Disney is Revamping One of Its Most Iconic Rides — And for Good Reason

Disney says Splash Mountain is getting a makeover (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

While you may not be familiar with the movie, you probably know its most famous song. Forgive me in advance for getting it stuck in your head, but it goes a little something like this: “zip-a-dee-doo-dah, zip-a-dee-ay, my, oh my, what a wonderful day!” You know the one.

But perhaps you don’t know the connection it has with a 1946 Disney movie called “Song of the South", or how both tie in with a ride at Disney’s theme parks that you’ve definitely ridden if you’ve been to one any time in the past three decades.

The iconic log flume ride Splash Mountain has been a fixture at Disneyland Park in Anaheim, California, since 1989 (it showed up at the Magic Kingdom in Orlando, Florida, just a few years later), but now, over 30 years later, Disney is reimagining — re-imagineering, you might say — the ride’s entire concept. The reason? Well, let’s just say “Song of the South”, which Splash Mountain is based around, is not exactly a film that would be considered politically correct these days.

According to Matt Singer, a ScreenCrush contributor, the movie is actually one of the most notorious films Disney has ever released. The live-action/animated hybrid is based on a collection of stories written by Joel Chandler Harris and told by a character named Uncle Remus, a jovial black man who works on a plantation in the American south during the Reconstruction era (1863-1877).

The plot centers on the relationship between Uncle Remus and a young boy named Johnny who comes to stay on his grandmother’s plantation for an extended period of time. Uncle Remus, played by James Baskett, who won an honorary Academy Award for his performance, regales Johnny with his tales of a trio of cartoonish characters — Br’er Rabbit, Br’er Fox, and Br’er Bear — making his stay on the plantation a little less dreary, and teaching him life lessons along the way.

While plenty have seen the movie and walked away claiming there isn’t anything overtly racist about it, critics often cite the film for its stereotypical portrayal of African Americans, and for its harmonious delusions of life in the south in the late 19th century.

As Singer, our friend over at ScreenCrush, wrote in a 2016 article: “The problem isn’t necessarily what Song of the South depicts, but what it chooses not to depict. Although Harris’ Uncle Remus stories were set in Georgia after the Civil War, the film adaptation never makes it clear when the story is taking place … [and] If you’re not a scholar or an Uncle Remus expert, it’s very easy to assume that the film is set before the Civil War, and that Remus and Aunt Tempy (Hattie McDaniel) are slaves — and that they are completely fine with that.”

Promotional poster for the 1972 re-release of “Song of the South” (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

Singer goes on to say that “Song of the South”’s version of the American south is “sanitized in the extreme”, and that the “utterly uncomplicated” picture of life it presents essentially transforms the southern plantation system “into a ludicrous utopia where blacks and whites live in harmony — a harmony where the only thing that’s clear is that the blacks are inferior and servile to the whites, but are content to work the fields anyway.”

While the NAACP reportedly holds no position on “Song of the South” one way or the other, in the past the organization has both acknowledged the movie’s “remarkable artistic merit” and denounced “the impression it gives of an idyllic master-slave relationship.”

The case in favor of the film, which Disney has kept on the shelf since the mid-1980s, also isn’t helped when you consider that neither Baskett, the actor who played Uncle Remus, nor any other black cast members attended the premiere at Atlanta’s Fox Theater in November of 1946, because segregation laws would have forced them to sit in the balcony, separated from the all-white audience down below.

All of that in mind, let’s turn our attention back to the actual topic of this post: Splash Mountain. On June 25, Disney announced the ride would be undergoing a “re-theming” process, stripping it of its associations with “Song of the South” and all of the controversy that comes with it. More significant than that, though, is what the ride’s new theme will be (and probably what this post should have focused on in more detail, honestly). Are you ready to hear what it is?

That’s right, 2009’s “The Princess and the Frog” is finally getting some representation at both Disneyland Park and the Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World. That is huge news for Disney’s first black princess, Tiana — not to mention all of the black women and girls who, after seeing that movie, could finally reference a Disney princess that actually looked like them.

As Nicole Antonio, managing editor at Afar Magazine, put it: “Modeling Splash Mountain after The Princess and the Frog represents a huge, positive change. The animated feature shows Black characters from all walks of life and does not shy away from the stark contrast between Tiana’s modest home and her white BFF’s family mansion.

“Instead of tokenizing a solitary Black friend, the movie portrays a spectrum of skin tones that had not been previously normalized in children’s films; the same opportunity presents itself for animatronics on the ride … Here’s hoping that Disney continues to take more steps down the road of equal representation.”

However you feel about “Song of the South” — and lots of people have lots of different opinions (one of which is to re-release the film alongside commentary that points out everything problematic about it) — redesigning Splash Mountain in the theme of “The Princess and the Frog” seems like a fairly-less-controversial step in the right direction.

-LTH