Blog by GHMF Committee Chair Jerry T.
When I updated City Council on June 15 to give an early season update, we had just scratched the surface of the 2026 season that started on Memorial Day weekend. The 2026 season concluded on the last Saturday of September, with a bit of an extension to the first Friday in October for the shooting of video footage slated for use in a television ad for Toyota. The ad folks tell me that the commercial will likely begin airing sometime in the Spring of 2027 after editing and post-production work and winter weather abating enough that snowy car commercials are no longer the norm. This season featured some significant milestones, so I am very pleased to give you this update!
Once again, from a physical plant perspective, I can confidently tell you that the Fountain is generally in better shape than it’s ever been, as we continued to accomplish items on our Master Task List as well as doing routine maintenance. We currently have 39 items on our master task list that still need attention, and have completed 925 tasks since we started keeping track of them a few years ago!
Winterization of the Fountain is already completed, and the Fountain is in hibernation for the off-season. When our Thursday crew returns to the hill in March, we’ll be focusing on completing the rebuilding of the rest of our legacy butterfly valves that was delayed this past spring as we sought and found the solution to some valve quirkiness that has plagued us for some time, and we now have the newly acquired parts in hand to fix that issue once and for all. You may have noted that I said “generally in better shape” about the Fountain’s physical plant. This is due to concerns that have been revealed by some piping issues that surfaced this season. In the first part of the season, you might recall that the Bazookas were missing for a couple of weeks. This was because the left Bazooka nozzle feed pipe literally rusted through, and the pipe failed completely as we tried to determine why it was leaking while under use. We procured parts to repair it and got it back into service, and plan to replace the same parts on the right Bazooka before next season. The Front Curtain feed pipe in the pump room also developed a leak early in the season, and due to limited usage was taken out of service for the rest of the year. We also noted another leaking pipe as we were working through our shutdown for the season that will need to be addressed in the spring.
These warning signs are showing us that the Fountain is showing its age to some degree, and that we need to be diligent about watching for and solving wear-relayed issues as they come up. It is also one of the reasons that we chose to make the focus of the Bright Future Campaign about more than just the new LED lights!
Speaking of those new LED lights that light up the Fountain every night, they had a handful of startup issues that took a few shows to work through, but the lights exceeded our expectations in terms of making the Fountain much brighter and even more colorful! In fact, they are SO bright that we are in talks with WGHN about upgrading their Channel Cam due in part to the fact that the Fountain brightness overwhelms the existing camera and makes the Fountain livestream image look washed out. Our fund raiser for the lighting project and the maintenance issues I noted earlier is still underway and you can donate toward it by going to our website at GHFountain.org and clicking on the Bright Future Campaign link in the header on the home page.
Installing the new lights last Spring
While we worked to keep the fountain in top physical shape this year, the team also continued to focus on the production side:
We currently have 14 active Choreographers with more in training, and collectively they completed 96 more new songs that all played this year!
We had 115 shows scheduled, with 110 of them actually occurring due to three weather cancellations and one tech issue, and one cancellation for hazardous air quality conditions due to smoke from forest fires up north (certainly a first for that reason!).
Only two of the 110 played more than once and that was actually due to a software glitch! Every other show was a unique experience, with more “firsts” this year like a Juneteenth show, a Beatles Night, The Fountain Goes To The Zoo, a 90s Night, and a Dolly Parton Night in honor of her passing this August. The catalog of songs continues to grow with more than 700 songs in the Master Catalog, 60 currently being worked on by Choreographers, and the Committee is slated to review at least 26 additional songs for the Choreographers to choose from at our upcoming December meeting.
Our social media presence exploded again this year, growing from 47,000 at this time last year to more than 68,000 currently. Our crowd counts this year were great, with our new double feature of KPOP Night and The Greatest Showman toppling Taylor Swift for the largest crowd of the season.
We again had the opportunity to talk to fans on the radio, with multiple visits with WAWL and WGHN, most recently just last week.
Everybody still loves the Fountain!
Coming Software updates for Choreographers
Switching gears, you may recall that during the Spring Update I talked about the major impact of the next generation of choreography software, a project that was spearheaded for us by Brad Boyink, whom most of you know and who is here with me tonight. The impact of that new software tool was felt all through this year in the improvement of the quality of the choreography work produced, due to the ease of implementing complex choreography approaches using the new tools provided. It also is a big part of the reason that we have had such a large number of new Choreographers join and STAY with us.
The even better news is that Brad has rewritten the software AGAIN from the ground up, making it even more capable and incorporating some choreography assistance tools that are absolutely groundbreaking! We ran training courses on the new software during the month of October, and will be doing training on the new assistance tools later this month. All of our training is open to anyone interested in doing choreography for the Fountain, and every training session is recorded and available for viewing at your own pace if you are interested in joining in the fun! Go to the GHFountain.org website and click on Volunteer if you’d like to get involved in choreography or any other aspect of the Fountain.
You can also sign up there for our April Volunteer Day to help us wake the Fountain up for the 2027 Season! As always, we would be happy to demonstrate our new software tools to any City Council member that has interest in seeing them.
New Software Updates coming for Choreographers
In closing, I want to say that all of us involved with the Fountain are proud to be a part of these efforts, and I want to again thank the City Council and all Fountain fans, wherever you might be, for your ongoing support of the Fountain! Let’s continue to work together to make sure that the Fountain is Forever!
