(Headline USA) Uber-woke Disney is opening a new attraction starring its first black princess at the company’s U.S. theme park resorts to replace an iconic former ride that cancel-culture adherents complained was based on a movie that contained racist tropes.
The new theme park attraction updates Tiana’s storyline from the 2009 animated film The Princess and the Frog and is opening this year in the space previously occupied by Splash Mountain. The water ride had been themed to Song of the South, a 1946 Disney movie based on Joel Chandler Harris’s “Uncle Remus” character that detractors claimed was filled with racist cliches about African Americans and plantation life.
Tiana’s Bayou Adventure keeps Splash Mountain’s DNA as a log-flume ride, but it’s infused with music, scenery and animatronic characters inspired by Princess, set in 1920s New Orleans. It was not immediately clear what the setting had to do with the “bayou,” which is the series of canals and waterways found in rural southern Louisiana that is often more associated with white “Cajun” culture.
The ride opens to the public later this month at Walt Disney World in Florida and at Disneyland in California later this year.
“For little black girls, Tiana has meant a lot,” said Neal Lester, an English professor at Arizona State University, who has written about Tiana. “When a little child can see somebody who looks like them, that matters.”
Disney’s announcement that it would transform its longstanding Splash Mountain ride into Tiana’s Bayou Adventure was made in June 2020 following the George Floyd-inspired race riots.
The Black Lives Matter-led protest spurred a wave of woke virtue-signaling from companies as it merged with the already dominant ESG movement, the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion movement, a push for critical race theory in academia, and other controversial efforts to offer preferential treatment for minorities to the detriment of the existing cultural institutions that were deemed too “white.”
BLM was later discovered, however, to be rooted in Marxist theory, while financial scandals involving misuse of the donations it had received left it largely discredited. Similarly, many corporations have abandoned their public race-based initiatives following backlash from consumers, policymakers and the U.S. Supreme Court.
Disney has borne the brunt of several of these, with boycotts cutting into its movie revenues and a high-profile spat with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis over its efforts to meddle in Florida’s educational policies, resulting in several subsequent lawsuits.
Nonetheless, some contend that there is a valid need for the company to grapple with its own legacy, which includes cartoons and movies reflective of the prevailing cultural attitudes at the time they were produced and some that were, like much of the company’s modern-day fare, outright propaganda intended to nudge society in a particular direction.
The Song of the South film is a mix of live action, cartoons and music featuring an older black man who works at a plantation and tells fables about talking animals to a white city boy.
At the time, the idea of having “Uncle Remus” portrayer James Baskett in the film’s lead role, starring alongside white child actor Bobby Driscoll and others, likely would have been seen as a pioneering advancement in the fight against segregation.
Nonetheless, the film has been criticized by modern audiences for portraying stereotypes such as the “happy negro” trope. It hasn’t been released in theaters in decades and isn’t available on the company’s streaming service Disney+.
Other Disney classics also include scenes now denounced as racist even though they may, at the time, have been making a conscious effort to incorporate black culture and convey it to mainstream white audiences.
The crow characters from the 1941 film Dumbo and the King Louie character from 1967’s The Jungle Book (voiced by famed New Orleans singer Louis Prima, who was a white Italian) were viewed as African–American caricatures.
The depiction of Native Americans in the 1953 movie Peter Pan and the Siamese cats— often deemed as Asian stereotypes—from the 1955 film Lady and the Tramp also have been derided.
Despite Disney’s efforts at historic revisionism, however, some racial activists remain malcontent, believing, in true Marxist fashion, that total destruction is the only solution.
By refurbishing Splash Mountain into Tiana’s Bayou Adventure instead of dismantling the attraction completely, Disney has linked Song of the South with The Princess and the Frog, complained Katie Kapurch, an English professor at Texas State University who has written widely about Disney
Kapurch observed that both are silent, for the most part, on the racial realities of the segregated eras they depict since they are children’s movies intended to uplift and not documentaries about the brutal realities of life in the South at the time in which they are set.
In the case of Song of the South, few needed to be reminded about the reality of segregation, although the depictions of white and black children playing together might have been seen as radical.
Yet, Kapurch seemed determined to project her own values onto everything modern and historic, even if they do not reflect the vast majority of the culture in either case. And Disney has been eager in the past to capitulate to such extreme-left voices.
“We might see the impulse to replace rather than dismantle or build anew as a metaphor for structural racism, too,” Kapurch claimed. “Again, this is unintentional on Disney’s part, but the observation gets to the heart of how Disney reflects America back to itself.”
Imagineers who design the Disney rides are always attempting to look at the attractions with fresh eyes and ways to tell new stories “so that everybody feels included,” said Carmen Smith, a senior vice president for creative development at Walt Disney Imagineering.
“We never want to perpetuate stereotypes or misconceptions,” Smith said Monday. “Our intention is to tell great stories.”
It’s also important for the Imagineers to tell a variety of stories for its global audience, said Charita Carter, an executive creative producer at Walt Disney Imagineering who oversaw the development of the attraction.
“Society does change, and we develop different sensibilities,” Carter said. “We focus our stories differently depending what our society needs.”
The transformation from Splash Mountain to Tiana’s Bayou Adventure is one of several recalibrations at the entertainment giant’s theme parks for rides whose storylines are considered antiquated or offensive.
In 2021, Disney announced it would remodel Jungle Cruise, one of the original Disney parks’ rides, which had been been criticized in years past for being racially insensitive because of its depiction of animatronic indigenous people as savages or headhunters.
Three years before that, Disney eliminated a “Bride Auction” scene, deemed offensive since it depicted women lining up for auction, from its Pirates of the Caribbean ride.
Although it is unlikely the entertainment mega-corporation will ever be able to fully meet activists’ demands without razing the entire theme parks, their decisions about how to address Disney’s legacy of cultural insensitivity boil down to one thing: profitability.
“Disney is first and foremost about money and getting people into the park, and you can make money, still have representation and be aware of social justice history and make everyone feel like they belong there,” Lester said.
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press
