBENBENEK Kurt Benbenek

A friend of mine works in the high-end watch shop on Main Street – he does custom painted watch faces according to customer wants and needs. He’s worked there about 20 years and along with doing his artistic job, he has to wear the costume and do the cornball Disney role-playing thing. His stories of nasty, demanding children and adults are priceless. He claims he wasn’t sarcastic and bitter when he started at Disneyland but now he constantly feels the repressed need to lash out at both Disney staff and tourists. He’s going to stick with it a couple of more years.

I know many grown adults who have an undying fascination with Disneyland. The last time I was there was at grad night for high school in the mid-1980s, when post-modern irony had yet to be invented (I ended up having to baby-sit three friends who’d taken either mushrooms or an elephant tranquilizer) – Prior to that, Orange County and places such as Disneyland, Knotts Berry Farm (and much more entertaining places like the ALLIGATOR FARM and JAPANESE DEER PARK) were places to be avoided in favor of thrill-ride based parks like Magic Mountain and the then-new mega-thrill water parks further down off the 405 Freeway. In other words, Disneyland was for kids, but 10-story roller coasters were for real thrill-seekers
- Benjamin Eugene NElson
  
  There is a reason that Anaheim is a party town.
  
  Gotta blow off that steam somehow.
  
  Me? Last time I was there it was raining buckets and I still had to wait half an hour in line for every ride.
  
  I would have been pissed if I had actually paid for the tickets..
Chanfan

Very amazing! As a Disneyland fan and a person with good memories of the Main Street Electrical Parade, I can only cheer on this amusing nerdery.

One could very easily imagine this being installed in one of the spots along Main Street, for that matter.
Richard Somers

Um, i hate to be an asshole (an unfortunate start to any sentence), but what is with all the Disney s*** lately? Are they donors? I love art and design as much as the next person, and studied classical animation, so have an appreciation for some Disney’s design, but i f***ing hate Disney Corp, and how lowbrow, cheap, and tacky it all seems to me. So i cringe when i come to this excellent blog, and due to the volume of Disney related posts, seem to feel like Disney has their finger in this pie too.
- Ryan_T_H
  
  Cory has a long-standing soft spot for Disney. He has published an entire (and excellent) novel set in the park. So interesting Disney stuff is more likely than most things to show up on BoingBoing. Been this way for as long as the site has existed. The writers are free to scratch their own personal itches.
  - Richard Somers
    
    Understandable, just a comment, this is a personal blog and it generally has mines some of the cooler corners of the web. Which is why the Disney thing seems kinda out of place; thematic consistency i understand and brings me here, but even if it is vintage retrospective it still seems shill-ie.
- http://devojane.blogspot.com devophill
  
  You must be new here.
  - Richard Somers
    
    No, been mostly lurking for 2 years now.
    - http://devojane.blogspot.com devophill
      
      >2 years
      
      So to you, Boingboing has always had comments? Ah, the innocence of youth. Either you haven’t been paying attention, or maybe the Disney stuff has been light lately (in the past two years) but you should know that that’s pretty much a thing around here. A couple of redesigns ago, somebody made boingboinglite.com (long dead) to filter posts by author or content and Disney was a standard option. If you examine it carefully, you may notice that it doesn’t really have the feel of true shilling; Cory never posts about the movies, he only likes the theme park. And then mostly the older aspects of it, unless the park is doing some sort of retro thing (Orange Bird).
      - Richard Somers
        
        Probably older than you, son.
        
        That is great that in the past there was a ‘disney’ option in a filter. But, that has no baring on my opinion. It does not matter if it is the movies, which i never stated was a focus of my comments, or the parks. This is still Disney Corp. A massive multinational, litigious, and creatively damaging company, which seems at odds with the ethos of the blog as a whole. Would you not agree?
- Bad Juju
  
  I’m right there with you, Richard.
  
  Just hope you don’t have anything against bananas, too..
- Guest
  
  1) no you don’t. 2)Policies are over there —>
  - Richard Somers
    
    Not sure i understand this comment
http://twitter.com/cakewrecks cakewrecks

Gorgeous – I’d love to see this in person with the music playing!

Also, just had to chime in and say that I love posts like these, since Cory almost always finds content that even I – a former JC skipper & big Dizgeek – haven’t seen before. So please, Boing Boing, keep ‘em coming!
http://devojane.blogspot.com devophill

It’s great, but I think it’s missing something:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQq7Fb9ANsM
daneyul

That was fantastic! And what a personable, cool guy, too!

The Disney posts are some of my favorites by the way. I agree–keep ‘em coming!
http://profile.yahoo.com/PZNOUH4JEXU4IEMPKNULA5YIEM Jon

Love this. But how does the track chain bend in both directions? My experience with bike chain is than it couldn’t make those tight elevation changes. And this chain looks much larger.
noggin

I thought collecting those miniatures was kind of an odd obsession, but then when I saw what he did with them, it goes from peculiar to cool. Funny how that works. And props to those involved in making the video. Nicely done.
Scatter

What are the programmable LED things called? I didn’t quite catch it in the video. Blinkems or something like that?
Scatter

Aha, BlinkM -
http://thingm.com/products/blinkm-minm.html