In a move that was a long time coming, Disney has announced plans to renovate its popular log flume attraction Splash Mountain. The ride, which opened in California’s Disneyland in 1989 and then in 1992 in both Florida’s Disney World and Tokyo Disneyland, was based on Disney’s live-action/animated feature 1946 Song of the South. Disney announced plans to reimagine the ride in its California and Florida parks, featuring a new theme based on the company’s 2009 animated film The Princess and the Frog.
This is Disney’s attempt to amputate the ride’s racist past. Song of the South has long been the shame of the Disney vault, having never been released on video in its entirety in the United States. It, accordingly, is not available for streaming on Disney+. Since before its release, the film was controversial, with many critics decrying its use of African-American Vernacular English, its perpetuation of Black stereotypes via the Uncle Remus character, and an animated segment titled “Br’er Rabbit and the Tar Baby.” The company reportedly was well aware that it had a potential disaster on its hands during its making. According to Neal Gabler’s 2006 book Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination, as the script was getting underway, Disney publicist Vern Caldwell wrote to producer Perce Pearce, “The negro situation is a dangerous one. Between the negro haters and the negro lovers there are many chances to run afoul of situations that could run the gamut all the way from the nasty to the controversial.’”
But Disney made it anyway and then swept it under the rug, and then—and this is the weirdest part—decades later, created a major, heavily publicized attraction based on this mar to its legacy. In fact, the repressed Song of the South has primarily lived on via Splash Mountain and the Disney songbook canonization of its most famous song, “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.” Disney effectively told audiences, “Do not look at this movie… ride it and hum along!” Via its storyline, the flume (which had elements of a dark ride, with animatronic presentations between drops) was able to whitewash Song of the South and cherry-pick elements that didn’t let on its source material’s racism, but it still seemed to me a bizarre way of treating a movie that Disney seemed otherwise eager for people to forget.