Disney's Most Notorious Film (33 page)

This intensely affective experience is carefully staged to create contradictory feelings of both disorder and comfort in the rider. Karal Ann Marling notes that Disney Imagineers specifically wished to make the environment more appealing to visitors, who might be alienated or intimidated by the essential unfamiliarity of the park’s spatial dimension.
Disney
parks are consciously designed to affect reassurance, to generate a feeling of comfort, invitation, and optimism, while also imposing rigorous order on the visitor’s experience. Marling places this reassurance in dialogue with
control
, contending that through both Disney manipulates the fan’s experience. Unlike strip malls and “real” streets, “[Disney’s] Main Street was aesthetically unthreatening.” Marling dubs this the “architecture of reassurance,” where the visitor is “emboldened and soothed by the clean streets, smiling faces, happy colors, and the implicit promise that here, at least, everything will be okay.”
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She posits reassurance as the overcoming of difference, where order is “the best
sensation
of all.”
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Control in the theme park is an aesthetic critique of the disorder and the incoherent lack of a logical design in the surrounding consumer world.

At the end of the ride, visitors are serenaded with a chorus version of “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.” Most of the Audio-Animatronic figures were reused from the America Sings attraction.

The promotion of sensation has always been part of Disney’s attempts to control their physical space. This was no less a factor in the design and promotion of Splash Mountain. When Galante later covered the construction of the ride in 1988, the emphasis was almost entirely on the technological sophistication and visceral thrills of the ride itself. Rather
than
focus on the narrative context of Splash Mountain, she instead highlighted the ride’s
affective
potential:

In Splash Mountain, the thrill comes from the rising, then lurching forward into a 10-minute trip through a splash pond, the old mill and into the briar patch. Patrons will plunge and yaw up and down hills into the “dip drop,” “the laughing place” and finally a five-story plunge down into darkness. . . . The flume starts by interrupting the lazy afternoon of a gaggle of geese and an alligator—all Audio-Animatronic characters singing “How Do You Do” from
Song of the South
. As the log boat enters the swimming hole, patrons will see cunning Br’er Fox screaming at a 10-foottall Br’er Bear that they’ve “got to catch a Br’er Rabbit.” The rest of the story is basically a 3-D version of the movie, with songs telling that story of how Br’er Rabbit outsmarts Br’er Fox and Br’er Bear.
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A chronological description of the ride’s mechanics supplemented any clear sense of narrative progression. As part of the ride’s debut a year later, Disney released a press kit for Splash Mountain to various media outlets, which included press releases, publicity stills, and a VHS tape with a five-minute video news release (VNR)—prepackaged coverage for the local nightly news. VNRs are a common public relations practice among corporations, intended to control media coverage via the free circulation of prearranged, but deeply propagandistic, “news” footage. The VNR began with a news clip of the “reporter” Tom Perri filing a story from the theme park. The VNR contained a talking head interview with Baxter, footage of the ride (in particular the final plunge and splash), and a few isolated clips from the animated sections. The reporter noted that the ride is based on
Song of the South
, but we see little of the film itself, and absolutely no Uncle Remus.

Just as intriguingly, the remainder of the video clip after the VNR modeled for prospective journalists the various options available to them once they arrived inside Disneyland, if they chose to visit themselves. One was a camera attached to the front of the ride, which could provide either a point-of-view image of the ride ahead, or—reversed on its pivot—an in-the-moment shot of people being splashed. There were also fixed camera positions for live takes of reporters with Splash Mountain in the background; access to editing bays; stock footage of the ride itself; radio
broadcast
setups; and a Disney employee on hand at all times to “help with any requests” (not “needs,” but “requests”). The on-hand employee was probably less interested in accommodation and more interested in supervising every move the journalist made. The tape provided an overview that gave the appearance that Disney was trying to accommodate journalists. Yet a look beneath the surface revealed not so subtly that the corporation was more intent on controlling every aspect of the journalist’s visit to, and coverage of, the ride’s premiere.

With the exception of families shooting videos and photographs of their vacation, the Disney parks are private properties that feature tight regulation over their representation. Michael Sorkin argued that the parks were the most tightly controlled private spaces in the United States. “Renowned for its litigiousness,” he writes, “the Walt Disney Company will permit no photography without prior approval of its use.”
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The press kit offers a helpful VNR for cash-strapped local news stations, and presents Disney as accommodating to journalist visits. At the same time, Disney dictates what will be shown to local TV audiences about Splash Mountain. There is no question that the Disney company’s larger strategy to maintain tight control over its physical space was at work in the promotion of Splash Mountain, and not only as a means to avoid references to
Song of the South
.

DISNEYLAND’S “AUDIENCE”

Even within such tight control, there remains much here in what Bukatman calls “excess.” Another way to put this is to consider the question of how visitors actually “receive” the experience of visiting Disneyland in general and Splash Mountain in particular, regardless of how Disney attempts to manipulate their journey. The most famous theoretical work on the parks remains the theorist Jean Baudrillard’s
Simulacra and Simulation
, his prescient observation that this hyperreal Disney space exists to conceal the fact that all of the United States is a simulation.
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As Michael Billig aptly notes, Baudrillard’s conception of Disneyland is curiously “
depopulated
.”
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Not only does the famous French thinker not theorize the “body” in the parks, but he discusses no
body
at all. Just as it is hard to “read” Splash Mountain’s narrative, it is difficult to provide an objective, empirical study of how Disneyland visitors negotiate the ride’s ideological, affective, and cultural messages.
This
is further complicated by doing so from outside the park, long after the immediate experience of the ride.

One attempt is a first-person project,
Inside the Mouse: Work and Play at Disney World
. This collaborative effort by Shelton Waldrep, Susan Willis, Jane Kuenz, and Karen Klugman—credited as the “Project on Disney”—recounts their own experiences in the park.
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Each author writes a different chapter from their own perspective on a particular visit. Some trips were done with other members of the writing group, some were done with their own families, and still others were done in isolation. In all, the goal collectively was to reflect the inherently eclectic everyday experiences that diverse audiences have when visiting Disney World. Theoretically well-informed, and attentive to such issues as control, consumption, and gender,
Inside the Mouse
is more focused on documenting trips to the parks than in offering a larger framework for “reading” Disney World. The result is an intentionally uneven account. For example, the one detailed discussion of Splash Mountain itself by Klugman was not easily amendable to ideological or narrative critique. Instead, it reinforces the overt bodily reception of theme park rides: “Once we [Klugman and her children] were on the ride itself, I pointed out the cute Audio-Animatronics that were cheering us on. I even felt thankful for the visual and auditory cues that evoked admiration for Disney technology, even as they were building suspense for the climax—a brief, but steep descent that would temporarily take my breath away and the memory of waiting in line for forty-five minutes.”
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The account is more about the affect of exhaustion and exhilaration than consciously analyzing the ride. This is not to suggest any historical or cultural ignorance, but to reiterate Bukatman’s point that Disney attractions quickly exceed narrative logic and instead become about bodies in motion. Klugman’s account reinforces Disney’s marketing of Splash Mountain as an intensely visceral experience that will “take [your] breath away” instead of a retelling of
Song of the South
.

Far more than appealing to nostalgia as earlier remediations had, or any another trait directly associated with
Song of the South
(beyond “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah”), this emphasis on overwhelming the visitor was a conscious goal in Disney’s promotion of the ride. Splash Mountain fits with a larger motif of thrill ride
drops
throughout the parks—this is a feature of “Splash Mountain,” “Space Mountain,” “Big Thunder Mountain Railroad,” “Matterhorn Mountain,” “The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror,” among others. In this sense, “Mountain” itself is a part of
the
Disney park brand. Disney even promoted Splash Mountain in a press release as part of its “mountain range of thrill rides.”
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While the press release mentioned that the ride was based on characters from
Song of the South
, that wasn’t the main selling point: “Unlike Disneyland’s other thrill attractions, in which passengers ride roller-coaster style cars on tubular steel tracks, ‘Splash Mountain’ takes riders on a waterborne journey through backwoods swamps and bayous, and down waterfalls. During their voyage, passengers plunge over the top of a steep spillway, hurtling from the top of the mountain to a briar-filled pond five stories below.”
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One of the first transmedia attempts to promote the new ride was a July 1989 episode of
The Wonderful World of Disney
on ABC, which featured the mockumentary “Ernest Goes to Splash Mountain.” This television sketch, too, emphasized the drop. A popular television and later film character played by Jim Varney, “Ernest P. Worrell” was a comedic act famous for addressing the camera directly as another, always-unseen character named “Vern.” Ernest’s rise in stardom was short, but immense. He began as an advertising gimmick, then developed his own short-lived children’s sketch comedy television program,
Hey Vern, It’s Ernest
(1988–1989), and eventually starred in numerous full-length feature films, starting with theatrical releases such as
Ernest Goes to Camp
(1987) and continuing into direct-to-video adventures like
Ernest in the Army
(1998). “Ernest Goes to Splash Mountain” involves Ernest preparing himself physically for the arduous task of riding the attraction—the whole time emphasizing the danger of the final drop. Ernest is presented as the only one brave enough to challenge Splash Mountain. Brief references to
Song of the South
’s animated sequences and other promotions of the ride are spliced between various scenes of his preparation—all leading up to extensive coverage of Ernest actually in the log, riding Splash Mountain. This latter sequence is resolutely uninterested in the “narrative” of the ride, preferring to focus on the drops and on reaction shots of Ernest as he careens through the caverns. After the final dramatic drop, the excessively talkative Ernest is left speechless. After stumbling off the ride at its conclusion, he literally collapses from the sensory overload. The other guests waiting in the queue area do not help him, but instead excitedly trample over him to get on the ride themselves.

Recent Internet descriptions of riders’ actual experiences with the thrill ride emulate this reaction. On YouTube, many fans have posted “ride-through” footage of Splash Mountain—first-person amateur footage taken during the ride itself. On these web pages, folks also post
comments
about their own encounters with the ride. An overwhelming majority emphasizes the drop itself, the
fearful
anticipation, and getting soaked (or not). “omg i remember my first time on this ride,” writes one, “and when we were on the top of the big drop the ride stopped and i was so scared [
sic
].”
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Adds another anonymous poster, “I used to be soooo afraid of this ride I would panic when we were about to go down the big drop. . . . And I made a huge deal out of it and screamed my head off, while my brother was sitting there calmly.”
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As the Ernest skit foregrounded, the terror of the drop is a big part of Splash Mountain’s appeal. Writes another past rider, “i love this ride when i first went on i freaked out then my sis made me ride again and i kinda got used to it then we went on some other rides and then me and my sis came back to this ride at night and no one was on so we rode it 23 times its so much fun” [
sic
].
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