Date of Visit: April 30, 2025
I am always checking the D23 events, but it rarely works out to be something we can go to since they are not anywhere near us. Thus, I was pretty excited to see an event that not only worked out at a time we had no other plans, but was also only three hours away.
We “checked in” (post about that adventure to come later…) at our hotel across the street and walked over to the museum getting there around 3:45pm. While the D23 Member Preview of the “Heroes & Villains: The Art of the Disney Costume” exhibit at the South Carolina State Museum event started at 4pm, they were already allowing people to check in and handing out the credentials, so we could go in and enjoy the museum before the after hours exhibit preview.
We were able to explore most of the museum in the time we had before the preview at 5:30pm (another separate post to come for the museum), although we definitely did it quick and would have spent much longer reading more of the signs and such if it had been a normal museum visit.
The first part of the exhibit is focused on Cinderella costumes. The different Cinderella costumes included ones from the 2015 movie, Into the Woods, Roger and Hammerstein’s Cinderella, and the Once Upon a Time TV show. There is also a room off of this area showing a short film, which we skipped at first and stopped in to watch before exiting the exhibit.
After the Cinderella area, you enter the main part of the exhibit, which is broken into Heroes on one side and Villains on the other. It was a really nice layout with a pathway of figures on each side leading to the Space Between before breaking off with more Villains to one side and more Heroes to the other.
My favorite in the pathway area was Scott Calvin (Santa Claus from The Santa Clause 3).
Mik’s favorite was Nizam from Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time.
He also really liked Jafar from Aladdin (2019).
At the end of the pathway, we when to the left to the Villains area. In this area, my favorite was the Sanderson Sisters costumes from Hocus Pocus 2.
The Into the Woods characters being posed as a scene was also interesting.
As we exited the Villains area and headed over to the Heroes, we checked out the costumes in the Space Between, which included characters that were sometimes villains and sometimes heroes. Mik’s favorite here was Captain Jack Sparrow from Pirates Of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest.
Over on the Heroes side was a somewhat interesting interactive Magic Mirror. For this, you stand on a spot and a costume appears “on” you in the mirror. It sort of worked, but was hard to really see yourself and more was just seeing the various costumes illuminated on the mirror. Certainly did not line up right for Mik sitting, but was not much better for those standing (or at least not if short like me).
My favorite on the Heroes side was Ben Gates from National Treasure. Mik wasn’t impressed as it was just plain street clothes. He would have preferred it to be the costume when Ben Gates was dressed up and stole the Declaration of Independence.
We both liked the scene pose for The Sorcerer’s Apprentice costumes scene.
Of course, I also liked the Mary Poppins Returns costumes.
The most impressive part of the whole is probably the Beast and Gaston.
The sketches on the wall showing the costume design from the original Mary Poppins (and some other movies) was also interesting.
After the exhibit, we had to wait for the presentation at 7pm in the theater. The presentation gave a good overview of the exhibit and the Walt Disney Achrives costume collection and preservation in general. It kind of would have been nice if this had been before the exhibit preview, though, as they talked about things to check out on the detail of some of the costumes that would have been nice to know before hand. We could have gone beak to the exhibit after the presentation if we had wanted, but instead we went down to the reception because we were were hungry and thirsty and Mik was done after having to wait so long between being done seeing the exhibit and the presentation already.
As we headed down to the reception, Mik loved that the elevator doors featured the exhibit poster, which we reminds me I keep saving elevator photos in a folder to do a series of posts on our favorite elevator finds. Maybe this year I'll actually start posting about the elevators.
Overall we enjoyed our visit to the South Carolina State Museum and the “Heroes & Villains: The Art of the Disney Costume” exhibit. It was fun to see some favorite character costumes up close, learn more about the costume design, and see the details that you otherwise would not see.
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