Clark Planetarium and "Holiday Magic"

During my growing up years, my father would take us every year to the Hansen planetarium to see the Christmas Laser Show. It had great music along with live laser drawings that were animated. Our personal favorite was "Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer" which had an old grandma running around nearly getting bucked by a reindeer. We just laughed and laughed over this. Well, the Hansen planetarium closed down several years ago and the Clark planetarium at the Gateway replaced it. I was excited to see that this year, they had a "Holiday Magic" show with computer graphics and lasers set to music. I thought that it would be similar to what they used to have, but in a suped-up more hi-tech and realistic way. Boy, was I wrong. They hardly had any lasers and the 3d graphics were so basic that William thought they were done as a college project. And what is worse, the graphics didn't correspond to the music- like for Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, they followed a TRAIN driving all around through the snow and mountains. They at least could have attempted to correspond it with the music. I do have to admit that there was one classic song where they took part of the Nutcracker Suite and had two Gingerbread men sword fighting to the song. Very clever- that was truly the highlight of the whole thing. All in all, it was ok but it is definitely NOT a tradition that we will be continuing. The planetarium itself did have some interesting aspects- they had a scale that showed you what your weight would be on other planets but our favorite, and the most fascinating part, was the giant ball maze/rollercoaster. This thing was huge (as you can tell with my sister Cynthia and William standing in front of it) and had so many different pathways to watch. I seriously think that we watched this for over a half hour from all different angles. What a clever idea and so fun to put together.