Tuesday, April 02, 2013

The Entertainment Committee, Tomorrowland

One of Tomorrowland's supa-cool features is the stage that appears to be a ordinary futuristic sculpture garden. But, several times a day, it suddenly begins to rise! Higher and higher, until a stage (complete with a groovy band) is revealed! (Notice the Carousel of Progress in the background).


This time it's "The Entertainment Committee". I've always wondered if the bands such as "Sunshine Balloon" and "The New Establishment" and their members (almost always a female singer backed by an all-male band) were interchangeable. "Today you are going to be 'The Aggregation' ". I am assuming that these bands existed only within Disneyland's berm.


Costumed character frequently showed up to dance and frolic. In this case it was Snow White and her Dwarfs... looks like the band is acknowledging the arrival of such big stars!

10 comments:

  1. Nice catch of the emerging stage.

    I love the GE icon. In the background you can also see parts of the Tomorrowland Autopia marquee, some aqua Skyway buckets and a red PeopleMover vehicle.

    I also wondered if the Tomorrowland Terrace bands were strictly in-house bands too. Nice set today!

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  2. Pepsi, polyester and pop music. Groovy man. I miss (some of) the 60's-70's.

    This is the dawning of the age of Aggrigation, age of Aggriga...tion.

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  3. Ahhh, safe, Disneyland bands - Sunshine Balloon, Lazer, Polo, Krash, Sound Castle Ltd., & Voyager - cover bands, all - many quite good. (But oh those names-!)

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  4. There's something extra delightful about instamatic photos. Whether its the warmish color skew or the overall soft focus, they seem to capture the essence of the time like nothing else. Great angles!

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  5. K. Martinez, I love that the photographer managed to take several pictures of the stage rising, especially back in the days when a frame on your roll of film was a precious thing.

    Alonzo, it's funny, when I was a kid I thought "NOBODY is going to be nostalgic for the 70's". How wrong I was!

    Nanook, wow, you know a lot more names than I ever did. I wish I knew if many of them were basically the same band with a different name.

    Tom, I agree; while I love the clarity and color of a 35mm slide, there is something very nostalgic about a vintage print. It reminds me of going through my mom's many boxes of photos.

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  6. We visited Disneyland in 1971, when I was not quite 9. I remember Debbie Reynolds was playing on the Tomorrowland Terrace stage. I just Googled it, and found an archived article of the San Bernardino County Sun announcing that she was playing from July 12-23, 1971 on the Terrace. The Supremes (sans Diana Ross), Patti Page and Leslie Uggams were all scheduled to play in the subsequent weeks.

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  7. Funny you should mention "The New Establishment". They performed the song "Seattle" for the opening credits of the Screen Gems produced TV show "Here Come the Brides" (1968-70). Terrific, little remembered series that was set in Post-Civil War Seattle, and featured a young Bobby Sherman and a young David Soul! The song "Seattle" was also recorded by Perry Como, Bobby Sherman, Floyd Cramer, Jerry Vale, the Longinnes Symphonette Society and Connie Smith (yep, I got 'em all!). The Perry Como version just barely squeezed into the Top 40 in 1968 (not bad for an old crooner in a year dominated by the Beatles, hippies, and "Hair"!).

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  8. Unknown, somebody in a previous post mentioned The New Establishment doing the theme for "Here Come the Brides". I barely remember that show… probably didn't want to watch a show about brides!!

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  9. Yeah, as a kid I doubt I would have gotten "hooked" if my folks hadn't wanted to watch it regularly, as both of them were from Seattle (moved to LA in 1956). We only had one TV in the house back then, and while my folks could be pretty accommodating to what we kids wanted to see, if there was something THEY wanted to watch, then that was that; argument settled and we kids lost!

    Anyways, "Here Come the Brides" used the arrival of 100 marriage-able young ladies as the basic framework, but it was really more about Seattle's early struggles and the logging that sustained the town, then merely about the brides, themselves. The stories almost always had a humorous bent; I guess what'd be called a comedy-drama or seriocomedy. The only real shame of it was they had two competent singers in the cast, and it was a very light-hearted show that didn't easily fit into a specific genre anyways -- yet there's only one episode (in the whole two-year run) where Bobby Sherman and David Soul get to sing (and it's an old Christmas folk-type song).

    The idea for "Here Come the Brides" came from a real event in Seattle's history, when an enterprising Seattle man named Asa Mercer went back east and contracted to bring young ladies to Seattle, which had something like a 10-to-1 ratio of men to women! If I recall, some groups and merchants in Seattle financed the "venture".

    Mercer actually made two such trips, totally about 80, and the ladies who came with him were dubbed the "Mercer Girls". After these trips, Asa Mercer apparently moved away and is lost to history. But he's remembered today in Downtown's Mercer Avenue, and Mercer Island in Lake Washington. I've heard that quite a few families in Seattle today have a "Mercer Girl" in their lineage! (My mom loved history, and had several books on early Seattle, so that's how I learned about this whole thing!)
    --Mike Douglas

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  10. Mike Douglas, I know that "Here Come the Brides" wasn't really about brides, but as a roughly-8-year-old, just the word "bride" probably would have kept me away. I guess my parent's watched other shows. "Laugh-In", for one!

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