Disney’s newest attraction, Tiana’s Bayou Adventure , replaces the controversial Splash Mountain — but Disney doesn’t want fans comparing the old ride to the new one. These days, Disney doesn’t acknowledge Song of the South , the movie Splash Mountain was built around . The film has never gotten a digital release and isn’t officially available for streaming.
But until 2020, Splash Mountain was a huge, unignorable, concrete reminder of the movie, a surprisingly big tear in Disney’s usually thorough wallpapering over questionable moments in its history . Now it’s gone, and we don’t have to wonder what it means to have a Song of the South ride at Disney parks anymore. But since Disney won’t explicitly say why it replaced Splash Mountain, we have to discuss a different question: what it means to have a Princess and the Frog attraction in 2024.
Amid the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement, multiple petitions circulated online demanding that Disney retheme Splash Mountain. Variations of the log-flume ride appeared in Walt Disney World, Disneyland in California, and Tokyo Disneyland, and it periodically ranked high on informal polls of Disney parks’ most-loved attractions . But some Disney fans bridled against its connection to Song of the South , the 1946 Disney live-action/animation hybrid movie best known for its racist caricatures and rosy glorification of life in the Reconstruction-era South.
Pushback against the movie didn’t start in 2020: The film was der.
