Electric Water Pageant

Electric Water Pageant 1971-Present

The Electric Water Pageant premiered in October 1971, during Walt Disney World’s Dedication Day celebrations, and it may be the most quietly remarkable show Disney has ever made: a parade with no street, no wheels and no park — just fourteen barges of lighted screens towed across the black water of the Seven Seas Lagoon. The idea came from Disney showman Bob Jani, who looked at the darkness over the lagoon and saw a stage. The music in this post is the pageant’s soundtrack.

The procession itself has the cast of a bedtime story about the sea: a four-barge sea serpent leads, followed by a whale, a turtle, an octopus, leaping dolphins and four seahorses, with King Neptune bringing up the rear before every screen flips at once to a stars-and-stripes finale. The music has its own famous lineage. The pageant opened with a version of Perrey and Kingsley’s synthesizer piece “Baroque Hoedown” made specially for it — the same tune that, a year later, became the theme of Disneyland’s Main Street Electrical Parade, which the pageant directly inspired. Later pageant scores traded the Hoedown for other synthesized themes, including Handel’s Water Music in the 1977 edition and Disney film melodies in the version heard today.

And the pageant is, against all odds, still running — one of the very few entertainments from Walt Disney World’s opening month that has never closed. It still makes its circuit on most nights, weather permitting, past the beaches of the Polynesian, the Grand Floridian, the Contemporary and Fort Wilderness, and across Bay Lake. In the archive it keeps company with the Magic Kingdom’s other vintage waterborne classic, the Liberty Belle — retired in 2025, where the pageant sails on — and with the Haunted Mansion, a fellow October 1971 original still receiving guests.