It would seem that not a single thing, other than Tiana’s Bayou Adventure, which was designed during Bob Chapek’s brief tenure as CEO of the Walt Disney Company, shall remain in place at Disney World.
They were compared to “death tacos,” a portal to hell, and hideous concert structures. Now, the barges and ring that have obscured views all over Epcot may be heading out. According to WDW Magic, not only is Disney World ridding itself of the Chapek-designed Harmonios fireworks show, but they’re even tearing down the highly expensive infrastructure that goes with it.
The show will be replaced with “EPCOT Forever” as an interim show, debuting April 3 2023. A brand-new EPCOT firework show will debut later in 2023.
Disney has also confirmed that there will be a phased removal of the fireworks platform in World Showcase lagoon.
In our review of Harmonious, I heavily criticized what our author perceived to be a glorified Disney Sing-a-Long. The same was true of Disney’s 50th Anniversary fireworks show at Magic Kingdom, but at least in that case there were no giant eyesores that stayed around all day long. The expense that Disney will incur to remove what were already extremely pricey pieces of technology to install is a sign of just how loathed Harmonious must have been. While we don’t have the internal data that Disney surely has, the show is so unpopular that Disney is willing to take it on the chin in the following ways:
- Waste the expenses of building Harmonious by only running it for a single year.
- Spend vast amounts of money deconstructing it and the underwater systems.
- Incur further expenses developing a new show, whatever that might be.
- Run an interim show for the third time… this time for much of the year… potentially costing the park nighttime interest.
All of that is to say, the internal data for just how much people disliked Harmonious must be tremendous. And perhaps Disney and I are not so far off in how we perceive a path forward. After all, a year ago when I did the review for Harmonious, I ended it with this:
So in summary, they’ve replaced a beautiful nighttime show at Walt Disney World about the unity of mankind into a Disney sing-along in different languages (but mostly English). They won’t do what I recommend, but I think they should just honestly fess up to the egg on their face, scrap Harmonious as it is, and go back to Epcot Forever during the 50th. Retool all the graphics, the narrative, create an original score, and come back with something befitting Epcot at night. As is, Harmonious is embarrassingly bad.
And that’s exactly what they did.
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