The Chinese Theatre at Disney's Hollywood Studios debuted a new lighting scheme this week and we took a trip after-dark for a closer look.
New lighting brings a much warmer color to some of the theater's signature elements, such as the dragon above the Runaway Railway marquee. The update really helps to highlight some of its features and makes it pop with more dimension than was there previously.
What will be most noticeable to most guests with the new lighting package is a return of the searchlights on the rooftop of the Chinese Theatre. A staple of the park from its opening days, the original lights could easily be seen miles away from the park and really helped to bring attention to what was then Disney-MGM Studios.
The original effect was achieved with large rooftop SkyTracker search lights using thousands of watts of xenon lamps - the same lights that were used at real premieres in Hollywood. The lights fell into disrepair in 2010 and where never to be seen again - until now.
The new searchlights are much smaller than their predecessors, and the fixtures can just about be seen on the rooftop of the theater. The new lights use LED as the lightsource, and are much more more energy efficient, using just a fraction of the power of the original.
At close quarters, around the courtyard area, the beams of light are quite visible to the naked eye. The beams are much narrower than the SkyTracker lights, but move in a similar pattern and bring an attractive "premiere night" feeling to the theater. Go here for our 4K video of the new Chinese Theater lighting.
However, moving further away from the Chinese Theatre the lower output of the LED light source really becomes a problem, and the lights are barely visible.
The view from the end of Hollywood Blvd is really lacking any impact at all from the new searchlights. It should also be noted that we were using every trick in the book of low light photography in all of these pictures to capture the lights at their best and to capture as accurately as possible what the naked eye can see.
The return of the searchlights is a welcome change, but we can't help but wish that much more powerful lights had been used. It has been more than 30 years since the original lights debuted in 1989, and despite all the advances in lighting technology since, the 2021 edition pales in comparison to the original and leaves us wanting more.
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