Better late than never: That turned out to be the case for thousands of drone show fans in Busan, South Korea who made the trip back to the city’s Gwangalli Beach to see a delayed New Year’s eve performance that was cancelled 30 minutes after 2024 had already arrived.
Organizers of the Gwangalli Marvelous Drone Light Show scurried to stage the choreography on the evening of January 1, a bit less than 24 hours after the scheduled New Year’s eve spectacle was grounded. A reported crowd of 40,000 people who’d turned up at Busan’s famous beach front had to go home disappointed after a technical glitch in communications gear led an intended midnight launch to be cancelled 30 minutes after that curtain time had come and gone.
Facing understandable ire from frustrated fans, Busan city and drone show company officials promised to dish up the celestial celebration by 2,000 UAVs at an earlier hour later on January 1 – a pledge they delivered on with an impressive performance, as seen in videos captured by people who made it back for the belated fête.
Performed as updated choreographies in various venues around South Korean throughout 2023, the Gwangalli Marvelous Drone Light Show had reportedly drawn up to 80,000 people taking in the dry run sessions ahead of the planned New Year’s performance. Among the drone show fans who flocked to Busan for the scheduled performance was a Twitter/X/Whatever user known as @FiveSignals, who’d come from Seoul and booked a waterfront hotel room to have an ideal viewing spot.
Instead, the tweeted news of the cancellation included an elevated video view of the teeming crowd below slowly breaking up after word dropped the show was off.
“I paid a lot of money to see it,” @FiveSignals lamented in the wee hours of January 1. “I was looking forward to it, but they didn’t even count down, so what? Before I knew it, it was 2024, and they suddenly said it was postponed, so I waited for 30 minutes and they said it was canceled after tens of thousands of people gathered like that…
“I can’t even sleep,” the tweet continued. “I can’t believe the new year started off so badly… No one will compensate you, you can only get angry.”
Far better that than organizers deciding to plow ahead and risk UAVs raining down from the sky, right?
Plus, with a bit of luck (and even more dough for the Busan hotel room), @FiveSignals got to take in the rescheduled drone show held in the early evening hours of that same day – and in (perhaps) doing so joined fans of the performance art in London, Seattle, Dallas, and cities around the globe that rang in 2024 with UAV extravaganzas.
Image: Ryan Brooklyn/Unsplash
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