For more then three decades, the Main Street / Disney's Electrical Parade is enchanting people around the world with it's 'spectacular festival pageant of nighttime magic and imagination in thousands of sparkling lights and electro-synthe-magnetic musical sounds'.

The parade, a beloved procession of Disney stories brought to life in shimmering colored lights and bouncy, bubbly music, was created by Bob Jani and Ron Miziker. It soon became one of Disney's most popular attractions ever built.

The predecessor to the Main Street Electrical Parade is the Electrical Water Pageant. One night Bob Jani noticed the perfect darkness surrounding the lakes of the Walt Disney World Resort. While the property was so vast, no horizon or city lights could be seen. The place seemed to him the perfect backdrop for a nighttime spectacular.

In the autumn of 1971, the 'Electrical Water Pageant' parade premiered. The nightly display was made up of a string of fourteen barges that traveled around Seven Seas Lagoon and Bay Lake for the Magic Kingdom area resorts. The vessels featured seven 25-foot tall screens with electrical lights placed on them.

In order to expand it's nightly entertainment offer and to motivate it's personnel (after the Walt Disney World Resort opened), Disney decided to bring the magic of a nighttime spectacular to Disneyland California. Soon the idea of the Main Street Electrical Parade was born. The building of the original parade took place in a warehouse in Chicago and California. Many technical problems had to be solved.

When it originally debuted in 1972, many of the floats of the Main Street Electrical parade were flat screens on rolling platforms (similar to the Electrical Water Pageant). The reason was to increase readability. Walt Disney Imagineers weren't sure how many lights they could put on a float that time and most units were hand pushed or pulled down the street, therefor lights were aligned so you could read them on both sides of the street.

The Blue Fairy was the only 3D float. Although, as soon as the parade went down the street the first night, Imagineers started thinking about three dimensions. When the original parade retired and reopened in 1977, the entire parade was three dimensional.