/ Cory Doctorow / 5:46 pm Sun May 6, 2012

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

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  1. 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

    1.  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..

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

    1.  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.

      1. 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.

        1.  >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).

          1. 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?

    3. I’m right there with you, Richard.   

       Just hope you don’t have anything against bananas, too..

  4. 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!

  6. 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!

  7. 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.

  8. 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.

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

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