SpectroMagic is an evening parade presented semi-nightly at Disney's Magic
Kingdom in the Walt Disney World Resort in Lake Buena Vista, Florida. Produced
by longtime Disney Show Producer Ron Logan, it is similar to the Main Street
Electrical Parade, which was its predecessor. The parade incorporates elaborate,
brightly lit floats, a musical score, and many sound effects. The floats are
populated with Disney characters and represent scenes from Disney's movies and
short films.
In the parade there 29 units, and 7 whilry units giving a grand total of 36
units in the parade.
Disney refers to floats as "units." Each unit has a driver cleverly hidden in
the unit. All audio is controlled through DTMF tones tramsmitted by RF signals
from the antennas on Cinderella's Castle to each unit. Each unit has its own
audio themed to the unit that gets overlayed on top of the parades theme which
plays on the zone speakers, between units, along the sides of the parade route.
Each zone is anywhere between 70 to 80 ft in length. When a unit enters a zone,
the audio is faded into the zone speakers. The on-unit speakers play the audio
and special sound effects for the individual units, while the zone speakers play
the audio of the unit laid over the parade theme. The audio is stored on the
unit as digitally encoded information. The lighting effects and other special
effects are all controlled by on-board computers which inititate their own cues
using a Programmable Logic Controller. The cues are sent via the antennas to the
units. The main control center is located under Main Street USA. The PC
(Production Center) is where all Magic Kingdom parades are stored. It is located
behind Pirates of the Caribbean and Splash Mountain. In its original run in 1992
most units used Amiga software developed by Richmond Sound Design Ltd. running
on Amiga computers to generate animations that were synchronized via MIDI Time
Code with the local audio and projected onto the side of the unit.
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