Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls! Disneyland proudly presents our spectacular festival pageant of nighttime magic and imagination. In thousands of sparkling lights, and electro-synthe-magnetic musical sounds: the Main Street Electrical Parade!

I realize this is not my usual take. Not a movie; not a short. Not really live action; not really a cartoon. Closer, I suppose, to live action? I mean, it happened live in front of me every year when I was growing up. I was heartbroken when I discovered they were ending it. My mom actually bought me one of the bulbs for Christmas that year; they were selling them for charity. I’m given to understand they’re bringing it back for the anniversary, but why take it away at all?

The idea was much more astounding in 1972, of course. After all, you had to rely on enough battery power to get those floats to stay lit all the way from Small World to the Firehouse (a distance I’ve actually marched three times that is longer than people may realize), and that was no mean feat. Disney started using nickel-cadmium batteries at the studio and speculated that they’d work for the parade. Miniature light bulbs were fairly new at the time as well. And while it’s now actually possible, if you are more technically adept than I, to make the light-up clothing from Tron in the comfort of your own home, having light-up clothing was a new concept then.

And literally shocking, it seems, before they got the technology right. Sparking, certainly. The first rehearsal was a disaster, with a float actually crashing into a building. Then again, a Rose Parade float caught fire once when I was a kid (the last time IHOP had a float in the parade, I believe), and that parade had been around for decades by then.

It’s probably hard to express the wonder of the thing today. I’m watching the parade on YouTube as I write, and it does, I admit, look a little clunky by the standards of modern technology. I find myself hoping they’ve replaced as many of those bulbs as possible with LEDs or something, because my friends and I always used to joke that the worst job at Disneyland was definitely being the person who replaced the bulbs. That has to be a tedious job.

Still, as I watch, I can imagine myself there. Even as a teenager, I would still watch, but what I’m really remembering is being a small child. Four or five, even. Sitting on the sidewalk with my older sister. The park lights were dimmed, of course, the better to let the parade itself show up. The only time we were allowed up that late, much less allowed outside that late, was our annual family vacation to Disneyland. So there we were, my family together, waiting. Starting to get cold, even though it was August or September, because after all it was night and we weren’t moving. Knowing that, if we went anywhere, we’d lose our spot and probably not be able to see. And then, the music and the lights and the costumes.

I won’t say we were enraptured the whole time. I was listening to “Baroque Hoedown,” the theme, last night, and I told Simon that my dad’s favourite part had been the calliope. He refused to believe that any human would have such awful taste, and I frankly remember agreeing with him pretty firmly. Even as I got older, I still hated it, and Mom still reminded us every year that it had been the part Dad liked best. But the whole time that wasn’t the calliope? Sure, I’ll go there.

In a way, I’m glad that I graduated from high school when I did. I left before the parade did. We’d gone every summer of my childhood, and the day ended pretty much the same way every time. The parade, the fireworks, ice cream at the Carnation Plaza, picking out our treat for the day at the Emporium. Sometimes, rarely, we’d stick around to watch the night’s second parade, going the other direction so all the floats could get back to their storage place. I haven’t been back to Disneyland in the summer since then, and I’m not completely sure I’d want to go if I weren’t certain the parade would be there, too.