Latest news with #TheNightBeforeChristmas
New York Post
07-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Post
Disneyland announces closure of beloved ride as 70th anniversary celebration kicks off
The future looks grim for some Disney-horror fans — but not for long. The Anaheim, California, amusement park, which is celebrating its 70th anniversary, is putting a pause on the beloved Haunted Mansion ride, based on the 2003 film. 4 Disneyland's Haunted Mansion is temporarily closing to get ready for Halloween. MediaNews Group via Getty Images After looking at the Disney park's website page for the attraction, fans discovered that it will be closed for a period over the summer, likely for its seasonal makeover. Starting August 11, park goers won't be able to hop on a Doom Buggy for a tour of the eerie mansion with grim grinning ghosts. While the Disney website currently shows no availability for the ride through the end of the month, the Daily Mail reported that its set to reopen on August 22. 4 The Haunted Mansion will be temporarily closed beginning August 11. David Nguyen/Disneyland Resort via Getty Images When the Haunted Mansion returns from the dead, it will have been given a Halloween makeover with the spooky theme of Tim Burton's 'The Night Before Christmas.' Jack Skellington, Zero and other characters from the movie will be featured. The ride's spruce up is the start of the Haunted Mansion Holiday, decorated first for spooky season and later for the winter holidays. The spirited decor will adorn the attraction through early 2026. Disneyland has not officially given a reason for the closure, but the timing matches up with previous years' timelines as the attraction gets its seasonal makeover. 4 The Halloween makeover will be the theme of Tim Burton's 'The Night Before Christmas.' PRNewsFoto In 2024, however, the holiday remake of the mansion opened earlier than usual in July — but that came after a much longer closure as the park made major updates to the ride, such as a more accessible elevator for guests with disabilities, revamped landscaping and the opening of Madame Leota's Somewhere Beyond gift shop. Though a temporary closure of an attraction due to updates or makeovers is not unusual, fans typically still get upset regardless — especially for the Haunted Mansion, which is one of the park's most iconic attractions and people sometimes visit specifically for this ride. 4 Though a temporary closure of an attraction is not unusual, fans typically still get upset regardless. AaronP/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images A few other attractions are going to be temporarily closed for seasonal updates as the official anniversary approaches on July 17. Pixar Pal-A-Round eccentric wheel and the Star Tours motion simulator in Tomorrowland will both be closed then for seasonal refurbishments, as will the Main Street Cinema as they install the new 'Last Verse' video. The Redwood Creek Challenge Trail and the Storybook Land Canal Boats will both temporarily close July 21, and on July 28, DCA's Incredicoaster and Casey Jr. Circus Train will be put on pause.
New York Times
20-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
J.B. Moore, Producer of Seminal Hip-Hop Records, Dies at 81
J.B. Moore, an advertising man from suburban Long Island who wrote the lyrics to one of rap's first hits — Kurtis Blow's 1979 novelty song, 'Christmas Rappin'' — and with a partner, Robert Ford, produced that rapper's albums as he became a breakout star in the early 1980s, died on March 13 in Manhattan. He was 81. His friend Seth Glassman said the cause of his death, in a nursing home, was pancreatic cancer. Mr. Moore and Mr. Ford, known as Rocky, were unlikely music impresarios. They met at Billboard magazine in the 1970s, where Mr. Moore was an advertising salesman who wrote occasional jazz reviews, and where Mr. Ford was a reporter and critic and one of the first journalists at a mainstream publication to expose the musical fusion created by DJs and MCs that was then emerging from New York City block parties and Black discos. Mr. Ford 'was a Black guy from the middle of Hollis, Queens,' Mr. Moore recalled in a 2001 oral history for the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle. 'I was a white guy from the North Shore of Long Island.' Still, he said, 'our record collections were virtually identical.' The two friends' careers took a turn in the late summer of 1979, when Mr. Ford, who had a child on the way, told Mr. Moore of his idea to try to scrape up money with a Christmas song. He was inspired by a Billboard colleague who had written a holiday tune for Perry Como decades earlier and was still getting paid for it. Mr. Moore liked the idea. 'Christmas records are perennials, and therefore you get royalties ad infinitum on them,' he said in the oral history. He was no musical novice. An experienced guitarist, bassist and songwriter, he had been in bands throughout his youth and had aspired to a career as solo artist or a producer. That night, he went back to his apartment in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan and scribbled out lyrics parodying the Clement Clarke Moore poem 'A Visit From St. Nicolas,' better known as 'The Night Before Christmas.' 'We didn't think a major label would understand a rap record,' Mr. Moore recalled, 'but they would understand a parody.' Mr. Moore also agreed to finance the song, ponying up the $10,000 (about $42,000 in today's dollars) that he had saved to write a novel about his Army days in Vietnam (he never completed it). Through Mr. Ford's contacts in the rap subculture, they eventually secured the services of Kurtis Blow, an ambitious young Harlem native, born Kurtis Walker, who was unknown to the wider world. Mr. Blow said he initially found Mr. Moore's lyrics quirky but charming, with lines like 'He was rolly, he was poly, and I said, 'Holy moly!/You gotta lotta whiskers on your chinny-chin-chin.'' 'That's a totally different meter from the way we rapped then,' Mr. Blow said in a 2019 interview with the music journalist and hip-hop historian Bill Adler for Smithsonian Magazine. 'But it was so witty, and I welcomed the opportunity to do it.' He tacked on some of his own lyrics about Santa joining a raucous party and, with a handful of musicians, banged out the record in one night. More than 20 labels rejected the song before Mercury finally released it in December. It reached the Top 30 in Britain and, although it failed to chart in the United States, became a go-to party jam long after the holidays. It went on to sell more than 350,000 copies. With the help of those two producers, Mr. Blow became the first rap artist to sign with a major label and find commercial success. His debut album, released by Mercury in 1980 and simply called 'Kurtis Blow,' contained the single 'The Breaks,' an absurdist litany of life's misfortunes, which soared to No. 4 on the Billboard R&B chart, showing a skeptical record industry that rap records could be more than novelties. At more than seven minutes, this anthem of 'progressive disco-funk,' as Mr. Blow described his sound, was the first rap song to be certified gold, a designation reserved for albums or singles that sell more than 500,000 copies. (The Sugarhill Gang's seminal hit, 'Rapper's Delight,' released the previous year, probably sold more copies. But the group's label, Sugar Hill Records, did not submit the song for auditing by the Recording Industry Association of America.) 'Moore was a key figure in the early commercialization of Hip Hop,' Mr. Blow wrote in a recent social media post. With Mr. Ford, he added, 'his productions helped bridge the gap between Hip Hop and mainstream audiences in the late '70s and early '80s.' James Biggs Moore III was born on Nov. 4, 1943, in Cleveland, the elder of two sons of James Biggs Moore Jr., who worked in the defense industry, and Lois (Foster) Moore. The family later settled in Plandome, a village on Long Island. After serving in Vietnam, he attended American University in Washington and later landed a job at Billboard. No immediate family members survive. Mr. Moore and Mr. Ford continued to work with Mr. Blow through his 1984 album, 'Ego Trip,' which contained his enduring single 'Basketball.' After that, the rapper took over producing duties himself. The duo also produced three albums by the Brooklyn electro-R&B group Full Force, as well as the novelty songs 'Rappin' Rodney' (1983), by Rodney Dangerfield, and 'City of Crime,' a comic tie-in to the 1987 film 'Dragnet,' rapped by Tom Hanks and Dan Aykroyd. Mr. Moore later looked back on his first taste of success in the rap world, recalling the day that a musician friend 'called up and said, 'Here,' and put the phone up. 'You know what that is?'' 'And I heard this terrible version of 'The Breaks,'' Mr. Moore said in the 2001 oral history. 'It was a bar mitzvah band doing it. We had arrived.'
