Splash Mountain Replacement Tiana’s Bayou Adventure Releases Artwork
Did you know Disneyland and Disney World got rid of Splash Mountain? It’s hard to believe; the ride is a Disney staple, something even people who’ve never been to either of the parks know of. But modern Disney hates its past, so of course, one of their most beloved attractions is no more. (The official reason is that Splash Mountain has ties to Song of the South, the movie Disney randomly deemed racist because it takes place in the South and has a black guy in it or something.) In its place, Disney is building Tiana’s Bayou Adventure, a Louisiana-flavored ride based on The Princess and the Frog. Tiana’s Bayou Adventure is scheduled to open in the summer of 2024 to coincide with a TV show called Tiana debuting on Disney+. Over the past two weeks, Disney has been releasing images and details of some of the new characters featured in the attraction. You can see the pics below, courtesy of WDW News Today (and you can click on those links for descriptions):
I didn’t see The Princess and the Frog (I’m kind of past my animated Disney movie phase), so maybe these images are similar to the film, but they look purposely antiquated to me, like they come from an older era of Disney animation. In fact, they look like they could have been drawn around the time of Song of the South. If that was the intention, it proves how hollow changing the ride is. They know people love Splash Mountain, and they’re cynically trying to make them feel like nothing has changed while pandering to the activists who suddenly decided that Splash Mountain was racist thirty years after it opened. Disney would never do this because they’re as crazy as the rabble-rousers, but a smart company would tell these nuts to pound sand, announce that they did so publicly, and bask in the renewed public interest in sticking it to people everyone hates. But that’s not the world we live in, and that’s not the Disney that’s operating right now, so get set for Tiana’s Bayou Adventure, which looks… fine, I guess. The problem is that no matter how good the ride is, it’s always going to have an air about it of being a lesser version of the ride everyone liked, there for the purpose of scolding anyone who liked Splash Mountain. Fun, huh?
