Posted by Aubrey on 7/21/24

Merlin’s Marvelous Miscellany opened on March 11, 2022 in the Sleeping Beauty Castle Courtyard. The previous iterations of the store included the Castle Heraldry Shoppe (Fall 1994 - January 2017) and the Castle Christmas Shoppe (April 2017- October 2021).

Here’s some backstory courtesy of the OC Register:

Imagineering took visual cues from the original Merlin’s Magic Shop for the new Merlin’s Marvelous Miscellany. The interior of the stuffed-to-the-gills small shop reflects the wizard’s stitched-together patchwork aesthetic.

“I wouldn’t say that Merlin is the most organized of tutors,” Dobrzycki said. “Everything of his is up in the rafters and in the windows, too. It’s like a really delightful jumble of his teaching and research materials.”

In the 1963 “Sword in the Stone,” Merlin stuffs his magic carpet bag full of spells, books and scientific tools before heading off to tutor the young King Arthur. Imagineering has unpacked the wizard’s magic carpet bag in Merlin’s Marvelous Miscellany for the backstory being told in the Fantasyland shop.

“When you’re in the shop, you’re going to see books lining the walls, little Da Vinci models of these great flying machines or tanks, chemistry sets that show his interest in alchemy, astrology and astronomy, star charts, homemade telescopes and armillary globes,” Dobrzycki said.

A jousting dummy with a bucket helmet and broken lance sits in the corner of the shop. Merchandise rests atop stacks of books. Zodiac and astrology charts line the wall behind the checkout stand. And, of course, there will be plenty of bird perches for Archimedes — Merlin’s owl companion.

“The whole upper quarter of the shop is just Merlin’s stuff jam packed and stacked in there,” Dobrzycki said. “It’s going to have a lot of nods to the movie. It’s going to be a pretty cool space.”

With such a wonderful wizardry shop, you’d expect a very cool “Sword in the Stone” themed music loop to accompany the environs, no? Well, no. The loop is a cut-and-paste collection of score, cues, and instrumental songs from the Sleeping Beauty soundtrack. I mean, it sounds nice at least. It’s just not, um, Merlin-y. I talked with one of the CMs that helped open the shop, and she noted that she and other CMs noticed “talking” in the shop from the speaker in the early days, and then referred to the vocal version of “Once Upon a Dream”. So presumably here’s a chance that the vocal versions of some of these tracks were changed to vocal-less versions, which I prefer for a less distracting shopping experience.

The loop is audible from a couple of speakers in the “back” of the store, on the opposite side of the register. I found it easiest to record near the metal railing to stay out of shoppers’ ways, but ideally I would’ve stood directly under the furthest back speaker (towards the castle) for 30 minutes. There can be a lot of excess noise from the outside carousel and chatter from guests and the shopkeeper.

The loop has a runtime of 00:27:41.262. Unfortunately the loop contains a high amount of unreleased score, and so compiling a tracklist is all but impossible. I was able to cobble together the loop from fan-released extended soundtracks around the internet and the Legacy Collection release, with varying quality and SFX inclusion.

I will not be posting my reconstruction as I’ve spent enough time on it that I don’t care for it to pop up elsewhere, but there are ways to make your own with this recording.

My patched live recording:

DL - Fantasyland - Merlin's Marvelous Miscellany (live, patched).flac

https://app.box.com/s/rnjrqfpnazaqvrto7l66qcsnams8a50f

Comments on my recording:

I call my reconstruction a “Pretty Good” reconstruction, but certainly not perfect. Tracks were sourced from many places. There’s a few places in my patched-together recording that were mostly inaudible for several seconds at an expected transition, or I couldn’t find a barely-audible music piece. In all, this accounts for maybe 35 seconds total. A better recording might help with some of the missing pieces, but ideally the source loop would pop up anyways. An example is around 10:31, where a silent area marks an inaudible recording region.