Oooooohh, gotcha.

Saw this thread and I had to reply.

I have seen the chair up close when we stayed at Vanguard Hall when I was on tour with my youth band in '90. There is a small collapsing metal circular device that fits over the phantoms head. There is a false bottom to the stage with a hard foamy covering that he would hide underneath. When he would go into the secret bottom the circular device would maintain the visual of the head. In '89 was a hard sell due to the "white" sheet they used. Worked better in '88 with the dark sheet. The best one was in '87. They made two girls disappear. The show the first one but cut away to a side angle when they made the second one disappear. You can hear the crowd go crazy when the second one vanishes. I think they added the second girl just for finals though??? Does anybody remember the floating girl from '86 or how about the "pants" change in '85 and '86. Maybe Vanguard was the beginning of the "gimmicks" coming into drum corps.

In '87, when they bring the table-thingy out at the end of the show you can see the first girl hiding in the bottom of the table-thing.... She's not completely hidden by the black material that's supposed to be covering her up. At the first big push in Great Gate, they make the 1st girl APPEAR, and you can't see the 2nd one hiding inside the table. They don't make either one disappear in '87.

In '88 and '89, when the phantom sits down in the chair after the front in Music of the Night, and Christine and the other color guard girl (Meg?) go to cover him up with the sheet, you can see some sort of frame get flipped up from the back of the chair. You can tell this because the level of the top of the back of the chair changes from when the chair is out in the open to when it's covered by the sheet. Then if you watch the black material on top of the table-thingy, you can see it moving from where he's crawling down into the table-thingy.

What was cool was in '89 when they knew that the audience would be watching the phantom disappearing at the end of the show, so they switch it up a little from '88 and don't have part of the corps run back under the big black tarp with the phantom mask. Everyone in the audience is watching the phantom, assuming the corps is going to do just like they did the previous year, but not only do they make the phantom disappear, they make the corps disappear.

The '86 girl balanced on 2 brooms was very cool too, but the best, in my opinion was in '90, at the end of Carmen. If you've only seen the video of it, you totally missed out because the cameramen give it away. If I remember correctly, I don't remember the hornline hiding back up in the tunnel and playing the last chord at semi-finals. That just happened on finals night, and from the audiences vantage point, you couldn't see the horns. So Carmen is dying, and you expect the final chords to come from the pit....instead, the hornline joins in with the last chord and it was I-N-C-R-E-D-I-B-L-E!