As Disneyland has kicked off its 70th anniversary, one thing many guests are missing is a great big daytime parade. As readers of this blog know, it used to be the case that every summer season at Disneyland was marked with a new parade, especially in the milestone years. True, a couple had run a little longer. The holidays saw long-running parades that had been changed only a couple of times. And there was a nighttime parade that had run for years and years.
The summer of 1995 was something of an anomaly, then, as The Lion King Celebration (that is its proper title) kicked off a full second season. Guests who may have been looking for a new parade might have been disappointed, but most guests were happy to see the return of this popular parade.
When The Lion King Celebration first stepped off on July 1, 1994, the movie had just opened. It would prove to be an enormous hit. Preceded by Aladdin’s Royal Caravan, The Lion King Celebration would be the second of four parades in the 90s tied to the opening of a hit film. The last two were Hercules’ Victory Parade and the Mulan Parade.
This parade featured six elaborate floats, over 75 performers, acrobats, musicians, puppetry, and even some mechanically controlled elements. Leading off the whole thing were some friendly rhinoceroses, who ambled along, ducking their heads, blinking their eyes, and even stopping to nuzzle a few of the younger guests.
Following them was the title float, carrying Rafiki holding his staff. Elaborately costumed dancers accompanied him.
The next floats were the Gazelle Tree, the Bull Elephant, the Rain Forest, and the Drum Dancers. The predominant musical theme of the parade was Simba’s joyful tune, I Just Can’t Wait to Be King. There were four show stops along the parade route, each lasting about five minutes.
The finale was the Pride Rock float, with adult Simba and Nala portrayed in full scale.
As the parade made its way through the streets of Disneyland for this second full season in 1995, no one knew that it was destined to run yet another full year. When its final performance was given on June 1, 1997, it was to make way for Hercules’ Victory Parade.
As many Disney fans know, this was not the final curtain for The Lion King Celebration. Four of the elaborate floats were taken to Walt Disney World and incorporated into a new stage production at Disney’s Animal Kingdom. The Festival of the Lion King was a mainstay of the Camp Minnie-Mickey area from the opening of the park in 1998 until the area was closed in 2015 to create Pandora. The show was then relocated to the Africa section of Animal Kingdom, and continued to run in a revised version and title through the present (with a hiatus due to COVID-19). As of this writing, it is the longest-running attraction at Disney’s Animal Kingdom. And to think, all this started out on Main Street USA, thirty years ago at Disneyland.
