World of Color
| World of Color | |
|---|---|
| Park | Disney California Adventure |
| Land / area | Paradise Gardens Park |
| Type | Nighttime water and projection show |
| Opened | June 11, 2010 |
| Designer | Walt Disney Creative Entertainment
|
| Status | Operating |
World of Color is a nighttime show staged on Paradise Bay at Disney California Adventure at the Disneyland Resort in Anaheim, California. It opened to the public on June 11, 2010, following a media premiere the previous evening, as the centrepiece of the park's expansion programme. The production uses more than 1,200 programmable fountains, together with coloured light, lasers, flame, fog and film sequences projected onto screens of mist, all synchronised to music. Several distinct versions of the show have rotated through the bay since 2010.
Development
The show was conceived by Steve Davison, then Disney's vice president for parades and spectaculars, and developed by Walt Disney Creative Entertainment. Its name and theme song reach back to Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color, the anthology television series of the 1960s; the series title song, written by Richard and Robert Sherman, opens the park show as well.
Building the production meant draining Paradise Bay and installing a large submerged platform carrying the fountains, projectors and effects equipment. Assembly, installation and testing of the system took roughly 15 months, within a development period of nearly three years. The show was announced in autumn 2007 as part of the wider reworking of Disney California Adventure, and it launched under the resort's Summer Nightastic! promotion in 2010. A terraced viewing area, Paradise Park, was built on the northern shore of the bay to hold audiences of up to about 4,000 people.
Show elements
The fountain array can throw water as high as 200 feet (61 metres), and individual nozzles are choreographed like dancers, sweeping and pulsing with the score. Images are projected onto mist screens formed by the fountains themselves, supplemented by lighting on surrounding structures such as the Pixar Pal-A-Round wheel and the Incredicoaster. Fire jets, lasers and fog fill out the effects palette, and the whole system is run to a timecoded soundtrack so that water, light and image land on the same musical beats.
The original version ran about 27 minutes and moved through a sequence of scenes drawn from Disney and Pixar films, among them The Little Mermaid, Finding Nemo, Toy Story, Aladdin, The Lion King and Pirates of the Caribbean, closing with a reprise of the theme song. Short encore scenes were sometimes appended to promote new releases, beginning with Tron: Legacy in 2010.
Versions
World of Color has been repeatedly re-edited rather than replaced. Holiday editions have included Winter Dreams, introduced in 2013 with material from Frozen, and Season of Light, which followed in 2016. Celebrate!, hosted by Neil Patrick Harris with Mickey Mouse, was created for Disneyland Park's 60th anniversary in 2015, and a Halloween edition, Villainous!, ran in 2019.
The show closed with the resort in March 2020 and did not return until April 2022. A new edition, World of Color – ONE, debuted on January 27, 2023, for the Disney100 centenary celebration, built around the effect a single act can have, in the manner of a ripple in water. In May 2025, ONE gave way to World of Color Happiness!, created for Disneyland's 70th anniversary, with the underlying fountain and projection platform continuing to support each new programme.