Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow
My kids wake up to Disney park music every school morning.
When I thought about the magic in my own house, my first answer was that there wasn’t any. I build theaters for other people. At home, I figured, it was just a house.
Then I remembered what happens at 6 a.m.
The song
My family loves Walt Disney World park music, including music from attractions that don’t exist anymore. My favorite attraction at any Disney park is the Carousel of Progress, and its song is “There’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow.” The Sherman Brothers wrote it for the show’s debut at the 1964 New York World’s Fair. It’s closed right now. Disney shut it down in July for a full rebuild that replaces every scene, and it’s due back in late spring 2027.
Every school morning at 6, that song plays on my kids’ bedroom speakers. That’s how they know it’s time to get up.
For a long time, I started it by hand every morning. What I wanted was for the Echo Dots to play a Spotify playlist as an alarm, and that was the part I couldn’t get working.
How it works now
It’s an Alexa Routine now, not an alarm. At 6 a.m. it sets the speaker volume first, so if one of the kids fell asleep to an audiobook at full volume, the morning doesn’t start at full volume too. Then it plays the playlist.
I didn’t pay for Amazon Music Unlimited. I went with Prime and a longer Disney playlist instead. “There’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow” always plays first, and then the playlist keeps going: “One Little Spark,” the Tiki Room song, the Country Bear Jamboree, the Fantasmic exit music, the Space Mountain theme, and more like that. It plays until we leave for the bus stop. When I go downstairs, I move it over to the Sonos speakers in the kitchen with the Sonos app.
The first morning it ran on its own, the kids woke up like always. It just happened to be more on time than other days.
The Tiki Room
On our Disney trip in April, the kids heard the Tiki Room song for the first time, in the Tiki Room. They weren’t huge fans. My son, who’s six, was a little scared, I think. My daughter, who was eight and a half then, was a little bored. I don’t think they knew what to expect. When we came out, the verdict was, “Okay. Well, that was fun. We probably don’t need to do that again.”
Now they’ve heard it a million times. They know the words, and they love singing along. My daughter likes the Tiki song a lot now, and they can’t wait to go back to the Tiki Room.
My son loves singing “One Little Spark” as Figment, because Figment has a silly voice in that song. They both sing “There’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow.”
What it doesn’t do
It hasn’t misfired yet. But I couldn’t find a way in Alexa Routines to skip school holidays. It would have to know the county’s school calendar, which is unrealistic. So on days off, I usually forget to turn it off, and the kids get an early wake-up. That’s unfortunate, because on days without school we really want them to sleep in and get as much rest as they need. But it is what it is.
The move to the kitchen is still a manual step, too.
Even the most magical things on earth start to lose their novelty when they’re not new and exciting anymore, and the same songs every morning are about as far from new as it gets. But I don’t really care, because the kids wake up noticeably happier. And it makes them even more excited about going to Disney next time, including for attractions they weren’t excited about before.
Header photo: "Magic Kingdom" by Theme Park Tourist, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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