Florida Man vs. Disney Adults & Splash Mountain
How low-information nostalgia ruins the theme park experience
Preface about Florida Man vs. The World overall:
Before I start pontificating about a princess cartoon made for children, I want to explain how this topic relates to the broader theme of this Substack publication Florida Man vs. The World, for which I posted the first article back in November. The article that you are reading right now might serve as a “hard launch” of this Substack publication. Yes, I already have posted four articles on here, but – in retrospect – I see these articles as “soft launches” in a way. (This characterization, especially, applies to the four initial articles that I published in November.)
Why do I see this as a hard launch? Well, the topic of Disney World quite comfortably falls under the umbrella of the exact sort of content that I want to cover on this publication of mine. With Florida Man vs. The World, I seek the encapsulate the mythos of the Sunshine State. Since the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, I think that Florida has reached a level of significance to the cultural zeitgeist of the United States in a way that it never had before.
We can identify many reasons for this increased relevance to all other Americans – e.g., the population boom since 2020, the controversial policies of Governor Ron DeSantis, and the impending release of Grand Theft Auto 6 – perhaps the most anticipated video game release in history) – and I do not see this relevance waning any time soon. Nate Silver elaborates on this in a recent Substack article of his about Florida. Perhaps the relevance will plateau, but it will likely not wane.
Considering our status as the third most populous state at 22.2 million people, Florida does not have the media that it needs: both fictional and non-fictional. Sure, there are plenty of exogenous stories about Florida from outsiders, but we need more Floridians commenting on the state. The editors at the new magazine The Miami Native have tackled this objective extraordinarily well so far. They released their first issue in November, and they are releasing their second issue this month. Nevertheless, Miami is just one metropolitan area in Florida, and my upbringing in Naples is very different from people who grew up around Miami.
I hope to fill the gaps for the other parts of the state. (Specifically, today, I will be discussing issues in Orlando.) This is my goal with this publication Florida Man vs. The World. For decades, we haven’t been taken seriously, and perhaps we behave in a manner that doesn’t deserve serious treatment. I get it. For the social media age, the meme of the Florida Man demonstrates the unserious reputation of the state nowadays. Definitionally, I am a Florida Man – in other words – an adult male who lives in the State of Florida, and I sincerely do not think that I am properly represented by the Florida Man about which you see in those sensational headlines circulating on Twitter and Facebook. Not only do the happenings in Florida have implications on the rest of the country, but also the Sunshine State itself serves as a microcosm of America. Florida will define the United States for the 2020s and beyond, and somebody needs to document it – ideally, a Florida Man.
Let’s now exit the macroscopic view and zoom back into the focus of today’s article on Florida Man vs. The World. I am going to be discussing a certain world within our state: Disney World.
Am I a “Disney Adult”?
I love Disney World. In a broad sense, it embodies a post-WWII American ethos, but – in a simpler sense – it’s just plain fun. The Florida of today would not exist without the opening of Disney World in 1971. It’s just an axiomatic fact about our history. Along with the advent of air conditioning, Disney World fomented the explosion of population and economic growth that has occurred in the past half-century in Florida.
What is a "Disney Adult"? If you do not know -- over the past few years – the term “Disney Adult” has become a pejorative for adults who obsess over everything related to Disney (both the media and the theme parks). To relate it to a Disney property, one could say that Disney adults are living in Neverland and exhibit some degree of Peter Pan syndrome.
Earlier in the article, I admitted that I was a Florida Man because I was an adult male who lived in Florida. By that logic, am I a Disney adult? After all, I am an adult who enjoys Disney World. Perhaps it does in a strict definitional sense, but I want to note that I barely go to Disney World. As an adult without children, there are just not really any organic opportunities for me to attend Disney World even though I live in Florida, and Disney adults infamously visit the Disney parks without any children of their own. Perhaps that is an unfair caricature, but it is the reputation.
Regardless, I recognize the importance of Disney World in the culture, but I am not commenting on some boring addition of a middling, forgettable IP-dependent ride like Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind in EPCOT. Those rides come and go. In 20 years, Disney could very easily replace it because it is possible that very few people remember Chris Pratt in the year 2044. These do not have any larger significance. On the other hand, the history leading up to the opening of Tiana’s Bayou Adventure in Magic Kingdom reveals something much larger about Americans’ relation to mass media (in this case, from Disney) and the nostalgia often fomented by those pieces of content.
The newfound political dimension of Disney World caused by Governor DeSantis:
In the year of our Lord 2024, a cultural critic can no longer discuss Disney World in a broad manner without the commentary becoming political. So many previously apolitical institutions in the U.S. have started to polarize the populace, and Disney World is no exception. One might attribute the politicization of these institutions to the political ascent of Donald Trump since 2015, but I think that the protests in 2020 during the lockdowns catalyzed this trend for the most part. As I will discuss later in the article, it was the protests following the May 2020 murder of George Floyd that prompted Disney to announce the cancellation of Splash Mountain’s theme of Song of the South in favor of The Princess and the Frog.
Zooming in on just the state of Florida and Disney World, Donald Trump has very little relevance to the politicization of Disney. Instead, one can point to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who took office in 2019. When one thinks about the tenure of Governor DeSantis, the feud between him and Disney is likely one of the first story arcs that comes to mind for most American political observers. The feud began in earnest — in March 2022 — after Disney executives publicly disavowed Florida House Bill 1557. This bill (and now law) has the official title of the “Parental Rights in Education Act”, but its critics uniformly call it the “Don’t Say Gay” bill.
Governor DeSantis has made fighting the “woke” into the keystone of his entire political brand and identity. One can read the transcript of his 2022 election victory speech to see exactly how much DeSantis obsesses over the nebulous force of “woke”:
[W]e reject woke ideology. We fight the woke in the legislature. We fight the woke in the schools. We fight the woke in the corporations. We will never, ever surrender to the woke mob. Florida is where woke goes to die.
For Governor DeSantis, Disney serves as the avatar of the “woke” in the state of Florida. If Ron DeSantis were a WWE wrestler, Disney would be his heel in an attempt to gain favor with his audience, in this case, the Florida electorate. I do not want to recapitulate the entire two-year timeline of the tit-for-tat between DeSantis and Disney. There has been plenty of ink spilled on the issue, and others can likely explain it way more effectively than I can. Again, I would point you to this Vox article that clearly lays out the events in the timeline of the feuds.
Regardless, Governor DeSantis’s feud with Disney is still very relevant to Splash Mountain and Princess Tiana. These events that transpired throughout 2022 and 2023 are what largely politicized Disney and made it a polarizing entity for some. Consequently, any commentary that I make regarding Disney, even the most inside of inside baseball, will inevitably cross paths with politics at some point. To my knowledge, Governor DeSantis has not commented on the cancellation of Splash Mountain at all, but it seems like the perfect culture war issue. It fills neatly into the bucket of “woke” actions that Disney has taken in the past few years. It hits so many cleavages: diverse racial representation in media, slavery, feminism, the perceived decline of Disney, etc.
Moreover — the seemingly inconsequential decision to retheme an old Disney ride actually has multiple potent dimensions to it:
Dimension #1: What does it mean for tourism to the theme parks in Florida?
Dimension #2: What does it say about the status of “woke” culture" in the United States?
I want to clarify that I personally do not use the term “woke” in a serious sense in my own parlance. I use the phrase as a catch-all metaphor for whatever DeSantis and other right-wing culture warriors perceive it to mean.
Dimension #3: What can we glean from the backlash from Disney adults? And does the phenomenon of Disney adults say much about American society in the 2020s?
Dimension #4: What is our relationship with nostalgia as American consumers of mass media?
Dimension #5: Does it say anything about larger racial issues in the United States at this moment?
I do not know if I will tackle all these layers in this particular. They likely deserve deeper research and require a broader topic beyond just the re-theming of a single ride in Magic Kingdom. I will likely touch on some to a certain extent, but my more targeted and specific goal is to defend the cancellation of Splash Mountain from a conservative perspective.
Disney’s 2020 decision to abandon Splash Mountain and Song of the South:
In under 4 weeks – on June 28 – Magic Kingdom in Florida will be opening its newest ride: the log flume attraction Tiana’s Bayou Adventure. An iteration of the ride at Disneyland in California should be opening later in 2024 although Disney has no specific date yet as they do for Florida, but this is not just any new ride. It’s really an old ride with new theming.
As those even just casually aware of events in the Disney universe, Disney controversially chose to shutter the classic ride Splash Mountain in both Florida and California. Splash Mountain was based on the controversial 1946 Disney movie Song of the South, and Disney decided to jettison that IP for the 2009 Disney movie The Princess and the Frog. For those who know anything about these two movies, the motives of Dinsey and the juxtaposition between the two IPs are clear. The movie Song of the South is a Disney movie that people have criticized for seemingly romanticizing Southern plantations and, by extension, slavery. Critics also say that it perpetuates racist stereotypes about Black people, largely, through its character Uncle Remus. This context of Song of the South obviously contrasts with The Princess and the Frog, whose protagonist Tiana is the first Black princess in any Disney film.
When you lay it out in those terms, Disney’s decision to re-theme Splash Mountain seems like lazy and opportunistic pandering. It is the most simple-minded of “representation”. Okay. Sure, we can agree that Song of the South is racist and depicts antiquated characterizations of Black people. With that concession in mind, eschewing Splash Mountain’s theme of Song of the South makes sense, but it then begs a crucial question. With what theme does Disney replace Song of the South?
Out of all of the Disney properties, they cheaply pick the movie that many know as just the Disney princess movie with the Black princess. That is not a critique of the movie itself. That’s just how a considerable number of people perceive the movie. However you want to slice it, the selected re-theming with The Princess and the Frog seems to reflect the most simplistic understanding of how to reckon with past racial wrongdoings. In that sense, I agree with the most knee-jerk right-wing reaction to such a story — in whatever way Sean Hannity or Tucker Carlson would respond to this news.
The opportunistic nature of this decision becomes even clearer when you find out when exactly Disney made the announcement. On June 25, 2020 — Michael Ramirez (Public Relations Director at Disneyland) announced the re-theming of Splash Mountain in both Florida and California. (Take note of the fact that Disney has never announced any changes to Splash Mountain in Disneyland Tokyo.)
Once you see the month-year combination of “June 2020” and think about the political climate of the U.S. at that time, your mind most likely will immediately go to the BLM protests after the murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020. This decision to re-theme Splash Mountain came within a flurry of so many other cancellations during this contentious time, including:
the removal of Aunt Jemima as the iconic maple syrup mascot
the “Dixie Chicks” changing their band name to “The Chicks”
the “Washington Redskins” dropping their logo of a Native American man and changing their team name to the “Washington Football Team” (now, the Washington Commanders)
These brands were caught off guard and had no idea how to respond. Their only responses were these superficial changes. That was how the corporate executives could effectuate the most change in response to the protests.
Michael Ramirez’s 2020 announcement of the re-theming never mentions Song of the South. He decides to sweep that under the rug. Instead, we see vague allusions in quotes such as these:
“Tiana is a modern, courageous, and empowered woman”
“The new concept is inclusive”
“It’s important that our guests be able to see themselves in the experiences that we create”
These are real quotes, yet — with the context of living in 2024 — they seem like parody. I know that DeSantis wants to castigate Disney as categorically “woke”, but I am not sure if Disney would be articulating this point in such vague platitudes if they had to do so in 2024. The public relations department is obviously trying to throw out as many platitudes as possible to massage the announcement that they were canceling a beloved ride in Splash Mountain. I doubt that many Disney guests even knew that Splash Mountain was based on Song of the South until the controversies in June 2020. It was released in 1946, and it never was released on home video in North America.
What bothers me is the duplicitous nature with which Disney announced all this. They claimed that they had been planning the re-theming years before any of the protests. Even more peculiarly, a petition on change.org was made on June 9, 2020, to urge Disney to re-theme Splash Mountain specifically to The Princess and the Frog, yet Disney still claimed it was their own idea from years prior. Disney made the official announcement only 16 days after the start of this petition, which had garnered over 21 thousand signatures by that point.
At the end of the day, all these critiques of the decision are valid, but where is the valor in exposing the pandering hypocrisy of a multinational corporation like Disney? Disney cares about PR and revenue, which is fine. That’s what they are supposed to do. This is a private company, but some people have seemingly put it on the same plane as if the National Park Service decided to blow up the faces of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson with dynamite because they owned slaves. That decision would have a broader historical and political context, but maybe Disney World in Florida and Disneyland in California are not much different in national importance compared to Yellowstone or Yosemite. Come to think of it … why even go to Yosemite when you can visit California Adventure at the Disneyland Resort in Anaheim?
I get all the critiques of “woke” Disney with their cancellation of Splash Mountain. It makes sense. I can’t exactly remember, but I was probably incensed when I saw the headline pop up on my iPhone in June 2020. We were enduring lockdowns, and the news just riled us up. At that particular moment, the ire is fine, but that was four years ago. There is obviously no reversing the decision. The re-themed replacements in Florida and California are completed. There are dozens of fancy new animatronics themed to The Princess and the Frog, and Br’er Rabbit and Br’er Fox are now in the pet cemetery outside Haunted Mansion.
I honestly forgot about Tiana’s Bayou Adventure until I visited Magic Kingdom in March after 5 years of not visiting Disney World at all. Then, I came back from Orlando and forgot about it again. It was irrelevant to my life until I went to Magic Kingdom next and had the opportunity to ride it, but my Twitter and YouTube feeds began getting inundated by all these think-pieces and rants against the new ride.
This led me to ponder the following question: what is the difference between the 2024 critiques and the 2020 critiques?
Revolt against Princess Tiana
The technical issues of Tiana’s River Adventure
All of that new discourse on Tiana’s Bayou Adventure emerged on my social media feeds a few days ago first because of Disney’s new released POV ride footage of Tiana’s Bayou Adventure. Within 24 hours of the release of that video, I began seeing reports of evacuations and breakdowns of the ride in Magic Kingdom during its first previews. A whole slew of problems began manifesting. Many riders have had to evacuate in the middle of the ride. Guests have witnessed fire alarms going off in the ride. Some of the previews were operating, but there was no water flowing on the iconic drop.
These are all valid critiques, but if Disney fans are getting mad at these technical issues, they are not really mad at the technical issues. The Disney fans are mad at the change of the ride, and the technical issues are just a very easy critique of a visible issue. In the long run, do these critics really not think that Disney will fix these issues? I know that some of the Star Wars rides have had frequent evacuations, but Disney will be able to handle this. In other words, critiques of the technical issues mask a critique at the very existence of the ride and cancellation of Splash Mountain.
Low-Information Nostalgia
The Definition:
I am going to attempt to coin a term here: low-information nostalgia. People suffer from low-information nostalgia when they have nostalgia about a certain thing, but it is misinformed. They have misperceptions on what that thing actually was, and that misperception informs what they want in the future and makes them want to stifle change.
I do not want to conflate this with rose-colored nostalgia. Any nostalgia is irrational to some extent. It’s all emotional, but rose-colored nostalgia only enhances the quality of what we experienced in the past. Low-information nostalgia distorts the past.
Splash Mountain serves as a perfect example of low-information nostalgia. The biggest critiques of Tiana’s Bayou Adventure are not that it is necessarily a mediocre ride. Disney has opened many mediocre rides in the past, but very few of those have engendered the ire that Tiana’s Bayou Adventure is receiving. Why is this the case? It is evident that is because of the ride that Tiana’s Bayou Adventure is replacing. Disney fans loved Splash Mountain. It was one of the three iconic “mountain” rides at Magic Kingdom and Disneyland alongside Space Mountain and Thunder Mountain.
My nostalgia at Disney World:
As a kid who was born and raised in Florida, I had access to Disney World more than others. In my childhood years, my family might have gone once every other year. We weren’t a “Disney family”. We never owned the annual pass, but Disney World was one of the great joys of my childhood and formed a large amount of nostalgia for me. To this day, if I ever go to Magic Kingdom, I must ride Haunted Mansion. Is it the most well-designed ride? No. Is it the most thrilling ride? No. The ride is a very old ride that does stop a decent amount due to technical issues. In fact, the ride was an opening day attraction when Walt Disney World in Florida opened on October 1, 1971.
Whenever I would go to Disney World as a child, my father would tell me about Disney World in its early days. He visited Disney World within a year or two of its opening when he was a teenager. Because of what he would tell me, I had a decent understanding of the timeline of the history of Disney World. As a history nerd overall, it became a fun history in which I could now delve. I knew that Magic Kingdom was the oldest park in Florida. Disney World would not add a second park until EPCOT in 1982 — 11 years into the existence of Disney World.
Therefore, Magic Kingdom had the longest-running rides out of any of the rides in Disney World. The other three parks — EPCOT, Hollywood Studios, and Animal Kingdom — would change throughout my lifetime while Magic Kingdom seemed to stay the most static for good reason. Magic Kingdom “just plays the hits” and feeds off nostalgia more than any other theme park in the world besides Disneyland in California, which precedes Magic Kingdom by 16 years.
However, the Disney fact that he imparted to me that was the most obscure was about Splash Mountain. He told me what IP on which it was based: the 1946 film Song of the South. Nobody else seemed to know this. It wasn’t an iconic IP. In fact, Disney had never released the movie on home video in the United States, so why did Disney decide to base a ride on it? Well, it’s an old movie. It must be one of those old rides from the 1970s in Florida and the 1950s in California.
Comparison to Universal
Magic Kingdom is the constant in the ever-changing landscape of theme parks in Orlando — especially — in comparison to Disney’s main competitor: Universal. That park seemed to change all the time. Universal Studios has only been open since 1990. That is not a long time compared to the Disney parks. Animal Kingdom is the only Disney park in Orlando that is newer than Universal Studios. Despite this fact, Universal Studios only has one ride that has been operating since opening day in 1990: E.T. Adventure.
Within the next decade, I would not be surprised if Universal closed it in Florida someday. Universal rebuilt the ride two other times in two of its other parks: Universal Studios Hollywood in California and Universal Studios Japan. Since their openings, Universal has closed them both. The California one closed in 2003 — only after 12 years of operation. The Japanese one closed in 2009 — only after 8 years of operation, yet — for whatever reason — the E.T. ride in Florida has survived.
Regardless of whether Universal eventually chooses to close the E.T. ride in Orlando, Universal is aimed at families, and the film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was released in 1982, over four decades ago. When Universal Studios in Florida opened in 1990, the movie was only 8 years old. Almost every kid who would have visited Universal at that time would have familiarity with E.T. Now, to have seen E.T. in theaters and have remembered seeing it, let’s say you would probably have to be 8 years old. Therefore, you would have been born in 1975, so anyone nowadays who remembers E.T. from its release are into their fifties!
Time goes by quickly as does the familiarity with mass-produced intellectual property, but Disney exists in a realm that transcends this issue. Magic Kingdom still uses IP that is very old. Mickey Mouse is 96 years old and entered public domain at the beginning of this year, or at least his first piece of media Steamboat Willie did. I am bringing up Universal here to draw a juxtaposition in the perceived nostalgia associated with Magic Kingdom, a park that happily relives the past nine decades of Disney media. For decades more, kids will recognize Mickey Mouse while they will not recognize E.T.
How old was Splash Mountain?
How many rides does Magic Kingdom have that precede the opening of Universal Studios? In other words, which rides at Magic Kingdom have withstood the test of time and have operated for 33 or more years? These are the rides that are classics! Yippee! I get to ride Space Mountain again! Well, let’s look at them in order of age. They’re all bangers!
I am only looking at rides. I am not including non-attractions like the Hall of Presidents or the Enchanted Tiki Room.
1971: Haunted Mansion (opening day)
1971: It’s a Small World (opening day)
1971: Jungle Cruise (opening day)
1971: Mad Tea Party (opening day)
1971: Peter Pan’s Flight (opening day)
1971: Tomorrowland Speedway (opening day)1
1971: Dumbo the Flying Elephant (opening day)2
1973: Pirates of the Caribbean
1974: Astro Orbiter
1975: Space Mountain
1975: PeopleMover
1980: Big Thunder Mountain
Wow! That’s a lot of really cool, classic rides! Why isn’t Splash Mountain on the list?
Well, despite what I may have believed as a child, Splash Mountain is not some “old” but iconic ride like Space Mountain or Haunted Mansion. Splash Mountain first opened in California in 1989, and it opened in 1992 in Florida one day after the opening in Japan. If this is the case, why did Disney choose an obsolete movie as the basis for a ride released during the year that the United States elected Bill Clinton as president?
Splash Mountain was always a lazy, opportunistic ride
Critics of Tiana’s Bayou Adventure have continually said that the ride is lazy and unimaginative. They cherish the halcyon days of Splash Mountain. That was when Disney cared about rides! Now, they’re just lazy! Michael Eisner was so much better than money-grubbing Bob Iger! He’s just trying to get a quick buck by pandering with IP on Disney Plus!
America Sings
In reality, Splash Mountain may have been even lazier than Tiana’s Bayou Adventure. The only reason it exists is because of the decision to close a ride at Tomorrowland in Disneyland — America Sings — an attraction/show of animatronic animals that would perform songs about American history in a manner similar to the animatronic bears in Country Bear Jamboree.
Here is a video of the ride, recorded in 1987.
America Sings never made it to Florida, but its successor ride eventually would. The ride operated in Disneyland from 1974 to 1988. Disney opened it ahead of the celebration of the American Bicentennial, in 1976.
I don’t want to get too deep into the lore of America Sings. The YouTube channel Defunctland has a very good video about it, but I will say that the ride quickly became outdated once the Bicentennial came and went. It also did not really fit the futuristic sci-fi theme of Tomorrowland. Oh … and a teenaged girl died on it in 1974.
Closing a ride is an expensive decision. First of all, you spent all this money building the ride, but now you have to destroy much of it. You then have to decide the attraction with which you will replace the old one. Additionally, you have to spend another big sum of money to build the replacement, but maybe you can save much if you just recycle many of the elements of the old ride and squeeze them into the new ride?
Disneyland did exactly that with Splash Mountain. The Imagineers used hundreds of the animal animatronics from America Sings and put them in Splash Mountain. By golly … look at these dumb-looking geese! The left-hand image shows the four geese on America Sings, and the right-hand image shows the four geese on Splash Mountain, which opened in Disneyland just a year after the closure of America Sings.
The YouTube channel Disneyland Musician posted a video of ride footage from both attractions that shows you the location of each recycled animatronic in Splash Mountain
The laziness and opportunism of Michael Eisner
People always lambast Bob Iger as somebody who only cares about the bottom line, which leads to lazy rides devoid of the Disney magic! Michael Eisner was better!
Splash Mountain was Michael Eisner’s brain-child. He chose to use Song of the South as the IP basis for Splash Mountain. Why? Essentially, nobody born in the 1950s and beyond would have much knowledge of Song of the South. It was never shown or released between 1946 and Michael Eisner’s decision to put it into Splash Mountain in the late 1980s. That’s over four decades of Americans not interacting with Song of the South. Usually, Disney will insert IP into a ride so that visitors to the parks have familiarity. For example, in 2016, EPCOT replaced the ride Maelstrom in the Norway Pavilion with a ride themed after Frozen. Nobody knew what the hell a “maelstrom” was, but we all know and love the movie Frozen!
Conversely, nobody really knew Song of the South. Disney had intentionally suppressed it because of the aforementioned racial insensitivities in the film. Now, I do not know if there is any evidence for my theory, but — based on the story of America Sings — I strongly believe that Eisner decided to use Song of the South as the theming of Splash Mountain because Song of the South is a Dinsey film whose animated characters are largely anthropomorphic animals — probably more so than any other Disney film. For that reason, if Eisner made a new ride with the theming of Song of the South, he had an excuse and reason to recycle the expensive animatronics from the moribund attraction America Sings.
Obviously, other classic Disney movies have anthropomorphic animal characters — Dumbo, Jiminy Cricket, all the crustaceans in The Little Mermaid — but nobody has a bench like Song of the South and the Uncle Remus cartoons, the cartoons on which Disney based the 1946 film: Br’er Rabbit, Br’er Fox, Br’er Bear, Br’er Goose, Br’er Rattlesnake. The list goes on forever. Look at the list of Uncle Remus characters on Wikipedia.
Disneyland essentially had a Song of the South character for which they could use an animatronic from America Sings. There is no reason for Song of the South to be a flume ride. Michael Eisner just wanted a thrill ride at Disneyland because they were losing market share to the competing amusement park Knott’s Berry Farm in Buena Park, California — 6 miles northeast of Disneyland. A flume ride was a good way to do this.
Weird Frankenstein monster of IP
Okay, Michael Eisner’s ungodly mash-up IP does not end. Why did he call it Splash Mountain? That name has nothing to do with Song of the South. Sure, water splashes. After all, it’s a flume ride, but he specifically used the word “Splash” to promote another piece of Disney IP: the 1984 live-action romantic comedy Splash, starring Tom Hanks and Daryl Hannah. Disney produced the movie through the subsidiary production label Touchstone Pictures, which released live-action movies aimed at adults as opposed to the animated films by Disney aimed towards children and their families.
In Splash, Hanks falls in love with Daryl Hannah, but guess what? She’s a mermaid! Mermaids are in water, right? And this ride is in water, right? And they’re kind of animals, right? At least, they’re half animals. And there are animals in Song of the South? Well, it seems to all fit.
In the next three years, Disney would replicate this ride at both Disney World in Florida and Disneyland Tokyo, where it would also become an iconic attraction.
Concluding Thoughts:
Let’s tie this all back to Tiana’s Bayou Adventure. Its predecessor Splash Mountain was an incoherent ride from the beginning. This is a perfect example of low-information nostalgia. We saw Splash Mountain as a magnum opus in Disneyland and Magic Kingdom. For anyone crying about IP, Splash Mountain may have been the worst form of IP abuse by Disney in a theme park. At least a flume ride is somewhat consistent with The Princess and the Frog. Tiana lives in Louisiana, and there’s the Bayou in Louisiana. The Bayou has water. Tiana’s Bayou Adventure has water. Sure, there are no “mountains” in Louisiana. It’s actually the lowest-elevation state, but that’s okay. It’s close enough.
At the end of the day, the ride is consistent. Disney chose a movie with which people have familiarity. It may not be the highest-grossing princess movie, but it at least is widely available on DVD and, now, on Disney Plus. On the other hand, no American had easy access to Song of the South.
But why do we care? Gosh darn it … it’s a ride for kids. I don’t actually care about what Michael Eisner did. All that matters is that it’s fun and whimsical. There’s music and cute little animals on Splash Mountain, and Tiana’s River Adventure will have cute little mystical creatures from the Bayou. Remember that alligator with the trumpet? Yeah, he seems fun. He’ll probably be on the ride. Or the titular frog? He’s probably there too.
However, this ride is a thrill ride. The drop is fun! Who cares about the theming beforehand? The kids who ride this are not analyzing the intricacies of the plot of the ride. People are saying there isn’t an antagonist in the new ride as there was Br’er Fox in Splash Mountain. Who cares? To allude to a more lewd comment from Jonah Hill in Superbad, do you need the Coen Brothers to direct your Disney rides?
Let’s all just have fun. Kids aren’t on Twitter. Let them have fun. And let’s not have low-information nostalgia about a ride that never was. Again, critics are acting as if the National Park Service blew up the faces of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson on Mount Rushmore.
Splash Mountain was imperfect. Princess Tiana’s ride will be imperfect. Disney World will be imperfect. They have to create a park that appeals to 15-20 million visitors a year. They aren’t making the park specifically tailored for millennials with low-information nostalgia from two to three decades ago.
It’s still fun, and that’s all that matters in a theme park ride.
Tomorrowland Speedway has changed names multiple times in Magic Kingdom since 1971, but the ride has stayed pretty much the same. It was originally “Grand Prix Raceway”, In 1994, Disney changed it to “Tomorrowland Indy Speedway”, to connect it to the Indy races. In 2008, Disney dropped the “Indy” and made it just into “Tomorrowland Speedway”.
Dumbo the Flying Elephant changed locations in 2012, but the ride is still pretty much the same as it was in 1971.
Wow, this was just about the longest post I've ever read on here, but it was totally worth it. Great piece, and very well-argued! So glad I found your Substack.