Once Upon a Time (show)
Once Upon a Time — billed in full as Once Upon A Time: Where Stories Take You Anywhere — was a nighttime projection show performed on Cinderella Castle at Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World in Florida. Using projection mapping to wrap the castle in animated imagery, the show was framed as a series of bedtime stories told by Mrs. Potts to Chip from Beauty and the Beast. Adapted from a Tokyo Disneyland spectacular of the same name, it played at Magic Kingdom from November 4, 2016 until the park's COVID-19 closure in March 2020, and did not return.[1]
History
The original Once Upon a Time premiered at Tokyo Disneyland on May 29, 2014. The Tokyo production was that park's main nighttime spectacular, a roughly 19-minute presentation combining projection mapping with fireworks, lasers, fire effects and searchlights.[1]
At Magic Kingdom, castle projection shows had begun with The Magic, The Memories, and You! in 2011, followed by Celebrate the Magic, which ran for four years from 2012. On October 26, 2016, Disney announced that Celebrate the Magic would end on November 3 and that a version of Tokyo's Once Upon a Time would replace it the following day, as part of Magic Kingdom's 45th anniversary observances and coinciding with the 25th anniversary of Beauty and the Beast.[2][3]
The show debuted on November 4, 2016, initially as a companion piece to the Wishes fireworks, and continued after Wishes was replaced by Happily Ever After in 2017. Lasers were added to the production in June 2017.[1] Its final performance came on March 12, 2020, days before Walt Disney World closed for the COVID-19 pandemic; the show never resumed, and Magic Kingdom's evening castle entertainment was eventually consolidated into its fireworks spectaculars.[4]
Synopsis
The fourteen-and-a-half-minute Magic Kingdom version was a gentler production than its Tokyo parent: it used minimised pyrotechnics, no fire effects, and a greater reliance on searchlights, keeping the emphasis on the projections themselves.[1]
The framing device is a bedroom in the Beast's castle, where Mrs. Potts tells Chip a bedtime story. As she begins — "once upon a time…" — the pair are drawn into the pages of a storybook, and Cinderella Castle becomes the book itself, its towers and turrets re-dressed scene by scene to match each tale. Stories visited include Cinderella, with the castle transformed for the ball and the race against midnight; Peter Pan, flying over London to Never Land; Alice in Wonderland; The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh; and Beauty and the Beast, before a Frozen sequence drawn from a winter variant of the Tokyo show replaced the Snow White and Tangled scenes used in Japan.[5][1]
Because the projections were mapped precisely to the castle's architecture, windows lit, banners unfurled and whole facades appeared to crumble or bloom in three dimensions — an effect contemporary reports described as covering "every nook and cranny" of the building.[6] The show closed by returning to Mrs. Potts and Chip as the storybook closed, positioning the performance as the park's goodnight story before — or after — the evening fireworks.