Main Street Electrical Parade

Main Street Electrical Parade
The Minnie (left) and Mickey (right) drum float, with the parade's logo in the middle
Disneyland
Status	Operating
Opening date	June 17, 1972 January 20, 2017
Closing date	November 25, 1996 June 18, 2017
Replaced	Paint the Night (2015-2016)
Replaced by	Light Magic (1997) Paint the Night (2015-2017)
Magic Kingdom
Status	Closed
Opening date	June 11, 1977 May 21, 1999 June 5, 2010
Closing date	September 14, 1991 April 1, 2001 October 9, 2016
Replaced	SpectroMagic
Replaced by	1991 SpectroMagic 2016 TBD
Tokyo Disneyland
Name	Tokyo Disneyland Electrical Parade: DreamLights
Status	Operating
Opening date	March 9, 1985 (original) June 17, 2001 (Dreamlights)
Closing date	June 21, 1995 (original)
Replaced	Disney's Fantillusion
Replaced by	Disney's Fantillusion
Disneyland Park (Paris)
Status	Closed
Opening date	April 12, 1992
Closing date	March 23, 2003
Replaced by	Disney's Fantillusion
Disney California Adventure
Name	Disney's Electrical Parade
Status	Closed
Opening date	July 3, 2001
Closing date	April 18, 2010
General statistics
Attraction type	Parade

The Main Street Electrical Parade is a regularly scheduled parade, created by Bob Jani and project director Ron Miziker, famous for its long run at Disneyland at the Disneyland Resort in California and Walt Disney World at the Magic Kingdom Park in Florida. It features floats and live performers covered in thousands of electronically controlled lights and a synchronized soundtrack triggered by radio control along key areas of the parade route. The parade has also spun off several other versions that ran or continue to run at Disney parks around the world. Currently, an updated version runs at Tokyo Disneyland as the Tokyo Disneyland Electrical Parade: DreamLights. In 2014, Hong Kong Disneyland premiered a spiritual successor to the Main Street Electrical Parade, the Paint the Night Parade, which, like its predecessor, features "Baroque Hoedown" as its theme song. An extended version of Paint the Night premiered at Disneyland on May 22, 2015 as part of the park's 60th anniversary celebration.

The original Disneyland copy of the parade ran at Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom as "Disney's Main Street Electrical Parade" from June 5, 2010 to October 9, 2016, when it closed in preparation for a limited-time run at Disneyland which started January 20, 2017 and will run through June 18, 2017, marking the 45th anniversary of the parade.

The predecessor to the 1972 Disneyland Main Street Electrical Parade is the Electrical Water Pageant, a show made up of fourteen 25-foot-tall (7.6 m) screens with electrical lights placed on them. The screens are placed on a string of seven barges that travel around the Seven Seas Lagoon in front of the Magic Kingdom at the Walt Disney World Resort. The Electrical Water Pageant has been showing since October 26, 1971, just weeks after the Walt Disney World Resort opened.

Not long after the Electrical Water Pageant debuted, Card Walker commissioned the development of what became the Main Street Electrical Parade to provide Disneyland with a similar nighttime visual spectacle. The Parade's design used nickel–cadmium batteries, which the Disney movie studio had recently started using, and Italian-made miniature bulbs that Disneyland staff had seen in light displays along Michigan Avenue in Chicago, Illinois. Disney arranged for the Parade's original floats to be constructed by the Chicago-based company responsible for those holiday displays.