By Robert Niles: The Disneyland Resort today announced the extension of its annual Lunar New Year celebration at Disney California Adventure park. This year's celebration of what many people call "Chinese New Year" will run for 17 days, from Friday, Jan. 20 through Sunday, Feb. 5, 2017.
Disney will add a Lunar New Year preshow to DCA's World of Color show each night during the celebration. A six-minute feature called "Hurry Home" will tell the story of Little Lantern, returning home for the holiday, with appearances by Mulan and the dragon Mushu along the way. Featuring projected animation on World of Color's water screens, as well as the show's fountains and light effects, the preshow will play with music by Academy Award-winning composer Tan Dun from the opening ceremony of Shanghai Disneyland.
Disney's also getting another couple weeks' worth of use out of their food booths, with the addition of three new Asian marketplaces for the event, offering Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese dishes. The Lunar New Year celebration joins California Adventure's Festival of the Holidays and Food & Wine Festival in featuring the food stands.
In this way, it seems that Disney California Adventure is beginning to follow the model that Disney has established on the east coast with Epcot — if it's not summer, haul out the food booths, and let's throw a festival!
With their common entrances modeled on Los Angeles' old Pan Pacific Auditorium, we've long considered Disney's Hollywood Studios the east coast sibling of Disney California Adventure. But with the Star Wars Land that someday will dominate DHS going in over at Disneyland in California, and more festivals taking over DCA while Epcot adopts more of the franchise-driven design that Disney embraced with its various DCA rebuilds, maybe Epcot and DCA are the two U.S. Disney parks growing most closely together now.
That'd be ironic, given that the original design for Disneyland's second gate on its old parking lot was for a west coast version of Epcot, to be called "Westcot." Many Disney fans have lamented the company's decision to create the lower-priced California Adventure park in its place. (While others... okay, I... really wish that Disney had followed through with its other plan for Disneyland's second gate — the DisneySea project for Long Beach that the Oriental Land Company eventually took for Tokyo DisneySea. Sigh.)
It took nearly two decades, but maybe we really will get that west coast version of Epcot after all. No, it won't be a shining model of an inspiring future... but it will be an ever-lasting food festival. Just like the 21st century Epcot seems its on its way to becoming.
Now, if only we Disneyland fans could get DCA to adopt the Epcot food festivals' prices....
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