Imagination Movers Season 3 Set! (For, er, 2011, Maybe?)
Tuesday, April 13, 2010 at 4:42AM 
It was a little dicey there for awhile -- you could tell from Facebook that the fans at least were getting restless (and nervous) -- but it's official -- Season 3 of the Imagination Movers' self-titled Disney Channel show is going to happen. Here's an article from Variety discussing the move -- it notes that production will start back up in New Orleans in June and that the production order includes a concert special, a first for the band on Disney. (And, yeah, there's another album coming out on June 8.)
Even though Seasons 1 and 2 started in the fall of 2008 and 2009, with a June production start, I'm guessing that fall 2010 may be hard to accomplish.
What the article doesn't mention is Nancy Kanter (Senior VP of Programming for Playhouse Disney) saying (in the press release) that Season Three "will expand the Movers world beyond the Idea Warehouse and will include more surprise visitors and guest stars."
So there you go -- perhaps they'll start going the Yo Gabba Gabba! route and inviting a whole bunch of guest stars from the real world. Come to think of it, maybe the Movers should challenge the folks at YGG -- which just started its third season -- to a friendly rumble. Or maybe a pickup basketball game. I think the guys have the moves, but Brobee et al. got height, and you can't teach height.
We are no longer the 
First off, I expected, and found, a sizable audience for the band. The lovely new Mesa Arts Center was hopping Friday with attendees for various events, but the Movers had the biggest theatre and given that the Ikeda Theatre seats nearly 1,600, I'd guess that at least 1,000 of those were filled, which, well, beat out Dan Zanes when he last came through on a Friday night.
It's a fairly simple set which will remind attendees of their TV set -- crates, primary colors, the swirling attic fan behind the drum kit. There's a video screen above the drums -- the screen was used most effectively when the band interacted with the Warehouse Mouse via prerecorded bits. They occasionally used the video screen for some other visual distraction during songs, but I didn't feel like those distractions were necessary.
Now, I've never been a huge fan of the Movers' music on disk (see "meh" above). I mean, the music was (and is) a lot better than quite a bit of kids' music out there, but nothing special. In part, I think the fine line the band has to walk as songwriters between entertaining and educating now that they have a TV show is very fine and some songs (like "Sunblock," not played in Mesa) sacrifice too much entertainment (particularly in repeated doses) in hopes of capturing some of that education.
Thankfully, in concert, the band doesn't necessarily need to be at their most educational. Instead, they can make silly jokes -- yes, kids go nuts when somebody quacks, a Mover says "Duck!" and everybody, well, ducks. Sure, there's a problem -- oh wait, sorry, an IDEA EMERGENCY -- to solve (it involves Smitty, don't ask), but it seems a little grafted on to the concert just to give a familiar structure to all the kids who are only familiar with the Movers via the TV show.
Amazingly, there was, as best I can tell, very little prerecorded music used during the show. "Farmer" Kyle plays drums during the set, which frees Rich to take vocals and move all around the place (he didn't play his own drum set often) . That's him zooming past while Scotty takes vocals on another song. The fact that Rich and Scotty are multi-instrumentalists and both take vocals mean that if you didn't get a chance to high-five a Mover during the show, you were probably sitting way in the middle of the row. That's one reason why I found the video screen somewhat pointless -- I was much more interested in what the guys themselves were doing.
I think that last part goes a long way towards explaining their appeal to a healthy segment of the American populace. I think the Wiggles 
Set List (Dec. 4, 2009, Mesa Arts Center, Mesa, AZ)
