Those two were stalwarts of SDC entertainment for ages - at least a decade or more? I have heard grumblings that the park got into some copyright disputes from some of those shows - we all pointed out that most of the tunes belonged to Disney and were only slightly changed... Even if that is true, it shouldn't be that hard to work around and retool. Obviously there are plenty of community theatres around the country that manage to put on great productions all the time without raiding the Disney music vault. I wonder if they got scapegoated or if the park simply doesn't want to bother with these kinds of productions anymore.
The shows at Christmas especially were massive draws. Does SDC really think they can replace all their entertainment with karaoke style shows like other cheap amusement parks have?
They spent all that money on Ruben's... I know it wasn't that great of a show, but I expected it to be improved over time. The stage setup was pretty sweet at least...
Music Copyright can be very much policed and there can be really big fines. I know in one of my videos I did for St. Jude - just some regular instrumental music was $1,000 for the right to use it - so we found some free music, but it just didn't have the same feel.
I owned a gym and there were fees just to play music for people hear while working out.
But probably similar to SDC, my local high school had to completely change their Show Choir performance because they couldn't get the rights to some songs. I also filmed a video for the school and we had destroy it because of contested copyright issues.
I just don't know though what constitutes infringement - some popular songs today sample so much from other popular songs - but no credit is mentioned. Just listen to the new Jonas Brother's song Leave Before You Love Me.....and Wham!'s Last Christmas. Way too similar to not give credit to the original writers.
Jay