Disney on Ice review

My wife and I took our daughters to see Disney on Ice last night. The show was broken up into four parts with Mickey and his gang serving as MCs.

The first segment consisted of the cars from the movie Cars driving around the ice as they helped Mickey's car get up and running after a breakdown. While there wasn't much to the actual story here the cars themselves were very impressive. They really looked like the vehicles from the movie and moved around with quite a bit of maneuverability.

After the excitement of seeing, Mickey, Minnie, Goofy, and Donald the Cars gang kind of played second fiddle for my kids but they definitely got into the music.

On a side note, if I had to guess, I'd say a majority of the prop and design budget for the entire show went into the fabrication of the cars. The reason I say this is because the sets for the next two segments were pretty unimpressive.

The next mini-show was an on ice reenactment of Disney's The Little Mermaid. The aforementioned set consisted of a large rock-type formation at the back of the stage that the performers primarily used as an area to reenact the on-land parts of the story.

This was a pretty decent retelling of Ariel's story and they had all the major characters and songs. They definitely utilized all their performers when singing songs such as Under the Sea. However, for my children's taste, and I'd say for my wife and mine as well, there was a little too much isolated skating in the center of the ring. While impressive at a low-level Olympic level, the skating seemed to drag and I eyed many restless children throughout our section.

Next up was an abbreviated retelling of The Lion King. Like mermaid, this too suffered from some extended skating or doubles skating. Impressive to watch for sure, but still, the kids could really care less to see humans with lion make-up and tails skate around tossing each other up and down.

That being said, the most impressive portion of the entire night's show came when they reenacted Mufasa falling to the wildebeests. The serious music starts up, Simba comes out alone and then about twelve performers burst out of the curtain, each adorned with three wildebeest-like flowing fabrics, one attached to their heads and the other two attached to their arms.

The effect was surprisingly good. When the twelve performers swooshed around Mufasa and Simba you really felt their peril. The director of this segment really deserves lots of praise.

After a much needed intermission, it was time to tell the story of Tinker Bell as told in the direct-to-DVD releases Disney has been putting out. Kaylee, my two-year-old, loves these DVDs and she was excited to see Tinker Bell. They were pretty faithful to the first DVD that introduces the world of Pixie Hollow and Tinker Bell and her gang of elemental fairies.

The highlight of the Tinker Bell segment was the grand finale where all the performers come out and celebrate the saving of the season. Mickey and his gang join in on the festivities and there's lots of ribbons popping and flowers blooming and it's was a great way to end the show.

All in all I'd say Disney put on a pretty good show. Be prepared to pay large amounts of money if you want any type of Disnified snack or prop. Disney is too good at this type of thing. They make all of the drink and cotton candy containers very cute and made of plastic so you hand over your twelve dollars like a good little Disney zombie.

My whole family really had a good time and I anticipate that the program book that we picked up (ten dollars thank you Mr. Zombie) will be a thoroughly destroyed, I mean well-read, souvenir in our house.