![]() There’s also a moment where Uncle Remus, the kindly old man who shares the animated folk stories with the movie’s young white lead, talks about how much he misses the past-a past in which he would’ve been a slave, and not just a sharecropper with a nominal amount of freedom.ĭisney wisely left all of that out of Splash Mountain. Not that there was much of one: Southern Black sharecroppers were still subject to racist laws and practices that prevented them from enjoying the freedoms they had been granted. The movie basically says that Black people were better off when they were toiling in the fields for white landowners, and although technically the time period in which its set would make Remus a sharecropper and not a slave, the movie avoids addressing the difference between those two. Its racism is overt, but not in the aggressive, transparently hateful way that The Birth of a Nation’s is it wants to be a heartfelt depiction of racial harmony, but in the process it gives a deeply ahistorical picture of what race relations were like in the South after the Civil War, while also encouraging Black people to be happy with a system that inherently dehumanizes them. I’m just old enough to have seen the movie in the theater during its last rerelease in 1986, and mostly all I remember is that, other than the songs and cartoons, it’s beyond boring. Here’s a bit of context for people who haven’t ridden Splash Mountain or seen Song of the South. Most people seem more excited about the prospects of a ride based on a popular, recent film starring a beloved Disney princess than they are about a ride that goes out of its way to cover up the unloved and disowned 75-year-old film that it’s based on. ![]() (There might be some overlap there?) But the overall response was refreshingly positive. Disney traditionalists, who grouse about any changes to the theme parks-complaints I often find myself agreeing with-were unhappy. You can’t separate Splash Mountain from Song of the South, and there’s no reason to reference that movie at a theme park.Įarlier this week Disney announced that it would be retheming Splash Mountain at Disneyland and the Magic Kingdom into a ride based on the 2009 film The Princess and the Frog-the first (and so far only) Disney animated feature to star a Black lead character. A movie that’s based on a white man’s commercial adaptations of African folktales and slave stories. But it’s still inherently linked to a movie that Disney has been embarrassed by for four decades-a movie that portrays race relations in 19th century Georgia in a positive, nostalgic light. ![]() ![]() Yes, the ride ignores the more blatantly problematic portions of the movie-there’s no Uncle Remus, no human characters, no references at all to race relations or sharecropping. It stars characters from Song of the South, the 1946 film that Disney has kept hidden since 1986-three years before the first Splash Mountain even opened. Splash Mountain might seem to be about as perfect as theme park rides get, but it has one major foundational flaw that should’ve prevented it from ever leaving the drawing board. And despite all that, it’s absolutely time for the current version of Splash Mountain to go. When you look at what makes a great theme park ride-the synthesis of theme, visuals, music, story and ride experience-it’s hard to find any design flaws on the surface. Heck, I ranked the California version as the best ride in Disneyland. It’s one of the best rides ever made by Disney, and even though it didn’t really exist when I was a kid (I was a teenager when it opened at Disney World, the only Disney park I went to growing up, and thus already had firmly established favorites at the Magic Kingdom that were deeply entrenched by nostalgia), it’s still one of my favorite rides at any Disney park. ![]()
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