After nearly 10 years of waiting, Magic Kingdom finally has a nighttime parade once again. But is Disney Starlight: Dream the Night Away a worthy successor to SpectroMagic or the Main Street Electrical Parade?

Introduction

When you talk about Disney Parks, one of the first things that comes to mind is parades, and it’s hard to imagine Magic Kingdom without a nighttime parade. If you were to ask someone unfamiliar with Walt Disney World what sort of things they would find at the famous theme park, they would likely list things like fireworks, a castle, and a parade. As a result, the announcement of a nighttime parade is a big deal, likely a bigger impact than most attractions a park could add.

Many of us at WDWNT have been around long enough to have seen several incarnations of the nighttime offering, from Main Street Electrical Parade to SpectroMagic. We have also traveled around the world to view parades at the international parks, such as Tokyo Disneyland Electrical Parade Dreamlights (which will forever ruin you on these parades if you haven’t seen it). Given this experience, if Disney Starlight is your first Disney nighttime parade, you might have a very different opinion from us.

We also have to note that expectations for Disney Starlight were extremely high. The lack of a nighttime parade at Magic Kingdom since 2016 has left a major entertainment gap at Magic Kingdom. While the Festival of Fantasy parade is very good (better in its pre-COVID incarnation), there still felt like there was something missing.

To make this review easier to follow, we will break down the parade in the order that the floats of Disney Starlight appear, beginning with the Blue Fairy.

Blue Fairy

Kicking things off, we love the inclusion of Baroque Hoedown from Main Street Electrical Parade in the fanfare at the start of the parade. The moment the lights go out and the orchestral score kicks in also feels very reminiscent of SpectroMagic.

Blue Fairy leads this parade, which keeps in tradition with her leading the Main Street Electrical Parade and Dreamlights. We think Disney did a good job here — she’s at the right height, the float is pretty… until you get to the back.

Pinocchio and Gepetto are “inside” what looks like a glass box behind the Blue Fairy’s dress. When she initially passed us, the lights inside that section were not on, and we couldn’t tell what was going on. We had thought that perhaps this was Disney’s take on the title float for this parade, and the logo might appear, but the title float actually comes at the end of the entire show this time around.

We’re not sure what Pinocchio and Gepetto are boxed inside of, but whatever it is, it’s not seamless. We’ve seen this disappearing-reappearing effect done better before, and as it is now, it looks cheap. The lighting strips above them are also way too visible, should you be seated on the curb watching.

Wish

Our first indication that this parade was going to be short was the lack of any real breathing room between Blue Fairy and the Wish float. Usually, you have a slow fade into the next unit with dancers, small rolling units. or “tweener” floats, or something of the sort.

This is the moment where we thought, “We could’ve built that” (and that’s not a compliment). You can see every seam of the mesh material used on the tree of this float, and in some cases, where it was stapled on. We’d go so far as to call it embarrassing. We do wish that Valentino the goat had moved here, and that Star could’ve been more than just a screen. In addition, the float is incredibly small.

Encanto

The butterfly “dancers” that lead the Encanto float might be the lowest moment of any parade we’ve ever seen in a Disney Park. You can’t see the dancers at all as they’re entirely blocked out in dark fabric, and all you can see are the butterflies on sticks coming out of the top of their heads.

The butterflies are edge-lit plexiglass and aren’t bright at all. The “choreography,” if you could call it that, is also quite stiff, and we don’t understand the choice of having them march about. Besides that, it’s kind of frightening to see solely smiling faces and poorly built bobbing butterflies coming towards you in the dark.

The Encanto float works well, even with the screens. Mirabel’s performance gave the unit most of its life. We wish Isabela had been swinging more, but it doesn’t appear she’s allowed to. Bruno and the illuminated rats on the back of the float were also cute.

However, we have to ask about the inflatable flame at the top of the screen candle. We’ve seen Disney do seamless inflatable set pieces before. Why can we see the seams here? Or why did they not do something similar to Lumiere’s flames in Paint the Night (material blown upward by a fan and lit from below) if the height of the float was a problem?

Frozen

Once again, we have to talk about the dancers that lead the floats — in this case, the spirits that summon Elsa in Frozen 2. Once again, the performers are stuck doing a weird marching choreography, and the illuminated fractals don’t do anything interesting. They look like they could be spun, but it just doesn’t happen. At least they’re bigger and brighter than the butterflies, but there’s still not enough movement.

We like the Frozen float enough, though it’s still small with just one character. It offers a good use of screens behind Elsa, though we wish that it could’ve looked like natural ice at points and not showcased the edge of the screens underneath the ice. Going with Frozen 2 was also a weird choice to us, and Elsa’s costume in that film is boring in comparison to the one from the first film. There’s no comparing this float to the Frozen float in Paint the Night; it’s not even close.

Disney Princesses and Princes

With the Disney Princesses and Princes float, we finally have dancers with actual choreography! Their costumes are nicely lit with the conceit that they are supposed to look like dancing starlight. It would be nice to actually see their full costumes, but we’re just glad we can see good choreography.

This unit is nice and big. We like the mix of characters here, the music, and the changing of lights to match the Princess’s movie playing at that point. We like that this is an homage to the Main Street Electrical Parade’s Cinderella segment with the fountain at the center.

The lights on the characters’ costumes are quite sparse, but the characters are well-lit. Sadly, the lights around the bases on this float and many others feel sparse, perhaps not even bathing the “millions of sparkling lights” that would have been found in Magic Kingdom’s nighttime parades starting in 1977.

Coco

There are things we love about the Coco float, and some things that we hate. Some characters in Disney Starlight have lit costumes; Miguel is just wearing a costume with no lights, but appears to be illuminated via blacklight.

The “fireworks” towards the back of this float are very cool. It’s essentially a giant billboard that illuminates with different fireworks shapes, such as trademark skulls from the film. The scenic design of this float is one of the strongest in this parade, showing snippets of the land of the dead.

There is movement on this float, too! Pepita’s wings open, albeit very slowly and not in any sort of impressive way. All of her joints and seams are very visible. The Dante figure, however, drove us crazy; he’s the same sculpt from Magic Happens at Disneyland, where he would jump up and change between his living and alebrije form along the marigold bridge. The use of Dante in that parade was cute and charming. Here, he’s just static and stuck on the float with no effort.

Moana

Once again, there is a group of dancers leading this float. Here, there are seven (yeah, seven) dancers with fabric covered in lights to serve as the “waves” that Moana floats on. Like the other dancers, we can’t see their costumes at all, and the lighting on the “waves” is quite dim. All the dancers do is flap the fabric around, which isn’t impressive, but it at least heralds and complements the waves Moana rides upon.

We do like the Moana float, though. Blue always looks good in lights, and this is one case where the lights are not attached willy-nilly, but have an intended formation and shape. It’s nice that Moana is also positioned high up on the float so everyone can see her.

The spirit of Moana’s grandmother appears as a manta ray that pops up out from the center of the float, and sits there for a second before going back down. It’s another super basic movement, and the figure itself shakes around a lot — whether it’s because it’s not secured well, but the unintended shaking is very apparent.

Peter Pan & Wendy

This float is very clearly based on the Peter Pan unit in the Dreaming Up daytime parade at Tokyo Disneyland. In that parade, Peter Pan and Wendy were rigged to fly side by side on the float, and it was incredible. Clearly, that’s what this float is supposed to do, though we’re unsure why they aren’t flying now. Without that effect, this float is missing a lot.

The float happens to be pretty without the stunt, though, and we love the Big Ben clock at the front. If and when Peter and Wendy are able to fly, that will add a lot to this parade. It is a stunning moment to experience. We hope this gets figured out soon.

Leading the float is Tinker Bell, who typically flies but is walking down the street in this parade for some reason. It’s confusing to opt for making a character known for flying, and who has flown in other parades, walk down the route.

Whimsy the Train

WE. LOVE. WHIMSY. You can tell that so much work went into the making of this float, and he feels very much alive and in tune with the music. His face is a screen, but it’s a perfect use of such a technology. The smoke coming from his stacks also brings much-needed kinetic energy to the parade that most of the floats lack.

Overall, we love this float, but the lack of movement issue comes into play again here, where the various train “cars” are angled awkwardly but don’t actually move or rotate when they look like they should.

This is the only unit where the strands of light circling the float aren’t in segments and misaligned. Why are the earlier floats so poorly constructed, but this one was done in a logical manner? We hope this was just due to time constraints and will be corrected.

We love what happens musically here, and this section includes one of our favorite covers of Baroque Hoedown, period. Say what you will about this parade’s score, but the beginning and end are phenomenal. We also enjoyed Mickey and Minnie talking in this section, a callback to many moments in past parades we love.

If every float were as big as this float, and if there were 15 of them, this would be a very good parade.

Title Float

Having the title float at the end of the parade is a little weird, yes, but it’s been done before. On the back of this float is a screen, which features new animation of Jiminy Cricket as an homage to the finale of SpectroMagic. It’s easy to miss him as he’s not onscreen for long, so we’d suggest following the parade a bit at the end if you don’t see him.

Disney Starlight Parade Final Thoughts

“Disappointed” is the word we would use to describe how we feel about Disney Starlight, along with “incomplete” and overall, “lackluster.” We would almost rather not have a nighttime parade at all if it’s not everything that it could be.

There’s no flow to the story and no build-up of emotion. The fact that we would rather see old parades from 1977, 1991, or 2015 (in the case of Paint the Night) over a new parade from 2025 says something about what little effort Walt Disney World management makes to exceed expectations. This parade feels like doing the bare minimum to make guests happy enough. If you’ve never seen a Disney nighttime parade and you book a vacation to Walt Disney World, sit on the curb, and look up, you’re going to be wildly impressed —which Disney knows they can get away with… but is that the right thing to do?

The legacy of Disney nighttime parades is so strong that there aren’t many bad ones to list. For us, it would rank second from the bottom, above Light Magic at Disneyland Park.

We are glad that there is a nighttime parade once again at Magic Kingdom, and we’re happy that guests will benefit from that addition. We hope that a few things get fixed, and maybe in a year or two, this parade gets some money sprinkled on it, and we see a few new floats added or new props and costumes for the dancers. If this is all we’re going to get for the next decade, we sincerely hope the plan is to plus this parade up over time. It has the potential to be great, but it simply looks like the budget was not there.

Disney Starlight Parade Review Video

Watch Tom and Jason’s full honest review below:

Disney Starlight Parade Full POV Video

Also, watch our full parade POV of Disney Starlight: Dream the Night Away:

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Gretchen McDermid