Disney's Most Notorious Film (32 page)

The cover of a Disney press kit for Splash Mountain’s premiere. Note that the drop is most prominent, and there’s little direct connection to
Song of the South
besides Brer Fox and Brer Rabbit.

Disney’s investment in Splash Mountain was considerable. It featured an immense physical design and an elaborate mix of water log thrill ride and Audio-Animatronic musical performance, featuring Brer Rabbit and other forest “critters” (most of whom did not appear in
Song of the South
originally). As a result, Splash Mountain was the most expensive ride the company ever built to that point, with a budget rumored to be as high as $80 million.
¹³
That was nearly as much as
Song of the South
had earned in its combined theatrical appearances up to the late 1980s. The initial financial projections for the budget were so high, in fact, that Disney originally balked at building it. The investment seemed even more daunting given the risk associated with the problematic source material. Therefore, when Disney finally did decide to construct Splash Mountain, it also made the strategic decision to stop rereleasing
Song of the South
to American audiences.

Yet this decision to shelve
Song of the South
wasn’t always the case. Only a few weeks after James Snead harshly criticized the last theatrical rerelease of
Song of the South
in 1986,
¹⁴
another article in the
Los Angeles Times
announced that Disney was planning to adapt it into a Disneyland ride. Mary Ann Galante’s piece offers a rare glimpse into the corporation’s initial thoughts on the project, some of which conflict with later events. Galante began by characterizing “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” as a welcome respite from “the haunting melody of the Small World theme song [the notoriously annoying ‘It’s a Small World’].” The article briefly mentioned the film’s controversy (though not Uncle Remus), but added that “Disney officials say they do not expect the ride to provoke controversy because it uses only the animated animal characters.”
¹⁵
While this might suggest a healthy dose of wishful thinking, protest against the ride ultimately was muted. On the heels of sporadic but sustained protests to
Song of the South
’s two popular theatrical rereleases in the 1980s, Disney’s decision to remove Uncle Remus and other magnolia myth references probably was perceived as a modest public relations victory after forty years of objections to its depiction of African Americans.

For better and for worse, the focus of Splash Mountain was always the animated products of Uncle Remus’s imagination, rather than the man himself. In the
Times
article, Disney claimed to pick
Song of the South
because Brer Rabbit, Brer Bear, and others fit with the theme of “Bear Country,” the section of Disneyland where the ride was built. It was later
renamed
“Critter Country” to accommodate the new ride thematically. Bear Country, whose only attraction then was the outdated “Country Bear Jamboree,” was one of the deadest sections of the park, and Splash Mountain was designed as a high-capacity ride (three thousand visitors an hour) that would ease overcrowding in other sections of Disneyland. A dirty little secret behind the notoriously long lines at theme parks, including Disney’s, is that companies want large numbers of people waiting in lines to keep traffic movement throughout the larger park relatively uninterrupted.

Splash Mountain’s relationship to its cinematic precedent was not without its own question marks. Disney’s public rationale for adapting
Song of the South
to match Bear Country also explicitly deflected attention away from the film itself as a primary motivation. Yet the article foreshadowed how the film did eventually become a liability. According to Galante, Disney’s plans for
Song of the South
itself were once quite different: “Al Flores, a Disneyland spokesman, said Thursday that the movie
Song of the South
—
which he said will probably be re-released when the new ride opens
—was chosen as a theme for the ride because it will fit into the Bear Country theme and
will be a good marketing tool
.”
¹⁶
Disney explicitly emphasized maximizing the marketability of every possible text in the vault. Yet the film was not rereleased when the ride opened two years later, nor ever again. Moreover, while Disney hoped that preexisting audience attachment to
Song of the South
would play a part in successfully attracting visitors to the ride, the company was careful not to release the film on home video. Also telling was Galante’s incidental comment that “no corporate sponsor has been lined up for ‘Splash Mountain,’ although the park will seek a financial backer for the ride.”
¹⁷
Sponsors in Disney theme parks are not at all uncommon. From “The Enchanted Tiki Room” (brought to you by Dole Pineapple) at Disneyland and Disney World, to “The Universe of Energy” (brought to you by ExxonMobil) at Orlando’s Epcot Center, most rides showcase the names, logos, and even products of the corporations willing to pay for the publicity. Yet no corporation ever agreed to sponsor Splash Mountain, though at least one company, the fast food chain McDonald’s, did collaborate with Disney on a cross-promotional campaign.
¹⁸
Somewhere during the long process of designing and building Splash Mountain, Disney’s attitude toward
Song of the South
changed. The theme park ride was the first Disney text to enact a radically different marketing and distribution strategy for the original Uncle Remus film. Instead of celebrating the source material, Splash Mountain replaced it. While Splash Mountain
proved
a popular attraction, the original film from which it was adapted was not ultimately the promotional asset Disney had hoped.

Splash Mountain is a homage to, and expansion of, the animated sequences from
Song of the South
. Disney Imagineers opted to remove all reference to Uncle Remus and the Southern context. But the designers not only confined the ride to Brer Rabbit and his adventures, they also
rewrote
those animated sequences. In one of its most directly deracinated adaptations, the infamous Tar Baby, which trapped Brer Rabbit in the film, was replaced with a pot of honey in the ride. Its bayou backwater vibe matches the water ride “Pirates of the Caribbean,” in nearby “New Orleans Square,” more than it does
Song of the South
. “Water,” generally speaking, is not a central motif or conceit in the Uncle Remus movie. Before setting foot in the hollowed-out log that serves as the vehicle, Uncle Remus’s sayings do selectively appear scattered through the queue line as generic,
unattributed
axioms (e.g., “The critters, they was closer to the folks, and the folks, they was closer to the critters, and if you’ll excuse me for saying so, ’twas better all around”). These anonymous plaques, however, are the only direct connections remaining to the character himself. This is done in no small part to remove perhaps the most overt signifier of the film’s racism. Once on the ride, the visitor careens through a series of dark caverns and lush (fake) plants, both inside and out. Throughout, one is invited to watch Audio-Animatronic versions of Brer Rabbit and others sing new versions of “How Do You Do?” and “Every body Has a Laughing Place.” Only the main characters remain from
Song of the South
—others (such as the dancing cabaret chickens) are simply redressed leftovers from the “America Sings” attraction, which Splash Mountain cannibalized to cut down on production costs.

Looking closely at a theme park attraction, however briefly, requires recalibrating what it means to examine a “narrative.” Big differences exist between being a “viewer” and being a “rider.” Specifically, the “body” takes on a very different, more overt role in such an analysis. “Although the careful staging of every aspect of the park seems calculated to remind visitors of the media that surround and embrace them,” write Grusin and Bolter, “there is an almost contractual promise that the visit will provide an
authentic emotional experience
” through the body’s manipulation.
¹⁹
While visitors to places like Disneyland are well aware of the park’s artificiality, that does not stop the experience from
seeming
real as a bodily sensation. “While it is acknowledged that there is something
more
in these [rides], that ‘something’ has frequently been tarred or celebrated under the rubric of ‘excess,’
” writes Scott Bukatman, “these entertainments
do not exceed
themselves
, but rather the arbitrary conditions of narrative hierarchical dominance.”
²⁰
That excess is not beyond the physical confines of the ride, but rather beyond what is traditionally privileged as its narrative core. While scholars have often focused on Disney’s distinctive emphasis on narrativizing its thrill rides, and on maintaining corporate continuity across its multimedia empire, it’s difficult to compare the story line of one to the other. The theme parks contain a more all-encompassing conception of “affect.”

In an essay on the “Tomorrowland” section of Disneyland, Bukatman highlights how the Disney theme parks were always structured on competing notions of narrative, control, and excess. Disneyland’s distinction from earlier amusement parks (from Luna Park to Six Flags) was in its desire to tell a story during the thrill. To ensure that everyone saw more or less the same story, Disney uses elaborate tracks, carefully programmed vehicles, and controlled perspectives to manipulate visitors’ physical experience as much as possible. As Bukatman writes, “The [Disney] rides do more than narrate. The combination of simulation and transportation seems to be an urgent part of the agenda.
The body is put in motion in Disneyland, where real movement of the subject’s actual body occurs
. . . . You have a body, the rides announce, you exist. The body, and thus the subject, penetrates these impossible spaces, finally to merge with them in a state of kinetic, sensory pleasure.”
²¹
Disney’s careful promotion and manipulation of affective potential is common throughout its media kingdom. Yet it is perhaps never more acute, more present, than with the theme park. Here bodily senses are bombarded with music, images, and constant physical motion into a heightened state of sensory overload. In this sense, as Bukatman notes, a ride’s emphasis on “narrative” is incomplete and misleading. For example, the movie
Peter Pan
(1953) was remade as a Disneyland ride. Even while the basic story of the movie was still in place in the form of panoramas, part of the attraction was how visitors glided through the air on moving vehicles meant to simulate a flying pirate ship. The thrill of the ride was in the body’s physical movement through space—it was the excess beyond the re enacted narrative on display.

The “story” of Splash Mountain is there, but tenuous at best for a casual visitor more invested in staying dry and listening to the music than in learning the story of Brer Rabbit. Throughout, the logs move very fast. It’s difficult to take in too much of the narrative. There are a couple of short but steep drops to prepare the visitor for the big “splash” at the end. We are given glimpses of Brer Fox and Brer Bear’s attempts
to
capture Brer Rabbit. At one point, Brer Bear gets caught in his own trap—one of the few direct references to a scene from the film. As the architecture critic Beth Dunlop broadly describes the ride, “The experience is as much visceral as visual . . . loud, soft, musical, talky, hot, cold, wet, dry, tame, scary—all within the space of a few minutes. The experience comes fast, like in a good movie trailer. The whole thing is as hokey as can be. It’s full of caricatures of creatures and nature. Real morning glories entwine a garden fence next to oversized and obviously fake kale and carrots. There are luridly bright colors, improbable tableaux, and funny little voices that chirp, croak, sing, gasp.”
²²
There’s really very little coherent narrative to speak of in Splash Mountain. Eventually, we stumble on a scene depicting Brer Rabbit mixed up with the carefully substituted jar of honey, but there’s no explanation of how or why this came to be. Then the ride turns vaguely ominous. One rabbit sings mournfully about Brer Rabbit’s fate, oversized talking vultures look down at the visitor, and there is one reference in projected shadow to Brer Fox getting ready to cook Brer Rabbit.

There is clearly an affective shift in tone that’s more clearly defined than a shift in story content. Throughout this darkness, the rider begins to ascend a steep ramp, and it’s clear one is getting ready for the big, heavily marketed drop. The drop itself is indeed an amazing physical experience. Like most water rides and roller coasters, one feels momentarily weightless, then overwhelmed with gravity, giving way to a plunge into a dark cave. This drop is meant to parallel Brer Rabbit’s fall into the briar patch, which saves him from Brer Fox. Aside from a few fake briar bushes above the tunnel, however, one would never know that if they weren’t already familiar with
Song of the South
or the Uncle Remus tales. Most often, the visitor thinks about nothing but how wet they just got. The low ceiling is meant to trap the splashed water to make the visitor even more soaked. Then, before the visitor can even get reoriented, the log ride rushes quickly into a final set piece. The whole “cast” of Splash Mountain is waiting to serenade the riders with the much-anticipated chorus version of “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.” The song both reorients and reassures the rider after the sensational (yet controlled) chaos of the drop.