𝔇isney Parks and music have always been intrinsically linked for me. My earliest memory of Disney outside of the movies was a VHS recording my family made of Disneyland’s 30th Anniversary Celebration, which was a feature-length, star-studded, musical special that shaped my taste in music for the rest of my life. I still can’t hear The Pointer Sisters’ Neutron Dance without picturing the Main Street Electrical Parade floats and dancers in TRON suits. My first exposure to the infectious tunes of It’s a Small World (After All), Yo Ho (A Pirate’s Life for Me), and Grim Grinning Ghosts came from that special, so when I first visited Walt Disney World in 1989, I was already humming along.
image source: Discogs
Around that time, my brother had a CD from 1988 called The Music of Disneyland, Walt Disney World, and Epcot Center featuring 28 tracks taken exclusively from the three Disney parks. Rummaging through my family’s record collection, I found a vinyl LP from 1980 entitled The Official Album of Disneyland/Walt Disney World which included eight tracks from the ’88 album, as well as six tracks unique to that one. Using my father’s multi-function Hi-Fi system, I dubbed both of these to cassettes and listened to them constantly. (The 1988 album would be re-released in 1991 as The Official Album of Disneyland and Walt Disney World, which I eventually bought for myself as one of my first CDs.)
In the late ’90s, during a trip to New York City, my brother and I visited The Disney Store on 5th and 55th, which sold some theme park exclusive merchandise. There I found a new Official Album with seven unique tracks, including music from IllumiNations 25(B), Fantasmic!, Fantasy in the Sky, and the short-lived Disneyland nighttime parade, Light Magic. In 1999, on my first trip to Disney World without any parents (I met my brother there, who was a seasonal cast member at the time), I found a CD of music from the newly opened Disney’s Animal Kingdom and bought that as well.
image source: The Walt Disney World Forever Project
On that same trip, I stumbled onto several kiosks in the parks simply called Walt Disney World Forever. What I found was beyond my wildest dreams — an extensive collection of audio from all of the Disney parks, most of which had never been publicly released before. Ten tracks could be burned onto a CD, on the spot, for $20. I selected all of the background music from The Haunted Mansion, and my brother and I together selected complete play-throughs of Tropical Serenade (the Enchanted Tiki Room), Kitchen Kabaret, and the 1981 version of the Carousel of Progress.
In 1999, I got my first computer (not counting a couple of old hand-me-downs from my brother). It was a second-generation “Blueberry” iMac, which was Internet-ready right out of the box. It didn’t take me long to discover the magic of Napster, and one of the first things I searched for was music from Disney World. I couldn’t believe what I found — hundreds of MP3s of Disney theme park music and spiels from every Disney park right there for the taking (at a maximum speed of approximately one megabyte per minute). But the biggest realization was the fact that I was not strange or alone in my love of Disney Parks music. There was a whole community!
I downloaded everything I could find, filling hard drive after hard drive with music from the parks and resorts. When Napster was shut down, I moved to Gnutella, then Kazaa. Even after I downloaded what seemed like every available audio track from every CD and kiosk worldwide, I would still search regularly for every variation of every park and attraction name, looking for those lost tracks and holy grails. I also searched eBay for more music and memorabilia and bought myself a couple of limited edition CDs commemorating The Haunted Mansion’s and Pirates of the Caribbean’s anniversaries in 1999 (30th and 33rd, respectively), which have since been re-released in the parks and on digital music stores like iTunes, and are still widely available.
In the fall of 2001, I got my first job with Disney with the Walt Disney World College Program. While I was there, I bought CDs of the most recent Official Album, a collection of songs and parade music from the 100 Years of Magic celebration, the soundtrack of Epcot’s Millennium Celebration, which included IllumiNations: Reflections of Earth and the Tapestry of Nations parade. During my tenure at Walt Disney World starting in 2005, I purchased a limited edition 5-CD box set of music from Disneyland commemorating the park’s 50th anniversary, and a CD re-release of the original Hall of Presidents vinyl LP.
image source: Amazon
Since leaving Walt Disney World’s employment in 2011, I have continued my search for rare and hard-to-find Disney Parks audio. My quest has led me to Amazon (for a 5-CD set of Disney at the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair), iTunes (for various tracks I didn’t already have from the newer Official Albums of Disneyland and Walt Disney World), MouseBits.com (for torrents of official and fan-made Disney collections), Kingdom of Memories, Extinct Attractions Club, Epcot Legacy, and of course, YouTube.
All in all, I have acquired, through various means, several hundred individual tracks of music and audio from and featured in Disney Parks all over the world, amounting to over 70 hours of continuous Disney and Disney-related music.
So we’ve arrived at a happy ending, right?
Anyone can get any Disney Parks audio on the internet with just a few clicks. Well, not quite. For starters, a lot of the source audio for older attractions has been lost — or at least, never released. In addition, much of what’s been released are not official releases. They are, in fact, bootlegs, recordings, and fan-edits.
Somehow, some collectors have managed to acquire digital copies of source audio from the Disney Archives. This allows us to have pristine, sometimes stereo recordings of music and dialog from our favorite attractions. The problem with this is that, of course, this audio has possibly been procured illegitimately, meaning Disney has the right to, at best, have the audio removed or, at worst, demand financial restitution.
One such independent Disney curator, who shall remain nameless, runs a website where this person has shared recreations of Disney art and collections of Disney audio. This in and of itself should have been enough for Disney to demand a takedown. However, when this person started providing Disney audio as well as commercially available music from non-Disney artists (which Disney had licensed for in-park background music loops), and locking this music and audio behind a paywall from which the person wholly benefitted, Disney slammed the gavel down on them.
screenshot captured using the Internet Archive Wayback Machine
But that’s the strange thing. For all of Disney’s notorious litigation over unauthorized use of their trademarked and copyrighted material over the years, they rarely demand takedowns from sites and channels that provide their park media for free. Pretty much all of the aforementioned sites are still up and running as of the publication of this post. Despite the ever-looming legal threat, Disney has maintained a mostly hands-off approach to dealing with file sharing. Essentially, as long as you aren’t trying to make money off of whatever you’re sharing, they seem to leave well enough alone.
So, again, we’ve arrived at a happy ending, right?
Still no. You see, since the vast majority of Disney Parks audio and media have never been officially released, and Disney has the option and legal right to request massive takedowns of their material, we live under the ever-looming threat of losing everything. While our own personal collections are likely safe, our sources for more rare media may be gone for good someday. Disney does not seem interested in curating and selling this stuff themselves, but if they ever decide to stop us from sharing it publicly, decades of rare and hard-to-find Disney Parks music and video may be lost.
And then there’s the media that has never been released, either officially or unofficially. These include the source audio from Walter Cronkite’s and Vic Perrin’s Spaceship Earth narrations, or any of the source audio from the original Universe of Energy; the music from Epcot Forever or Enchantment; the original widescreen/3D print from Magic Journeys, Captain EO, Muppet-Vision, or Honey, I Shrunk the Audience!; the Pooped Pirate dialogue from the 1997-2006 version of Magic Kingdom’s Pirates of the Caribbean (curiously, Disneyland’s Gluttonous Pirate dialogue was released on the aforementioned 33rd Anniversary album); Maelstrom’s narration; any version of the Magic Kingdom’s PeopleMover narration; The Enchanted Tiki Room: Under New Management; any of the Hall of Presidents iterations since the 1971 original;… Many of these pieces of media are key to recreating long-gone attractions (or earlier versions of attractions) for those of us who remember them and those who’ve never experienced them.
After Disney released their comprehensive 6-CD box set of Disneyland audio for its 50th anniversary, there was the expectation that we would see a similar treatment for Epcot’s 25th, but there was nothing of the sort, nor was there anything released for Epcot’s 30th or 35th, nor Walt Disney World’s 35th, 40th, or 50th. In fact, we haven’t seen even an Official Album released since 2013. And despite being more than nine months ago, we’ve yet to hear anything about a similar collection of Walt Disney World audio for its 50th anniversary, on CD, digital, or otherwise.
That’s not to say that there’s been nothing released since 2013. They’ve just mostly been more in the vein of what would be considered EPs and singles. There’s an album devoted exclusively to Pandora, as well as a collection of music from Animal Kingdom’s nighttime entertainment, such as Rivers of Light and the Tree of Life projection shows. We got a suite of John Williams’ music from Galaxy’s Edge, as well as a selection of music played in Oga’s Cantina. The music from Epcot’s newest nighttime show, Harmonious, was released on digital music stores.
image source: iTunes Store
Although that’s more in line with the way the music industry has worked lately, it shouldn’t preclude new park-related releases or updated mixes of attraction ride-throughs. For example, there’s nothing stopping Disney from releasing a digital single float-through of the current Pirates of the Caribbean, with the movie references and updated auction scene, for $1.99 or something like that (the most recent audio ride-through of this or The Haunted Mansion were released in 2005, on the aforementioned Disneyland 50th box set, and didn’t even include any of the updates from the ’97 revisions, let alone the ’06 refurbs to either attraction). I’ve found several similar mixes on YouTube, albeit using inferior audio sources.
Ultimately, that may be what’s stopping Disney from doing it themselves. Rather than plug the leaks and charge guests for their own audio mixes, it isn’t hurting them to just let the fans do the work themselves; and as long as they’re not asking for any money for them, it’s not necessarily taking money away from Disney. The downside to this is that we still don’t have access to those lost tracks and holy grails mentioned earlier.
Considering the size and devotion of the Disney Parks media collecting group, I think any release, digital or physical, of any or all of this lost content would be nothing but a net positive for Disney. Although nothing has been announced, I’m still hoping for another comprehensive collection of Walt Disney World land and attraction audio similar to the Disneyland one before the end of the 50th anniversary celebration. If one is released, rest assured we will be here with our reviews and opinions on it!
In the meantime…
memed by Utilidork
