Date Night At Disneyland: Disney Flashback Friday

It's hard to believe it's Friday again and already time for another "Flashback"! With all the hubbub surrounding the D23 Expo this past week, we almost forgot!  But luckily for everyone we didn't so here we go.

I was sitting around listening to music from Disneyland this past week off of my "A Musical History of Disneyland" set and came across one called "Let's Dance At Disneyland", by a group called The Elliott Brothers Band.  The song was recorded and cut for a record in 1956 (so just one year after Disneyland Park officially opened), called Date Night at Disneyland.  If you're interested in hearing part of what the song sounds like, you can check it out here on the iTunes website where you can buy the entire album should you so desire.  I may just have to myself one of these days.

At any rate, through a little bit (and I do mean a little bit) of research, it appears that back in the early days (and some people report into the 70s even), Disneyland hosted "Date Night at Disneyland" events on the weekends.  Bands would come in (such as The Elliott Brothers), special ticket books would be sold (you can see one from the 1960s on this Vintage Disneyland Tickets blog), and couples would come out and dance the night away in the Plaza Gardens.  Sounds pretty cool to me!  Well, other than the dancing part because I have four left feet.  They still do something very similar to this many weekends with swing dancing in the now Carnation Plaza Gardens, if we're not too terribly wrong about it.

The confluence of several events led to my deciding to feature "Date Nights at Disneyland" in this week's flashback:

• I was listening to a song about said "Date Nights at Disneyland"
• It was performed by a band called "The Elliott Brothers" which is my last name (they even spelled it correctly!)
• Word came out at D23 last weekend that the Carnation Plaza Gardens would be leaving us soon to make way for a new Fantasyland Fantasy-Faire

Seemed like a sign from above to me!

Without belaboring it too much more, Disneyland is one of my, if not my absolute, favorite places to take my wife on a date.  We don't get to much anymore because of all of our responsibilities with work and the kids, but if given the opportunity it's where we'll wind up most of the time.  There's just something magical about being there with the person you care most about in the world, your best friend, and it's something that Disneyland obviously knew from the beginning and has kept alive lo these many years.  And it's something that I think both of us look forward to being able to partake in for years to come.

So that's what I'm sharing today.  Are you a "Date Night at Disneyland" person?  Have a great "Date Night" story you'd like to share?  Leave us a comment because we'd love to hear from you.  In the meantime, it's an "Elliott Date Night at Disneyland".  Enjoy!

DitP Music: A Musical History Of Disneyland

We wrote an article a month or so ago about the music we listened to as we are on our way out to The Park, and about how we think that our trips into The Park are very much defined by the music we hear while we are there.  We got a lot of good comments about our selection and playlist, but we've been looking for an opportunity to expand on that post for a while now, and the opportunity presented itself a couple of weeks ago when a certain item arrived in our mailbox.  But the process that got us to this point actually started way back in the beginning around the same time we wrote our original article.

Around the time we began publishing articles on Days In The Park, and around the time we began actually communicating with others on Twitter, we began to follow and be followed by Chris Reid (Twitter @CosmicReid).  At the time, my view of Disney music was still pretty narrowly tied into what I had on CD myself, what I knew from the movies and cartoons, and what I actually heard while we at The Parks; not much else.  I knew how important it is, and it was easy to say how important it is, but it was still a pretty narrow view regardless.  That is, until I started paying attention to what Chris was tweeting.  I found out that he was the proprietor of a little site himself called 'Cosmic Reid's Starlight Cafe'.  I decided to give it a look see and found out that on Mondays he was the host of a radio show on 'Magical Mouse Radio'.  Once again, my narrow view shamed me.  I had no clue that there were radio stations on the internet whose sole purpose was to bring Disney music to the masses.  And not just music from the movies, either, but honest to goodness music from The Parks; both The Land and The World.

I waited for a Monday when I knew I'd be in my bedroom (where the PC is) wrestling with laundry or some other such inane project and tuned in to see just what the show was about.  The only way I could describe it was wonderment.  Chris had me at Haunted Mansion Holiday.  I couldn't believe I was sitting in my bedroom listening to the actual ride soundtrack (you're probaby dying of laughter at me and my ignorance at this point).  I inhaled the show (and the repeat later; I wanted to hear Haunted Mansion again) and listened to 'Magical Mouse' off and on the rest of the week until the 'Starlight Cafe' came on again the next week, where Chris again floored me with the ride soundtrack/medley for my other favorite ride, Splash Mountain.  My mission was clear.  As much as I enjoyed listening to the 'Starlight' every week (and I still do whenever I can) I needed to have this music for myself.  Little did I know how easy it would be.

It still took a few weeks until I remembered I was supposed to be on the hunt.  But a couple of weeks ago I was sitting on the computer listening to a podcast (probably Tales From The Mouse House) which featured some music from California Adventure when I remembered.  I immediately pulled up my browser, went to Amazon, typed in "music from disneyland" and there it was, the first item returned:  'A Musical History of Disneyland'.  I'm not quite sure exactly what happened next, but two days later a package arrived at my door and the set was inside.  I can only assume I clicked the Buy button on the website.  I don't even remember thinking about it, but I'm sure if I had the result would have been the same. 

For anyone living in the darkness as I was, 'A Musical History of Disneyland' is a six CD set, originally released in 2005 for the 50th Anniversary celebration at Disneyland Park, that is just what it claims to be, a musical history of The Park.  Over the course of the 6-CDs the music carries you through every land in The Park, starting on Main Street and Walt's dedication of The Park all the way through Tomorrowland and Space Mountain, and is wrapped up in a neat little package on Disc 6 which contains "special" music from around The Park including Fantasmic!, the Main Street Electrical Parade (no longer there), and of course, the one that started this whole thing for me, Haunted Mansion Holiday. 

It is absolutely fantastic in its cumulative inclusion of almost everything you could want from The Park.  Want to hear Great Moments With Mr. Lincoln?  There.  The entire Enchanted Tiki Room show?  There.  The original Pirates of the Caribbean?  There.  The flippin' People Mover'?  There.  This could go on all day.  I won't give you a complete rundown of everything here, you can find a link for that here, but I can say this without hesitation:  if it's Disneyland, and you can think of it, it's probably here in some shape or form (my wife's favorite is The Country Bear Jamboree; the smile she had listening to it was priceless).  It's a whopping 8 hours of Disneyland goodness, both past and present, in digital form that you simply can't go wrong with. 

And as if that's not enough, it also includes an absolutely beautiful book that traces the musical history of The Park right alongside the CDs with tons of gorgeous pictures and writing.  It's absolutely amazing!

About the only possible "con" we could think of is that it's only Disneyland Park, and not Disney California Adventure.  Easily fixed, however, as a subsequent visit to "Off The Page" in The Hollywood Backlot yielded this little beauty:  the "Official Album of the Disneyland Resort".  Whatever gaps may have existed prior, consider them filled.  We can now listen to 'California Screamin' and 'Soarin' Over California' just as easily as anything else.  And at roughly 10 hours of music (between all 8 CDs), we figure we can easily make 20 or so trips out to The Park and rarely hear the same song twice.  Vunderbar!

I owe a huge thanks to 'Cosmic Reid's Starlight Cafe'.  It might seem a simple thing to others, but Chris' show and its music truly lit a fire in me to make these tunes a part of my own musical collection and to a large extent, my everyday life.  I couldn't be more grateful.  Sitting on my sofa and listening to the "Remember... Dreams Come True" fireworks show with my children and remembering the first time we ever saw it together is something that simply has no price-tag attached to it, and it all began with his radio show.

If you'd like to listen to the 'Cafe' yourself, you can find out all about the show (and 'Magical Mouse Radio') at the 'Cosmic Reid's Starlight Cafe' website, or follow Chris on Twitter @CosmicReid.  And you can catch his show live every Monday at 10am (PST) - 1pm (EST).