After years of speculation and disagreement, the Walt Disney Company announced yesterday that Splash Mountain, which is A) based on a film so uncomfortably racist you can’t even see it anymore and B) one of the greatest theme park attractions of all time, would be undergoing a massive re-theming. Instead of depicting the Antebellum critters of the Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus stories, the ride will now feature original Disney character from The Princess and the Frog. There’s a lot of ways to feel about this, and I believe rational arguments can be made on either side, so let’s get in to it. I think in the scheme of things, a log flume ride isn’t that important, but as a symbol of cultural mores and changing opinions, this particular one tells a pretty remarkable story of America and how we view our own history.
It would be easy to get bogged down on the specific history of Splash Mountain’s inspiration, the bizarre 1946 film Song of the South. Every bit of it is complicated, having been adapted from the writings of a Southern white who grew up on a plantation and collected the spoken word stories of the slaves and former slaves who lived and worked there. In a sense, it’s a record of African-American folklore, distilled though they may be. Regardless, the film has been called ‘antiquated and fairly offensive’ by departing Disney CEO Bob Iger, and ever since its last rerelease in 1986, it has been unavailable for rental or purchase, effectively a lost film. It tells the story of a little white kid who comes to live on a plantation during the postwar reconstruction and befriends Uncle Remus, a kindly old black man who tells him stories about cartoon animals that tangentially reflect on the struggles the kid is facing. These stories are presented as cartoons, and while these animated critters only make up about 30% of the run time or so, they are the basis for the ride’s expansive cast of audio-animatronic characters.
There’s not too much to say about Song of the South, as no one’s seen it in thirty years. The complaints are largely about its portrayal of the Antebellum South as a jolly, idyllic place of carefree adventures and daydreaming. It’s less the overt racist presentations (although it has its share of those), and more that it appears to take place in a world where slavery never existed. The question of whether it should be made available remains an interesting one, with film historians of no less stature than Roger Ebert arguing against it, saying that as a Disney cartoon aimed at children, it’s in a unique position to instill objectively shitty ideas in their impressionable heads. I happen to be old enough to have seen the film, in theaters in 1986, and my six-year-old perspective on it was that it was boring as hell. I think if you removed its cultural stigma and notoriety, it would be about as popular as other long-forgotten, profoundly dull Disney offerings from the era, like So Dear To My Heart or The Three Caballeros.
Or it would be, if it weren’t for the Triple A Disney imagineering classic Splash Mountain. This ride is a masterpiece of engineering and design, about as perfect as a Disney ride gets, with a truly transporting combination of theming, thrills, and music. Even the queue is masterful, getting you slowly but surely into the correct headspace to take a trip through the romanticized South of the imagination, populated by cornpone frogs, birds and gator. If you’ve never had the privilege, Splash Mountain adapts Song of the South by dumping everything but the cartoon critters, presenting a world of puckish rabbits, scheming foxes and stupid bears chasing one another around a swampy bayou/logging run. Uncle Remus is absent completely, aside from a few folksy aphorisms carved on the walls of the queue. The music, easily the best part of Song of the South, is given particular highlight, especially the Oscar-winning ‘Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah’, which has since taken on an anthemic quality in the Disney parks. It’s a lengthy ride too, and one you could positively describe as joyous, so much so that even surly teens aren’t immune to its charms. It certainly helps that it has some legitimately thrilling drops, all made that much more effective by the ride’s ingenious storytelling. It’s truly one for the ages, as far as such things go.
One aspect to Splash Mountain that doesn’t get much acknowledgement is the way it tiptoes the divide between the charming cartoon characters in Song of the South and the offensive shit that has since removed it from circulation. It’s hard to point at any specific thing in the ride as problematic, aside from the very fact that it exists. Splash Mountain came at a particularly odd time in the Song of the South story, as you’ve never been able to watch it during the ride’s life (the ’86 release was its last hurrah, and Splash Mountain first opened in California in 1989). Enormous care seems to have been taken to remove the Br’er characters from the film, and the general tone of the attraction’s minimal storyline is just Tom and Jerry shit, animals chasing each other and having parties. The most (in)famous cartoon sequence from the film, the Tar Baby bit, has been removed, and replaced with Br’er Rabbit getting stuck in a honeycomb. It’s impressive, in its way, a political scrubbing of the original material that actually improves it. No one wants to be thinking about slavery during their talking animal flume ride, and they make it really hard to. Such tremendous care was taken in this regard that it’s obvious Disney was aware of the film’s issues, which in turn begs the question: why adapt this source material at all? The simple reason is that it was developed just before the 90s Disney renaissance, during their proverbial Dark Ages, and they had a real dearth of popular new characters to draw from. Regardless, even from the start, the ride’s always had a weird association with this cultural relic that the company was already ashamed enough of to shelve.
So, why does it have to go away now? Despite the specific cultural moment we are in right now, this change had reportedly been in the works for over a year. There’s even been an online movement asking for this specific change to Princess and the Frog, as it’s a IP that would seemingly fit right in to the existing structure of the ride. So it’s not a reactionary move. I’d suggest further that Disney is neither trying to correct a social wrong or bowing to political correctness (depending on your perspective). This is a savvy financial decision, and achieves several goals for them. Song of the South is not moving merchandise at this point. You can’t buy anything with these characters that isn’t directly related to the ride. Princess and the Frog, on the other hand, is only increasing in popularity since its release. A bit of a financial disappointment at the time, it has gone on to an increased profile at the parks, and appeals to a demographic notoriously underserved by Disney. They can advertise it as a brand new ride while only paying for a re-theming, and can probably expect Princess and the Frog merchandise sales to shoot up.
And they’ll stop getting asked what the hell’s up with Song of the South. Why can’t we see it on Disney+? If it’s so bad, why is there a ride about it? The ride doesn’t seem that bad, so what’s the deal? I suspect this was an inevitable change, the way the world has been going, and this is a tidy way to keep the ride but remove the faulty substructure. I would argue that without Splash Mountain, Song of the South would just be forgotten, a relic with no relevance in 2020. You might even still be able to see it, but would you want to? It’s a middling piece of children’s entertainment from the 40s, and racist to boot. Remove Splash Mountain, and good luck getting anyone to sit down and watch it. You can make an argument about erasure here, but not every piece of cultural flotsam needs to be maintained.
One of Walt’s initial big ideas for Disneyland was to capitalize on American history, and present it as entertainment. This was the entire basis for Frontierland, and several other paeans to American Exceptionalism found across the parks, and this rose-tinted view of our past has defined the character of these themed fantasy lands. As the world changes, and outsider voices receive long-due amplification, the simple ideals the went unchallenged in the 50s simply don’t have the same meaning that they did seventy years ago. And personally, I kind of like the idea that theme parks are ever-changing and ephemeral, with things that can be lost to time. The Pirates of the Caribbean attraction has gone through several alterations in recent years, and all of them have been controversial. And you can debate them, but all they amount to is giving 21st century crowds what they expect from a family Pirates ride (More Jack Sparrow, less pirates raping people). And I do respect the purist’s point of view here, as there’s real artistry in old Disney. But then I remember Walt’s words on the changing face of the parks. 'Disneyland will never be completed. It will continue to grow as long as there is imagination left in the world.’ That’s a sentimental, even maudlin, way of saying they’re not going to be precious about bulldozing shit as it gets old, and that the parks will always be changing to better sell themselves. It’s why there’s a Star Wars land next to Frontierland now.
As to the Princess and the Frog version of Splash Mountain, I suspect that given five years of operation, this will be just as beloved as the current iteration, maybe even moreso. I have my own reservations, simply about Princess and the Frog as a movie. I don’t think it’s very good, personally. I don’t much like the supporting critters, who I’m sure will all have positions of primacy in the ride. And trying to get the Princess and the Frog songs to measure up to the effect of ‘Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah' seems doomed. But I’m also at a point in life where having an angry opinion about a theme park ride seems like a real failure of managing my priorities. And more importantly, I can also see that Princess and the Frog is a far better movie to base a theme park ride on than Song of the South. This will get their best effort, and for young people, I bet this will be a huge improvement. And young people are forever the lifeblood of theme parks.
Truly, the biggest tragedy of this might simply be the forthcoming irrelevance of this Clickhole article, truly one of the greatest