"Playhouse Disney Live on Stage": I don’t have children, so I’ve never seen the Playhouse Disney shows, so forgive me for perhaps being overwhelmed by the wave of cheer and chipper music.

The plot is simple: Mickey Mouse is enlisting the aid of favorites Donald Duck, Goofy and Daisy Duck to plan a birthday party for Minnie Mouse. But the three find themselves at dead ends. They get the help of Disney Channel staples Handy Manny (voiced by Wilmer Valderrama, who also voices the character on the show), Little Einsteins and the Super Sleuths to bake a cake, write a song and hang a sign.

The message that everyone needs help sometimes and that friends are a great gift runs throughout the show, but isn’t that preachy for kids. As a sometimes-cynical adult, I saw the cooperation angle from a mile away. That’s one reason I figure the target audience for this show is not the sometimes-cynical adult.

The characters, except for the human host of the show, are puppets worked Muppet-style from underneath the stage. All attendees have to sit on the floor or on benches lining the walls, lest they see the humans manipulating the puppets.

I was surprised by how well-articulated the cartoon characters’ puppets were. In the cartoons, they all look different, but in puppet form, they all seem to inhabit the same style universe. And they even blink their eyes. What an incredibly nice touch.

As a Playhouse Disney newbie, I found this a good primer to the three shows (can someone tell me: is the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse a show, or is it merely an umbrella show that packages together other shows?). I haven’t stopped humming the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse theme song since last Friday.

Someone stop me, please.

Pixar Play Parade: The new parade is for anyone who likes the Pixar films, as it’s populated with characters from “A Bug’s Life,” “Monsters, Inc.,” “The Incredibles,” “Finding Nemo,” “Ratatouille,” “Cars” and the “Toy Story” movies.

The whole event has a bit of a Mardi Gras feel, from the fast-tempo music to the colorful costumes (hello, a 1980s mall called and wants its Day-Glo neon clothes back) to the near constant spray of water.

Oh yes. If it’s a cold or windy day, you don’t want to be on the frontlines of this parade. You, your kids and everything you have will get spritzed with water.

That’s not to say that wouldn’t be welcome in the heat of summer, just that on an overcast March morning, it was a surprise.

The human performers, whether appearing as humans, as rats, as flowers or as comic-book exclamations, added to the carnival atmosphere. Some performers were on stilts, which in the case of the performers playing the chefs on the “Ratatouille” section, lent a sense of perspective: After all, with those super-elongated legs, this is what they’d look like from a rat’s perspective.

Other performers swung on high bars, performing stunts, while others in bungee-corded waist girdles performed jumps.

The music is high-energy, featuring standards such as “I Don’t Want to Work” and a triple-tempo “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” alongside new songs “Countdown to Fun” and “The Party’s On” by Matthew Gerard and Robbie Nevil, who wrote many songs for “High School Musical.” They changed the lyrics to “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” but I SO associate Cyndi Lauper with the ’80s that I was like, what is her song doing in a Disney parade?!

The music cue that confounded me the most was the use of Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now.”

Queen’s songs such as “We Are the Champions” and “We Will Rock You” have certainly been mainstreamed, but overall, I don’t know that Queen is a family-park friendly group.
Then again, maybe I’m not giving Disney enough credit.

Throughout the parade, some floats have blown-up balls that the performers toss to the audience, making the whole affair seem more like a party or a sporting event than a passive event like a parade.