So my family does pyro. Like, DOT 1.1 professional displays. Have done for 40 years. We do ours with highway flares. That way you can light the quickmatch and it goes up when you want. But we do little shows that aren't timed to music because they're more fun. If you have a choice between 1) touching a highway flare to an explosive fuse that ignites a quarter stick of dynamite to throw two pounds of flammable chemicals several hundred feet in the air 2) Pressing "play" on a computer Go with 1. At least, if you know what you're doing. Thing is, we do it for us. Disney does it for its customers. As such, they've been out of the highway flare business for a long fuckin' time. For that matter, they don't like the smoke. For that matter, they don't like the variation you get from minute changes in lift charge, shell aerodynamics and payload weight. So Disney fires their shells pneumatically. They have computer-controlled air mortars capable of lofting an 8" mortar round a thousand feet in the air. And they aren't detonated with a fuse at all. Disney shells have their own individual radio frequency detonators and squibs on them. And they can time how long it takes for the shell to leave the gun, have the velocity to within a centimeter per second and trigger the shell within six inches of where they want it to be. Disney has always been a no-expenses-spared, customer-facing organization. And that's an important consideration: Disney is not collecting all this data for nefarious purposes, they're doing it to make more money. I'm not about to call Disney a nice organization - they're the biggest shits in Hollywood. But malevolent they ain't. Greedy? Check. Callous? Double-check. Monomaniacal? Absolutely. "Evil?" No more so than any other consumer-facing enterprise. That said, Erik Haseltine went from Hughes Aircraft to head of Disney Imagineering to the NSA to associate director of science and technology at ODNI. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Haseltine So I will admit there's some overlap. The bizarre part is that the photos are always of you, no matter where on the ride you sit. Even if you go with a group and all sit in different parts of the rollercoaster train, Disney will show you all of the correct photos because they know exactly on what seat you rode.