Walt Disney World has closed its famous Splash Mountain water ride, the Magic Kingdom attraction that for years had been criticized for having racist roots. But not everyone was happy to see the ride go.
It closed Sunday, and by Tuesday, the TikTok hashtag #goodbyesplashmountain had attracted 1.6 million views. Somber tribute videos to the ride set to the song "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah" — some of which claimed to show visitors' last times riding its log boats over its waterfall with a 45-degree drop — had thousands of likes.
"I will miss you forever. Goodbye, Splash Mountain," read the caption of a video that had more than 1,300 likes Tuesday afternoon.
Another video claims to show a two-plus-hour wait to board on the final day.
Other Disney devotees — some of whom are known as "Disney adults" — looked to capitalize on the ride's closing by listing more than 70 bottles, Mason jars and plastic bags filled with what they claimed to be "Splash Mountain water" on eBay. Some sellers said they swiped the liquid during the ride's last days of operation.
The containers fetched dozens of bids, with some buyers offering to pay more than $50.
The closing of the 30-year-old ride — which Princess Diana visited in 1993 — follows years of calls for change because it features several characters from Disney's 1946 film "Song of the South," which featured racist stereotypes.
The film, set on a plantation, features an elderly Black man known as Uncle Remus who tells traditional African American folk tales to white children cared for by Black servants.
Walter White, the former executive secretary of the NAACP, said the film "helps to perpetuate a dangerously glorified picture of slavery."
In March 2020, Disney Executive Chairman Bob Iger confirmed the film would not appear on the streaming service Disney+ and said it is "not appropriate in today's world," Deadline reported.
That June, Disney announced Splash Mountain would be "reimagined" as Tiana's Bayou Adventure, based on Disney's first Black princess, featured in the 2009 film "The Princess and the Frog."
Tiana's Bayou Adventure will open at Magic Kingdom and Disneyland Park, in Anaheim, California, in 2024. (It was not immediately clear when Splash Mountain at Disneyland Park closed.)
"The new concept is inclusive — one that all of our guests can connect with and be inspired by, and it speaks to the diversity of the millions of people who visit our parks each year," Disney said in 2020 when it announced the new feature.
The website for Tokyo Disneyland does not indicate whether or when its Splash Mountain ride will close. A representative for Walt Disney World did not immediately respond to questions Tuesday.
A Change.org petition created three years ago that decried Splash Mountain's racist imagery and demanded it be replaced with a ride dedicated to "The Princess and the Frog" garnered more than 21,000 signatures.
"While the ride is considered a beloved classic it's history and storyline are steeped in extremely problematic and stereotypical racist tropes from the 1946 film Song of the South," the petition says.
A counter-petition "To Save Splash Mountain" has attracted more than 99,000 signatures.
"Splash Mountain has never included depictions of slaves or any racist elements and is based solely on historical African folktales that families of all ethnicities have been enjoying for nearly a century," that petition says. "It is absurd to pander to a small group of 'Disney haters' that dont understand the story, and re-theme such a nostalgic ride."
Splash Mountain is no stranger to controversy: In 2018, it made headlines when Walt Disney World banned a man who rode it while holding up a "Trump 2020" sign.
Disney World closed Splash Mountain after allegations of racism. Not everyone's happy.
On TikTok, tribute videos to Splash Mountain had thousands of likes, and more than 70 containers of water purportedly swiped from the ride were up for sale on eBay.
On closing day for Splash Mountain at Walt Disney World, wait times exceeded three hours. Fans of the Magic Kingdom's 1989 water log attraction gathered to say goodbye;among them were folks genuinely looking forward to the Tiana's Bayou Adventure re-theme. Then there were the disgruntled extremists who were still clinging to the ride as if it were one of their own Confederate monuments.
With those heightened emotions associated with the latter—something that isn't much of a surprise, considering all the petitions filed against the ride's Princess and the Frog redesign—comes a chance to cash in. And so water allegedly taken from the flume ride has made its way onto eBay, where jars are going anywhere from 20 to 50 bucks a pop. Truly, we've reached the lowest form of South of the South commodification in its long history of doing just that, from the Uncle Remus tales "written" by Joel Chandler Harris in 1880, to the 1946 Disney feature, to the late-1980s creation of Splash Mountain.
I'm not going to mince words here: certain fans' normalization of Splash Mountain as its own entity has downplayed the role Song of the South has within the attraction, claiming it gets an exemption from the story's overt racism because none of its human characters—i.e., the slave storyteller Uncle Remus and his master's children—are featured on the ride, which instead included just the happy-go-lucky animal critters.
Harris might have created the "kindly-type" characters of Uncle Remus and his master's family, but he appropriated the animal folklorefrom slaves, with critter characters like Br'er Rabbit originally serving as allegories for the plight of African Americans during slavery on the path to freedom. Disney Imagineers in the late 1980s were apparently unaware of this and assumed the animated rabbit and friends were fair game to use on Splash Mountain; Disney fans in turn presumed they were unrelated to the racist elements of the original story. In fact, Harris' "of its era" misaligned re-telling of this folklore by a white man inspired another white man, Walt Disney, to commodify Black cultural resistance stories though an idyllic lens of the post-Civil War South.
In 2012, African American literary great Alice Walker wrote in the Georgia Review that "Uncle Remus in the movie saw fit to ignore, basically, his own children and grandchildren in order to pass on our heritage—indeed, our birthright—to patronizing white children who seemed to regard him as a kind of talking teddy bear. I don't know how old I was when I saw this film—probably eight or nine—but I experienced it as a vast alienation, not only from the likes of Uncle Remus—in whom I saw aspects of my father, my mother, in fact all Black people I knew who told these stories—but also from the stories themselves, which, passed into the context of white people's creation, I perceived as meaningless. So there I was, at an early age, separated from my own folk culture by an invention."
Now, Disney did get into it with the Harris estate as Song of the South was set to be released, as noted in the film's notes on Turner Classic Movies—it wasn't happy with his removing a reference to Uncle Remus from the film's title, not disclosing his status on the plantation he worked on, and shifting the era of the film ever so slightly. Which sure, is something for a film released in the mid-'40s, yet Disney kept the African American vernacular as a major plot point to the film; it's embraced by a white child character against his father's wishes. This brings a lot of new context to the story, and to the lyrics of Song of the South tunes like "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah"—which was heavily featured as a staple of Splash Mountain—making lots of Disney World visitors over the years unwitting participants in the easily digestible commodification of Black culture that the movie presented.
Disney carries blame here for pretending thefilm can just be tucked away, aside from the parts that made it money for as long as they did, and hoping audiences wouldn't notice. Select films on Disney+ have begun to feature warning labels, holding certain releases accountable when they contain problematic, outdated material—but Song of the South's fate is a little more complicated. Back when the streamer became available, Deadline shared Disney CEO Bob Iger's response to an audience question regarding the film's absence from Disney+ , and he firmly asserted that the film is "not appropriate in today's world,"which it's not. Distressing, however, is the conjecture of assuring audiences it was a product of its time—despite TCM's chronicle making note of protests upon the film's release, including picket lines that were racially integrated efforts from the National Negro Congress, the American Youth for Democracy, the United Negro & Allied Veterans, and the American Jewish Council at cinemas in major U.S. cities. At the time the NAACP objected to the film, saying that "in an effort neither to offend audiences in the North or South, the production helps to perpetuate a dangerously glorified picture of slavery... [the film] unfortunately gives the impression of an idyllic master-slave relationship which is a distortion of the facts."
Disney's stance of "let's just throw it all away" was not an ideal strategy for addressing the issues that still surround Song of the South—evidenced by the large number of Disney fans who have professed nostalgic loyalty to Splash Mountain. That some showed up in droves to make a quick buck off cups of log flume water affirmed the existence of bigoted fans who feltlike a part of their history was being stolen, inspiring them to circulate petitions against diverse employees at Disney Imagineering and its attempts to create inclusive stories. It's all encapsulated by the hate they hold as represented by the water in jars; they can just look at instead of letting themselves be hit with the cold splash of reality.
Disneyland's Splash Mountain has yet to announce a closure date. Tiana's Bayou Adventure is set to open in 2024.
Are People Really Paying for Splash Mountain's Water?
The Walt Disney World attraction closed for its re-theme and some had a funny way of showing they weren't happy about it
gizmodo.com
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